Stop killing games and the industry response

That kind of reasoning makes sense if you have a single publisher controlling the entire market and they don't want to undercut their own business. But that's obviously not the case. There are plenty of publishers that want to publish games like Terraria, especially if they go on to sell more than 60 million copies.

So much this.

Its why Neverwinter Nights had extensive modding, local hosted server, and more....

But Baldurs Gate 3 doesn't.

NWN will still be playable in 10 years. BG3 likely won't be, or significant reductions in game quality will take place.

This would be why they’re trying to create consumer protection laws

This is literally every industry now. Shall we "regulate" all industries to be like this, then? Is that achievable?

Shall we require Netflix to release server builds so that you can access their content indefinitely because you paid for a subscription at some point? "That's not what this is about. Ok, where are we heading then?

I'll never buy an Ubisoft game again. Instant dealbreaker to see that studio on the Steam store page; I've deleted a $3 sale game from my cart when I realized that it was Ubisoft. No game is worth giving money to a company that hates its customers so much.

> I'm blown away that series like AC, FarCry are still big sellers. These games are vapid and designed to be a time sink.

They are like junk food. Everyone has the junk food that they enjoy. FarCry is certainly the McDonald's of games. I enjoy some junk food once in a while, problems arise if I make it my staple diet.

Not to mention the sexual assault

> to leave said videogames in a functional (playable) state.

Yeah, I like the general goal, but I worry about the corner cases; is an MMO “functional/playable” if you just release a localhost server? Are we forcing indie shops to pay for servers indefinitely now? Great way to ensure no more indie MMOs get built if that ends up being the text interpretation.

And, as you say, the question you should always be asking about EU legislation - how does this affect the small/medium shops’ competitiveness? Counterintuitively, compliance can hit the small guys relatively harder and entrench the big guys.

Not to say that we shouldn’t try to fix the problem. But agree that skepticism about EU regulations has some historical merit.

So don’t even try because it might be bad?

This vague handwringing isn't any better. None of us know what the law will end up turning into. But we shouldn't let that stop this being addressed properly in our political institutions. That's what they're there for.

Also, bringing up the DMCA is sort of rich, since it was always just a vehicle for the biggest content companies in publishing, film, television, music and software to protect their property online.

Now we have something that was brought into being by consumers and may finally do something to curb anti-consumer behaviour by companies like this, and you're against it because you have no idea what it'll look like. I just can't, man. What's even the point of legislation if we have to be afraid it'll all be corrupted? Why even have political institutions at all at that point?

[dead]

Its not always obvious when you buy them which games will still be around a few years later.

Some singleplayer titles from just a few years ago are no longer playable. (Hello, Ubisoft). Meanwhile there are MMOs like guild wars 1, released 20 years ago, still playable today.

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 was such a breath of fresh air in this regard. If you just want a reasonably priced, good game with no shady stuff but still that AA (arguably AAA) experience I can’t recommend it enough.

Yup

Something I am noticing more and more is how stagnant the North American game industry is. Meanwhile Europe and Japan are still killing it

Larian with BG3 - Europe Cd Projekt with Witcher and Cyberpunk - Europe

Nintendo rocking on as normal Monster hunter wilds and the RE remakes? Capcom, Japan

Elden Ring and Nightreign. FromSoft, Japan

Helldivers 2. Arrowhead Studios, Sweden

Kingdom Come Deliverance 2. Warhorse Studios, Czech

I cannot remember the last time I bought a new game and had a blast with it from a North American studio. Certainly not a AAA studio anyways

And people are. Games sales are slumping in response to a decade of predatory dark patterns and simply not giving the audience what they're asking for.

Just keeping the games playable is a singular issue and in the noise. It's a good issue to single out for regulation.

>Vote with your wallet

I bought Minecraft from Mojang, years later I am forced to setup a Microsoft account to play the game, or risk downloading a cracked version. They did not offer a refund. Minecraft is a video game where you need to login even if you do not play online. (maybe things changed , I think this MS account thing was a few years back, it worked for my account but I read of people having big issues because some MS assholes ahd to force the Java edition players to use an MS account)

This behaviour should not be legal.

Or just sign the initiative, so that you maybe don't have to abstain to achieve this goal? I don't understand this mentality.

There's fewer games to vote on every year, as conglomerates like Microsoft out vote your wallet a billion times over every time they buy a game studio to embrace, extend and then extinguish.

Look where decades of "voting with our wallets" led us. How some people can still utter that sentence unironically is beyond me at this point.

The publisher can't do that. No one can tell the future.

But that won't stop a horde of midwits from thinking they've won. In reality, all they will achieve is increasing the barrier of entry yet again to yet another industry.

This is part of the beauty of such a thing being a law.

If your code library, licensed property etc. does not allow companies to comply with the law, then its value is zero and you won't be able to sell it. So suddenly, all providers of such libraries etc. have to make this possible.

how did they do it in the past? If I can put my Tony Hawks cd from the PS2 into a cd player and enjoy all the DRM music, what changed between now and then?

If music labels refuse to license out their songs like that, then if this law passes, they're going to have to suck it up and play nice again, else lose customers/publishers.

The issue with most of what you're saying here is that all of that works the way it does because it can, not because it has to. Code libraries, for example, may essentially prohibit what is being requested by SKG because they can. However, if they couldn't then they wouldn't. The companies selling the libraries aren't going to simply shut up shop.

Which is just to say, if there's money to be made then businesses will do so within the regulatory framework.

Those are all just decisions the companies made. For future games, the game developers and the companies licensing IP can simply make different decisions. If a large market like the EU creates strong incentives for them, they will make different decisions.

Now, this is not necessarily the case for existing games. Revisiting existing licensing deals can be needlessly difficult. But I'm assuming the proposed regulations will only apply to new games rather than trying to force changes retroactively.

All of those things are concerns. But if video game publishers really needed to figure this stuff out in order to sell units, they would. Contracts would change. But they'd still get signed. Everyone wants money too much. The only hard part is trying to fix this stuff for games which have already signed on the dotted line. Or games which have shipped and disbanded their software teams.

But even then, can't they just opensource what they're allowed to? Even if it doesn't build, it wouldn't take the community long to rip out FMOD or whatever and replace it with working alternatives. Or submit a final patch which removed the part where games phone home before launching in singleplayer mode. Why would that interfere with the licence for 3rd party IP?

IMO if I'm "buying" the game, you can't also remotely disable the thing I bought. (And "buy" is the word they all use!). If you want to remotely disable the game at some point in the future, I'm fine with that so long as they list it very explicitly and loudly on the box. "THIS GAME ONLY PLAYABLE UNTIL 2030". Games publishers need to start being honest and upfront about what we're paying for. Its not an unreasonable ask.

anyone ever noticed how so many completely different restaurants food tastes almost exactly the same? it’s because so many of them use the exact same food suppliers to buy their food before they cook it. [0]

gaming over the last few years feels the same way. like they all taste almost the same.

> Simply pretending these very real concerns don’t exist is nonsense land.

i don’t believe this to be true at all.

if all of the things you listed are limiting game development so much, than this isn’t “progress” in the games space. if it’s really that bad, maybe we should regress, start from the basics and let some of the incredible indie studios or midsize studios take the lead who will A) bring us actual originality, not more IP rehashed for the thousandth time, B) not bleed gamers wallets dry and C) lets us actually own the thing we buy.

sooo many amazing games were made in the past that were able to do this and do it well, the difference is they didn’t cry if they “only” made $40 million in profit.

cod3 made like $400 million in the first 24 hours.

the difference now is the AAA studios are sucking all of the air out of the room and not leaving nearly as much room for midsize studios.

[0] sysco, us foods, and pfg supply an absolute massive number of restaurants in the US. sysco alone distributes to something like 700,000 restaurants.

How things are doesn’t prevent how things could be. Studios could negotiate better licensing deals.

> You want games with real vehicles or licensed music?

Not really if it means that I wouldn't be able to play the game in 10 or 20 years.

> Think about it - what does the gaming industry look like 100 years from today?

This is something we can answer pretty easily by looking at the book industry. People do enjoy novelty. The pulp sci-fi/fantasy from the 60s-80s is long forgotten save for a few masterpieces, and there is a flow of recent books that people buy and read.

> At a macro level, killed games are a good thing for gaming companies.

But they aren’t good for consumers.

It would still be illegal to acquire a copy of a killed game. Their numbers would still dwindle, since they'd be limited to people who bought the game before it was killed.

I think that most developers are just afraid to voice such anti-industry opinion. Gamedev is fairly small industry, so if you piss off wrong people, you might be left without job opportunities.