[EU] Stop Killing Games:
The consumer movement to stop game publishers from disabling older games with kill switches after official support ends.
The goal is to reach 1 million signatures so that the european parliament will respond to the petition that then leads to game ownership protections enacted for consumers.
Progress Tracker:
Final Day: 31/7/2025.
Can't wait for this to pass and all games are now being put under a different label than just calling it a game to avoid this because somehow the politicians drafting it let that loophole in without realizing it.
Sonic Origins is my favorite interactive movie! /s
If this is passed, the EU parlament will be forced to look into it and debate about it.
No conclusions are guaranteed, but it would make sense that EU recognises this as an illegal practice and passes some regulation to prevent it.
The one thing I wonder about these kinds of regulations is how it would affect certain types of game that by their very design require a robust multiplayer environment/server interactions and therefore heavy server requirements. I can't see the text of this for some reason, so I wonder if there are exemptions for such things? Or perhaps mandating that once the company stops support they have to release source code so that some attempt can be made to make it work on servers available to those who would like to host the PD game. Basically I don't think you make laws that a company has to rewrite their game to be single player, so what's a good solution?
The solution is to release the server binary and allow the customers to run their own servers when support ends. This would come into effect for future games.
That it isn't retroactive I guess takes care of some of that. It might limit what companies put into future games as well, if the design would mean something far past what a private server could handle. I'm all for it in principle, I can just think of certain games now that simply won't work without an overhaul. Requiring a total code release would allow companies to push limits without worrying about what to do years later, and give players an opportunity to adapt it (if possible).
The approach for massive multiplayer games would be for the publisher to make their best effort in assisting the community to run their own servers by giving them a smaller build of the game that can run on consumer hardware that supports up to thousands of players instead of the original hundreds of thousands of players at once coupled with the documentation to allow us to figure out the rest.
It would be the perfect side project for threadverse admins.