"... curtail developer choice" - This from a bunch of people for whom the term 'executive meddling' was created.

Uh, yeah, that's the point of all regulations. To make you not pick bad things.

When you work hard to create a consumer economy, the first rule is, don't piss off the consumers!

Developer choice, ha-ha, very funny. I am not familiar with the industry and still feel safe to bet most of them (edit: actual software developers making games) just want to get enough money for doing what they can do without too much stress/disgust and also most of them don't have a desire to see their work die just because some manager decided it is time to make some other games instead

I don't know why these companies think they can talk their way out of this. No one is buying your BS. Just STFU.

Whenever a large games company talks about "developer choice" you know they're referring to one of a few things:

1. Think of the shareholders!
2. Think of the rich CEO who adds zero value to the company!
3. The people don't know what they want and therefore we need to tell them exactly what they want and need!

This initiative sure would make things more complicated for the game publishers, yes.

Because they're currently not doing the bare minimum.

If they weren't so accustomed to not doing the bare minimum, maybe they would have different opinions! Just saying.

Edit: Just signed the petition. Didn't think this was necessary before because, as soon as I heard of it, Finland was already top of the list percentage wise. But I did sign it, just for the hell yeah of it.

Why are publishers speaking for devs about how much choice devs would have? Why not get devs to speak?

"Won't somebody PLEASE think of the ~~children~~ devs!?"

The last refuge of a dying argument 😴

Curtailing developer choice is rather the point, no?

Giant corporations have proven no amount of profit is too much. There needs to be some guardrails. And some form of preservation of the games your loyal customers have enriched your company to access.

Lol. We're gamers. We know that if we encounter enemies we're going in the right direction.

All games become subscription only in 3..2..

"curtail developer choice" is such a weak argument because you could equally apply it to literally every piece of regulation ever passed. Of course it curtails choice, that's almost the dictionary definition of an industry regulation.

If it means developers won’t make “live-service”/trash games anymore, we should hasten the SKG movement.

they say "developer choice" because they know those words have positive connotations but what they mean is "publisher greed"

Companies would still be cutting flour with chalk if they had their way. "It's limiting blah blah blah" that's the point you corpos, consumer rights are about the consumer not the bottom line

This is just pure fabricated bullshit. They themselves started limiting options. Remember the old days where you could host your own server with basically any game? They took that away, not us. So they themselves are 100% responsible for this 'uprising'. Besides they could just provide/open-source the backend and disable drm. Hardly any work at all.

But of course it's not about that. They just try to hide behind this 'limits options' argument. But they simply don't want you to be able to play their old games. They want you to buy their latest CoD 42.

The original article completely misrepresents the initiative:

We appreciate the passion of our community; however, the decision to discontinue online services is multi-faceted, never taken lightly and must be an option for companies when an online experience is no longer commercially viable. We understand that it can be disappointing for players but, when it does happen, the industry ensures that players are given fair notice of the prospective changes in compliance with local consumer protection laws.

Private servers are not always a viable alternative option for players as the protections we put in place to secure players’ data, remove illegal content, and combat unsafe community content would not exist and would leave rights holders liable. In addition, many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only; in effect, these proposals would curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create.

...

Stop Killing Games is not trying to force companies to provide private servers or anything like that, but leave the game in a playable state after shutting off servers. This can mean:

• provide alternatives to any online-only content
• make the game P2P if it requires multiplayer (no server needed, each client is a server)
• gracefully degrading the client experience when there's no server

Of course, releasing server code is an option.

The expectation is:

• if it's a subscription game, I get access for whatever period I pay for
• if it's F2P, go nuts and break it whenever you want; there is the issue of I shame purchases, so that depends on how it's advertised
• if it's a purchased game, it should still work after support ends

That didn't restrict design decisions, it just places a requirement when the game is discontinued. If companies know this going in, they can plan ahead for their exit, just like we expect for mining companies (they're expected to fill in holes and make it look nice once they're done).

I argue Stop Killing Games doesn't go far enough, and if it's pissing off the games industry as well, then that means it strikes a good balance.

Yeah, because the choices they have now is working great for quality games...

Yes, it curtails you from making absurd choices about how to fuck customers out of the money they paid for your games

Backpedaling to "defending creators" - that's a bold move, Cotton.