What's everyone's thoughts on the Stop Killing Games initiative?

[Danvzare]

I'm sure almost everyone here has heard about it by now, but I'll sum it up for those that don't.

It's basically a petition to the EU to pass a rule where players must be given the means to play a live-service after their permanent closure. Whether that's through an end-of-life update (like modern arcade games already do), the tools to run your own private server (saving people the task to reverse engineer the code to make their own tools), or some other way (I can't think of any other way though).

The petition has already met the threshold to be considered, but whether or not they reject it because of bots or something, has yet to be seen.


Personally, I think the initiative is a good thing and I hope it passes. 
I don't like live-services, and their temporariness is baked into their design, so anyone who does like them, should already understand and appreciate that those servers are going to be permanently closed one day.
But there's no reason for the vast majority of them to give you the message "Can't connect to server." After the servers close down. Especially when a lot of them are mostly single-player experiences anyway.

[LimpingFish]

I fully support it. MMOs aside, there's no reason to let fully-functional offline games die for want of a server check. End-of-life updates (which in most cases would likely require a minor addition, relatively speaking, to patch out such checks) should be mandatory.

Of course the game industry is muddying the waters, as it always does, by claiming the initiative wants to force publishers to maintain full online capabilities for everything from dormant MMOs to dead multiplayer shooters (which it most assuredly does not), crying about the impact it will have on studios making new games, as development funds will have to be diverted. "Never mind closing studios, cancelling games, and firing thousands of people to artificially inflate our end-of-year numbers (or to piss away 80 BILLION dollars on AI initiatives), it's this minor inconvenience which we could easily afford to fix but simply choose not to, that will really hurt your games!"

[Rik_Vargard]

I started playing "Enlisted". In this game, you can buy new soldiers for your squad. You use in-game money (not real money) and it's not even a "random loot box thing" (maybe the stats of the soldier are random dice rolls) but I do get a message, because I live in Belgium, to be sure I accept to "pay" for it, even with in-game "money".

I think it's a good thing because I guess that many younger players, who don't realize what this is, might want to spend a lot of money just to have a new gun and don't realize how much real money they spend on all those "random upgrades".

[WHAM]

I wholeheartedly support it, as the games industry shifting from selling products to selling services that can be killed off, leaving the 'buyer' with nothing to show for their money, doesn't sit right with me.

My personal take on what the stop killing games initiative should actually lead to, legally speaking:
- Mandate that games with online requirement are clearly labelled so (is online required for single player, are there also offline game modes etc.)
- Mandate that games with online requirement are labelled with a pre-planned minimum lifespan and end of life date, so a buyer can clearly see how long the game has left in its lifespan
- Mandate that games with an end of life date clearly label what happens to the game at that date: what functionality will stop working, what will remain
- If the game is killed off before that end of life date, consumers are entitled to monetary compensation paid by publisher or legal rights holder in case of bankruptcy or acquisition
- Dev/publisher can extend the end of life date and may update any online storefronts with the new date, but the date cannot be reduced without compensation to consumers
- Any content packs, DLC and expansions that may lose functionality should also be clearly labelled with either the same end of life date as the main game, or have their own separate date to indicate when the newly sold contents function will come to an end (paid limited time events, gameplay modes, cosmetics etc.) This also applies to content purchased for free-to-play games that have no main game end of life date assigned.
- Storefronts selling digital game licenses (Steam, Gog, Epic, EA, Nintendo) must provide an end-of-life date for their store, at minimum, 3 years prior to any end of life. If none given, then 3 year minimum mandated. Storefronts must also have a reasonable plan for providing post-termination access to sold content.

In my view the main goal of all this is for consumers to have a chance to know what the limitations of the license they purchase to access content has before making the purchase. How long can they be confident that the money they spent will continue to provide access to content and when can they expect to lose access. Ensuring consumers retain access to offline variants of previously online experiences could be a way to mitigate any compensations that might otherwise need to be paid out, pushing publishers away from games that are designed to stop working when server connectivity is lost and instead, hopefully, going back to releasing games that can support features like player hosted servers (at least after the official ones go down) and such.

[bicilotti]

I am happy EU citizens are getting mobilised on this topic! I admit I thought there are more pressing matters at EU level, but it is not that you can fight only one battle at a time.

What I am not happy about is consumer behaviour. I see many people moaning about subscription services, "always online" games and day-0 DLCs, but in the end they keep buying them.

Regarding this proposal: as a consumer, if I buy a single-player game today, can I be sure it will be still available in ten years? Do Steam/GOG advertise this?
If the platforms do, maybe it is time to stop buying crap games.

[Danvzare]

What I am not happy about is consumer behaviour. I see many people moaning about subscription services, "always online" games and day-0 DLCs, but in the end they keep buying them.

I like to think that the disconnect between what people are saying, and what people are doing, is more of a result of the silent majority not caring.
While there are definitely hypocrites out there. I just think it makes more sense that most of the people who are complaining (like us), are just a vocal minority.

My justification for this way of thinking is that people like us are customers, and we want to be treated as such. We get games we actually want to play.
But the vast majority of people are simply consumers, and are happy to just consume. They'll buy all of the latest popular games on a Steam sale and never play any of them, choosing instead to scroll on TikTok for four hours straight.