Ross Scott Gets A Second Chance For His ‘Stop Killing Games’ Crusade
Ross Scott Gets A Second Chance For His ‘Stop Killing Games’ Crusade
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Ross Scott Gets A Second Chance For His ‘Stop Killing Games’ Crusade
16 comments
16 comments
Setting aside piratesoftware's concerns (that it's economically untenable to require devs to develop a form of their game's source that would be publicly releasable), I'm not clear on why games should have this requirement and no other media, particularly when games are so much more complicated.
If we can't even require physical releases of any show or movie or album, because the company still owns the copyright and might choose to profit from it in the future, how can we expect active investment in the unwinding of their copyright from devs? Seems a double standard.
Why do people trying to advocate against the movement push the narrative that source code is being asked for or that it is the only solution to make games work after it is sunset?
Just put in an offline mode like was done for Redfall. https://www.ign.com/articles/redfalls-final-update-is-live-bringing-with-it-offline-mode-dlss-3-and-more
Knockout City provided tools for gamers to run their own private servers after it shutdown
https://www.knockoutcity.com/private-server-edition
Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League has servers still running but put in an update to provide offline mode
https://dcgamessupport.wbgames.com/hc/en-us/articles/36119520746515-Suicide-Squad-Kill-the-Justice-League-Offline-Mode-FAQ
And fans have picked up the slack in Hitman with the peacock project when the companies lock certain things to online.
https://old.reddit.com/r/HiTMAN/comments/12o76t3/what_is_the_purpose_of_peacock_project_mod/
So that's what I'm guessing the movement wants. Just to leave the game in a playable state as opposed to inaccessible when servers go down. And source code wasn't provided for these solutions.
Nothing about the initiative says anything about “requiring devs to develop a form of their game’s source that would be publicly available”. Where did you see that?
Seeing multiple people pushing source code to misrepresent the movement makes me start to think they are bad faith actors.
This campaign is not asking to take away IP from devs or publishers, they would still retain it.
Legally speaking, a game sold for a single payment and without clear stipulation of an end of service would be considered a Good under EU law. Tjis means you're purchasing a perpetual license to your specific copy of the game, but not to the IP or copyright.
Ross, the creator of the SKG campaign, goes into extreme detail on this very topic of goods vs services, and how the game industry is committing fraud by destroying a customer's ability to access the content their perpetual license allows.
The equivalent for other media would be that if I buy a digital copy of a film or something, I should always be able to access it in the same resolution and whatnot that I purchased it. That's outside the scope of this campaign, but this campaign would certainly pave the way for it.
It's asking for games to remain functional, not for source to become available. Even the Video Games Europe reply linked in the article mentions that the main problem, for them, is "keeping servers online indefinitely":
It sounds like you're asking genuinely. Ross' interest is in games, hence that's the area he started it in. He's already stretched to his limit co-ordinating this limited campaign. He also advised to keep the scope limited so that the opposition to it will be mostly from games companies (Nintendo, Sony, Ubisoft, EA etc.) Than from movie companies (Paramount, Disney, Warner Bros. etc.) who will be also pushing as hard, using a lot of lobby money and a whole web of arguments from different fronts, that will be more difficult to deconstruct and rebut.
For other audio and visual content, there are often "analog loopholes" that can preserve media even if in a slightly degraded form no matter how many layers of DRM you put. Games do not have a standard method to do that, so access is unilaterally and permanently taken away without a way for it to have been preserved.
So, I have no idea how purchasing a show or movie (to own) digitally works, but I would think that at least you wouldn't have to worry about a server being taken down and not being able to access the movie, and I'm 100% certain that it's not a problem when you have a physical disk. The thing is, most media isn't being watched this way. It's watched on Netflix or any other streaming service where you aren't actually paying for a movie itself, which is why it's okay for them to delist it and you not be able to watch it anymore.
The reason that Stop Killing Games is happening is because people own a disk of The Crew and are physically unable to play the game now
Any successful first step is a first step. Hopefully this should lead to more sensible things.
Like, I don't want to be misconstrued; I want to live in a world where this stuff is possible. I guess I just feel like Stop Killing Games is shortsighted in its current form, and will get caught on some technicality like this, that will ultimately sink it.
My hope is that if it comes to failure, it will be as you say, a first step towards driving this media preservation objective, and advance the conversation.
If it passed in its current form, my fear is that it would effectively be an extra tax and burden just for choosing to make games instead of some other type of media, and I'm concerned investors would see it that way too, and move their financial support to these surer bets, ultimately harming individual game developers and lessening game releases.
Other media should. But getting it to happen on games is a good first step considering games are the MOST profitable form of media.
They're also the most complicated, and the production budgets, the resources available for archival, are often higher on blockbuster movies, as well as the barrier to entry being lower, for them to participate in archival, there's no such thing as spaghetti code in a movie
Like, why games first, unless you're specifically trying to tamp down their profitability as compared to other forms of media? I'm suspicious that this is the kind of shit the MPAA would pull because they're getting outcompeted.