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. We welcome the opportunity to discuss our position with policy makers and those who have led the European Citizens Initiative in the coming months.
  • nibbler@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
    131·
    7 hours ago

    You are basically saying that consumer protection is useless, as consumers should protect themselves.

    That would be true if all consumers would have the time and understanding to be perfectly informed all the time, which is not realistic.

    • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      15·
      6 hours ago

      If the population at large is too stupid to make healthy video game purchasing decisions, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for protections to come from the representatives they elected.

      I can see a stack of ways that this isn’t going to work:

      • The government looks at the petition and says “No we’re not going to consider that.”
      • The government says “We’ve considered that and decided to do nothing.”
      • The government pulls an EU and the solution they come up with is to make every video game published everywhere in the world force the user to agree to the EULA every time the game launches, prompting a slew of “EULA auto-accept” mods to work around the annoying thing you now have to constantly click.
      • The government puts in a law that’s written decently. The industry, particularly those parts based outside the EU such as Japan and North America, ignore it, and shut down servers when they damn well please.

      But let’s indulge in the fantasy that democracy works for a minute and Stop Killing Games becomes a law that works perfectly as intended. The publishers will find some other way to be shifty greedy fuckpukes. Case in point: Live service games just shutting down their servers whenever they want is 100% legal right now. The government currently is not protecting consumers. It never truly will. The shadiness of business will always outrun government protection, 100% of the time.

      I still maintain, if you continue to pay for live service games, you’re the problem.