We need some kind of modern equivalent to the old proposed Digital Media Consumer's Rights Act but which protects people's rights to digital media they buy. These should never be sold and then taken away with no compensation like this. We need a law that forces companies to treat digital files the same as a physical purchase. They can't take it away and have to allow people to resell and loan out as well. And in cases of online games where you can buy something, and then later they can ban you which deprives you of being able to use what you bought, that should come with requirements that the company must provide full compensation of the purchase price. It should also ban EULA's and TOS from defining these things as only licenses even though they are structured as a purchase in a store.
I know it'll never happen with the people we have in government these days, and the anti-consumer organizations, like the ESA, that are out there now claiming things like running private servers for Minecraft is illegal and piracy. (Yes, they really said that. Despite the fact that Minecraft has always provided the server and allowed this for 15+ years)
Not sure if you know this, but this is literally the Stop Killing Games movement. Despite the recent apparent setback as reported in the news, the organisers are in talks with EU MPs that are writing sweeping legislation to address this sort of thing across all digital mediums.
You only need legislation like this to hold in one major market to make a big difference.
The GP comment mentioned Minecraft servers. The full story is that California politicians were discussing Stop Killing Games and and that gamers were willing and capable of running their own servers, and ESA argued against that by saying private servers are illegal, basically.
Politicians are taking about it. Anyone who purchases media cares about it. Support for copyright reform is only going to grow, so hopefully we'll see some.
> You only need legislation like this to hold in one major market to make a big difference.
Could you explain this? I understand that for things like emissions regulations on cars, where it’s very expensive to invest R&D and production capacity into different SKUs for different markets. I can’t see why it would help in other markets in this case though (beyond potentially inspiring similar regulations elsewhere).
The most relevant example of this for the games industry is probably Steam’s refund policy. They allow you to refund a game if you bought it less than 2 weeks ago and have less than 2 hours playtime recorded.
This is their policy for all users, but was a direct result of an Australian consumer watchdog lawsuit [0].
[0] https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/valve-to-pay-3-million...
Counter-example to this would be 3rd-party app stores on iOS, which are only enabled in the EU, Japan and more recently in Brazil (maybe I'm missing some).
Legislation in one market didn't impact the state of things in the others, and some countries get screwed over.
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You are both rigth and wrong.
First, the EU parliament isn't a "fake" parliament. You just claimed this, without any reasoning, so I'm free to just claim the opposite. The members of this parliament are freely elected and they can decide out on their own whim, without consulting the executive. So really they are one of the 3 legs, the legislative.
However, the "EU is a fake democracy" is maybe correct.
The thing is that one should never confuse the EU with some sovereign country, like the Unites States of America. Or with a federal state like the Federal Republic of Germany. The origins of the EU aren't based in some idea of nationality. They are based in trade: how to make trade easier, how to create a common market. It's much more similar to the "Hanse" than than to a modern national state.
And as such, comparing the EU with a national state is futile.
It's actually astounding that this trade club got so many democratic institutions, like the EU parliament or the EU court of justice. A lot of other trade agreements only have fully undemocratic arbitration tribunals.
Also, "the EU cares about" is silly. The EU is a body of many members. The member states think not in unions (just think of "Visegrad members"). This list here isn't even complete:
- Council of the European Union headed by Antonia Costa - EU Commission headed by Ursula von der Leyen - EU Parliament headed by Roberta Metsola - European Central Bank headed by Christine Lagarde - European Court of Auditors headed by Tony Murphy - Court of Justice headed by ... no idea
So one part can "care" about a thing, while another part does not. One must have lived under a rock to not know how e.g. the Commission often wanted some Orwell-1984 laws, again and again, and the EU parliament or the EU court of justice dismissed them. So no, the EU isn't a uniform body. And any claim in that direction is therefore inherently false.
>You just claimed this, without any reasoning
Unlike nearly every other parliament the EU parliament cannot propose legislation. You may ignore it, but the reasoning for the claim was plainly stated.
>members of this parliament are freely elected and they can decide out on their own whim
MEPs are entitled to their opinions, it's just that they hardly matter. Everything voted on was already decided between the commission and lobbyists before behind closed doors.
>Also, "the EU cares about" is silly.
Many thousands of people are employed because of the EU parliament. It must exist for some reason or else it's just a colossal waste of money. Usually the point of citizens electing representatives that control their government is democracy. If instead those representatives have no power it is because the intent of the system is a potemkim village. An illusion of democracy, in short, a fake.
If anything the EU parliament is like the UK house of Lords except the British know the lords are pointless and continually try to abolish it.
Thank you for that.
It often feels like many people (including here on HN) don't understand what the EU is.
Misleading misinformation. The EU laws come from direction set by the Council (elected representatives from the national parliaments). Then their chosen civil service (the Commission) formulate and propose those laws based on the direction set by the Council. Then the EU elected MPs vote on the laws.
That is not less democratic than how many countries operate.
Considering the kind of people that get voted into Parliament, I consider that a very good thing.
I only consider true democracies those countries where citizens can force new legislation by national referendum, bypassing parliament. There are very very few countries that allow it, and even fewer where the requirements are low enough to actually allow it to happen.
Anyway, back to the subject. If Stop Killing Games will ever be law, it will be in EU. We already have very nice things like GDPR, USB charging, and replaceable batteries (soon).
I think we know from using Athens of Ancient Greece as an example that true democracies of this kind are not a good idea at scale. Enough of the general public can be so easily swayed on a clearly catastrophic idea.
This is wrong. A "true democracy" is the system where you need to "sway" the most people on the catastrophic idea. The worst scenario is a totalitarian system where exactly one person can take the catastrophic decision on their own. Everything else is in-between.
It does NOT mean that democracies cannot go wrong. Just that a functioning democracy represents the majority of the people, and we don't have a single system that can steadily represent more people than a democracy (by definition).
It also does NOT mean that democracies are not frustrating: when you are in the minority, obviously it is frustrating. And of course you will be in the minority from time to time.
Responsibility comes with practice. Switzerland is doing okay.
The replaceable batteries is only a mandate that it retain 80% capacity after n charge cycles, which phones already meet. Toothless and useless regulation, the EU strikes again.
> which phones already meet
All phones, really? Or just the one you care about? Even if it's all phones, it sets a bar, and it doesn't hurt.
> Toothless and useless regulation, the EU strikes again.
This is unfair. The EU brings many regulations. Ever heard of the Digital Markets Act? USB-C? EU does a lot for the ecology/climate (more than the individual countries, actually). There are many examples. Probably you don't like all of them, which may be frustrating. Doesn't mean the EU is completely useless.
I find that people love to hate the EU based on some regulations that they hate, and more often than not based on discussions about potential regulations that they would hate (like ChatControl). I hate ChatControl, but the truth is that it hasn't been accepted at this point.
If you consider the marketshare of phone brands in the EU, it's mostly apple, Samsung and a few large chinese brands. They already have batteries that meet the legal definition. Good regulation can have outsized positive effects but this just creates paperwork and changes nothing. But the idea of replaceable batteries made you feel better, right? The point of regulations and politics is to get positive headlines while changing as little as possible because change makes the lobbyists sad.
I think this is going to have unintended consequences if it goes through: funding game development is a very very high risk investment. Adding this type of regulation adds further cost and complication, which makes it an even less attractive investment. Which will result in less monetary and creative risk taken.
Even just open sourcing part of project is expensive. Legal and technical.
This argument is always pretty weak. All regulation adds cost and complication for companies. If that alone was a good reason to not add regulation, then taken to the logical conclusion, there should be no regulation on companies.
Regulation needs to be seen as a trade-off, for example: We get better behaving companies, and the cost is less risk taken. Then the question becomes "is the benefit worth the cost?"
The argument should be stronger since the vast majority of regulation is as you say, the cost is not worth the benefit.
All regulation by default is anticompetitive and also comes with the risk of intended consequences, and thus must prove that they provide sufficient benefit. They are "guilty until proven innocent".
e.g., rather than trying to "just do something" about games, maybe we should revisit copyright law as a whole, instead of slapping a bandaid on a festering wound caused by the first bandaid
How is all regulation anti competitive?
Is it anti competitive that your product does what you say it does and is safe? Isn't that just levelling the playing field by allowing consumers to make rational choices?
What about regulation designed to make sure there is competition? Is that anticompetitive???
I thought this was more "let people run the code themselves if they can figure it out" not "open sourcing". There's no appetite to force a company that reuses and improves their game engine on every new title to open source it, even an older version.
That alone would be an improvement from the status quo, but the SKG movement does go one stop further in wanting publishers to be required to leave the game in a working (local) state of they design it to be dependent on central services they then shut down.
This could be as easy as releasing the tools they used for development when developing the game.
That's really tough. Marathon, by Bungie, is a good example of why this is tough - it's basically all the Destiny engine, network, and tooling code. When they shut down Destiny, it's not like they have a snapshot of their tooling. They've been continuously updating that tooling for ten years, and now they're using that investment for a new project.
Most game studios are similar, in reusing and improving a whole development architecture and systems across many titles. I would not agree with making them release that, even an older version. That's a big competitive moat for some studios.
I think if a community group wants to PAY to operate a server, that's quite reasonable. And then you still end up with a fight about how much to charge. But I don't think handing over server code is the right move.
Fortunately, Stop Killing Games isn't looking to mandate any one solution to this problem.
There are many possible ways to enable game preservation and SKG is pushing for game studios to pick one and implement it, instead of not doing anything and letting games die when they become unprofitable.
Practically speaking, I think the best way to do something like this is to enforce an auction when a studio shuts down an online game. That way the people that care get to vote with their dollars, rather than costing the studio.
Doesn't seem fair to the people who have already paid for a product that will stop working.
I'm not sure I get this. A game costs about the same as watching a few movies - the cost per hour of entertainment is vanishingly low. For these long running games, the cost per hour of entertainment is down to pennies for these users. The same users who are still playing years later are also the ones who have gotten the most value for that same number of dollars already.
Do you genuinely believe that property rights diminish as the utility derived from property increases?
That's how copyright and patent law both work, yes. That's why we have expiry. And we all know the current expiry system is arbitrary (and capricious).
Copyright and patent law aren't relevant to this discussion. We're talking about goods that are purchased and then later rendered unusable by the seller.
I disagree. We're talking about goods purchased, and separately services without a paid support contract, and this is all about copyright law.
There's nothing illegal about selling a game where the servers only work for a week, if you say the servers are only going to work for a week unless you pay more.
The question is, what's reasonable if you don't say anything at all? Forever? A year? Five years? And that's not a trivial question.
If copyright law lasted two years, there would be nothing stopping someone from reverse engineering the service under one of these games after two years and running it themselves (barring serious cryptographic blockers).
Furthermore, the developer would have planned for that expiry of their IP protection. There's a loss to the game studio if they give away their intellectual property while it is still protected.
The only reason this is difficult at all is because of copyright law, and I suspect patent law as well but I think that's murkier.
If you start looking at this through that structure, I think it will make a lot more sense to you why each entity involved takes the actions they do.
I don't think that's what working state means here. It's not a full snapshot or even necessarily multiplayer support. It means minimum functional, which to me is just barely enough to see the assets used in the game. Not necessarily networking, matchmaking, online services, or the relevant tooling. Developers have already proposed making helpers that would introduce an effective switch to do this.
Also what you said about releasing the code and letting the community figure it out was explicitly an example SKG said was okay, from memory.
I think you're right from what I remember reading about them. But I think in practice it costs significant engineering time to package up what they are asking for. For a small game studio it may be incredibly prohibitive.
It just requires game engines to develop a tool to make this much easier to do. The rule won't apply retroactively, so it just means different design choices from the start.
> For a small game studio it may be incredibly prohibitive.
Alright, you lost me here. All of the games that do not follow what this law would suggest are AAA (or scams, essentially). The smaller studios always have some acceptable end-of-life plan from my experience.
I'm not sure AAA studios are as large, or as profitable, as you think. The studio itself is often small, large publishers just own many of them.
Small like 30 people? I don't think so. Genuinely small studios are able to preserve their games for the long-term, so there is no excuse.
AAA gaming isn't something that needs to be protected. Anything of sufficient magnitude and budget should be made responsibly or not at all. If a game is unable to exist without screwing over the user in a very legal sense, it has no right to exist. The requests of SKG are not only sensible, they impose a serious legal ambiguity in the current system that needs to be corrected one way or the other.
AAA was always an untenable monster that brought obscene risk; this was clear even in the mid-2010s and the industry is rapidly moving away from that model for good reason. The user-base clearly does not look kindly on AAA anymore either. That's why they are not profitable anymore. The SKG requirements would make very little impact overall compared to this.
I got my start at a game studio in 2001, after they were bought by Microsoft (and their game went from Mac to Xbox, if you get my drift). They're "big" now, but they regularly lay off large portions of their staff, because game development is boom and bust.
I don't think what you say in your first paragraph follows. Are you really, really interested in learning more about why, with an open mind?
Absolutely! Happy to learn from an industry veteran; hard to argue with that pedigree (part of why I like HN). I figured you might have been, but wanted to push back a little because I think it is important.
Here is my impression. 2001 feels like it was still within a golden era of game development; "AAA" games of that time would have been made by smaller studios still, and budgets could be very large, but not catastrophically so. The industry was still expanding. Post-GFC, once graphics scaled, demands seemed to scale, and costs blew out. Games had to reduce risk as a consequence, become more consolidated, more live-service. But the model was never sustainable at that scale. The tech improved so that costs for basic games went down, but big-budget AAA live service costs went to the moon. Volatility skyrocketed, leading to rapid hiring-firing phases. Now it is at its most extreme and the AAA side of the industry is in crisis. Demands for long-term support could be the straw that breaks the camel's back, but it always seems like that back was going to break eventually anyway. What I hope is happening is that talent is falling into the hands of smaller publishers, but that might not be true. What I do think is that the nature of development may need to change so that studios are able to facilitate these requirements while remaining profitable. Some have shown it can be done, anyway.
That's my impression from a semi-outsider perspective. Happy to be corrected though.
First, thank you so much, I so appreciate when somebody cares what someone else has to say!
Second, I think you're right. The games industry is in really bad shape right now. That's part of why I'm so concerned about putting new requirements on studios. If they have to pay someone to package up software to preserve it like this, that's one less person to generate them revenue, and that means someone gets laid off.
Whether their back breaks or not is not binary. It's measured in careers, and time. Most studios aren't profitable at all, or they're very temporarily profitable after each release. That's why publishers buy them, to keep them afloat during the time when they are losing money, and that's an investment with an expected return from those good times.
If you tell a studio they suddenly have to keep something going when it was already a financial failure, there's no way they can plan for that. They did that planning years ago.
Thanks for continuing the discussion! It's not often an outsider would get to speak with someone with your experience.
I definitely agree that it is not tenable in any studio to have a full time staff member dedicated to packaging software to be in line with this legislation. The solution has to be similar to a toggle in the engine code itself at the very earliest design phases. That means there has to be sufficient advanced notice and can only apply to future titles. There is hope that an inexpensive industry of third parties may arise to easily handle this aspect upfront with new software, but it would be great if there was a tangible demo of this.
Good point about publishers providing the cash to get the studios through the bad times. I think where this falls apart now is in the modern big-budget live service model itself, since these projects are expected to be so long term, so expensive, and gain so much income, that their lack of success now seems to end up in a studio turning the lights out altogether. Concord comes to mind here. Bungie's reliance on the new Marathon is not something I would wish upon any studio either. These kinds of game development strategies do not seem to be healthy for the industry anymore, and some diversification is really needed. These comments here are not really an SKG thing, it just feels like a far bigger issue from the dev side right now. I hate that devs are constantly losing their jobs in the current market, and I think gamers do too. I just can't see the status quo as sustainable. I guess that's why I treated the "back breaking" as binary, but it is true that there is a whole range of suffering inbetween.
A studio should never be forced to keep something going when it is deemed a financial failure. Again, it has to be an upfront design decision during the early planning years so that the end of life version is mostly a compilation target. Latest version goes out, no more updates, no more servers to run. There were more specific solutions discussed by other devs in a video on Ross Scott's channel, but that's the general idea. Does this seem even remotely possible from your viewpoint? Maybe not on current projects, but for projects five to ten years in the future?
If it is too hard to implement in this way for the team, the legislation may force to accept that the nature of the project may be so inherently risky with the current staff resources that it should not come to fruition until new software developments have made it less risky. But you are right that it might just end up as one less person with an actual dev job at the studio, which isn't great in the current economy. Either way, I think many users feel their hands have been forced by the publishers as I understand.
I’d go with a simple proposal: if you use the word “buy” the seller is required to refund buyers if the seller’s action removes access (unlike, say, losing access to a CD or DVD after the disc is scratched).
The most likely outcome is that they’d change their storefronts to use the word “rent” but that’s a good outcome (it encourages buyers to accurately understand what they’re paying for) and it would allow other options like releasing an old game without DRM prior to killing servers.
I agree, the "buy" on a streamable product implies that as long as the company is solvent and they have the same overall streamable products available, then your "purchase" should always be upheld.
In a an ideal world, if you bought the title then you'd have the ability to download it locally. I understand the licensing is a main driver of taking titles down, but these agreements are completely opaque to the customer at the time of purchase.
The law is changing (very, very slowly):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48754782
Include "add" and other potential weasel words
California Assembly Bill 2426 (AB 2426), effective 1 January, 2025. Expands the state's false advertising laws to explicitly ban companies from using words like "buy," "purchase," "own," or "keep" if what the customer is actually getting is a revocable digital license governed by shady T&Cs.
I’d take it farther. If you knew, or a reasonable person should have known, that this sort of thing might happen (for example, because you signed a time-limited licensing agreement), then you’ve lied for financial gain. The legal term for that is “fraud” and it’s a criminal act. Prosecute it.
I quite like the idea of what Nintendo Switch 2 is doing and hopefully could take on with some guarantee. The new Switch 2 cartridge, I am buying the Key to access the media. Storing and transferring media cost is going down every single year. You can pass the physical media to anyone. And they will still be able to access it. And the copy of that data should be legally yours and be protected by law they can't remove it.
> and then later they can ban you which deprives you of being able to use what you bought, that should come with requirements that the company must provide full compensation of the purchase price.
Wouldn't this incentivize people to buy the game, play it and once they are done with it get banned to get a full refund?
Maybe not a major problem since almost no centralised multiplayer games are one-time purchases.
We already have a pretty resilient solution called piracy.
Never buy, never subscribe, obtain by other means, until things change.
Starve 'em!
There’s only one party fighting for things like this and they are in the minority. Funny how people that cry about politics on hacker news don’t understand how it directly affects them until their digital media is no longer their property. Sad that’s what it takes.
> I know it'll never happen with the people we have in government these days, and the anti-consumer organizations, like the ESA, that are out there now claiming things like running private servers for Minecraft is illegal and piracy. (Yes, they really said that. Despite the fact that Minecraft has always provided the server and allowed this for 15+ years)
I really do not understand how it is not considered treason to give blatantly false testimony to lawmakers. Lawmakers, even the most upstanding and righteous ones, have to rely on the testimony of experts and if those experts can just make up whatever they want then democracy is not worth shit when it can be circumvented like that.
> These should never be sold and then taken away with no compensation like this.
I don't think it is reasonable to bundle those ideas together.
Companies renegading on their promise of perpetual access is not the same thing as a right to resell at all
Right to resell is just going to warp game prices in a way that is bad for everyone
After all how do new games compete with used games in that setup? Given the way engagement with games works there will basically always be spare copies
Key sales already happen at below new game value at nearly all times and that is unused games
> they can ban you which deprives you of being able to use what you bought
Also not the same thing at all, bad behavior removing access and no refund is normal
> that should come with requirements that the company must provide full compensation of the purchase price
Ah yes cheating in an MMO results in a full refund of all money paid that wouldn't be abused by anyone
Fortunately, we don't need a policy solution or to convince already-bought-and-paid-for-lawmakers to side with justice over profits.
Solutions for liberating media of all kinds, from P2P file sharing to DRM-stripping, have roundly and soundly outpaced all this other corporate knowledge control nonsense at every turn since the invention of the printing press.
All we need to do is make the simple choice to stop recognizing ownership of ideas (and thus, bytes) as a conceptually coherent phenomenon, and carry on.
I'm a full-time professional bluegrass musician, and like most of my peers, I release all of my material DRM-free. I invite you to get my new record from IPFS or Bit Torrent, and to pin/seed/encourage your friends to steal it also:
https://pickipedia.xyz/wiki/Release:QmUWtV7fG1K9pM5TQSf5c38v...
The list of legislation we need is getting very big very fast, but our Congress is dysfunctional and the president only cares about the SAVE act. Even when we've had a functional Congress, most protections like these are written in favor of corporations and/or weakened by the next administration.
They’ll be begging for it when they recreate the very piracy problem they were fleeing, but far worse.
Yeah. This time I'm not living the high seas.
We seen what licensing ala Netflix and Spotify means artists.
*leaving
We need consumer boycotts, not legislation. I find it hilarious that people would continue to buy (or license) content from a trash company like Sony after they were caught literally installing rootkits on customer computers. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_BMG_copy_protection_rootk...
Yes, let's boycott sony and go to... sega?
There's only 3 major companies at this point in the home entertainment system market. Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo. Microsoft has indicated they want to get out.
When so few companies have so much control over a market boycott becomes pointless as you are basically saying "You need to give up a product you like and there is no real alternative".
That means we need regulation, legislation, and enforcement.
We need better antitrust enforcement and tweaks to to give it more teeth. We should be seeing more corporate breakups.
Memory is in the same boat. There's only 3 major companies producing most of the RAM and they've repeatedly colluded to raise prices.
> We need consumer boycotts, not legislation.
We need both. 'Buyer Beware' and 'The invisible hand' are necessary but insufficient to correct corporate bad behavior.