Comment by surgical_fire
7 days ago
With online distribution games can be made unavailable for purchase. You are not distributing it anymore. Only people that previously purchased can still download the game.
There are multiple such cases in stores such as Steam or GoG. I own games that are not available for purchase anymore.
Those games were not killed. I can still download and play them.
Offering the game for download but not sale is still distributing it and you’d still need licenses for all the content you’re distributing. In the cases you mention the games still hold the licenses which is common but not universal.
That's a solvable technical problem. If your game needs a online server to work, either patch it to not need it, or distribute the server. IF your licensing prohibits you form doing it... well, don't enter that kind of licensing, negotiate different terms. There might be a small fraction of games that stop being financially viable. That's what we call a tradeoff.
You've signed a pretty shoddy license agreement if it requires you to refund all your customers, in full, after a few years. That's just bad business.
If you’re saying that a change like SKG would lead to developers needing to take a perpetual license then you should say that rather than alluding to it with a non-sequitur like this.
If that’s what you mean then I’d say maybe but doing so would definitely increase the cost and complexity in using licensed content. Which is likely to be passed on.
Interestingly though reading the EU petition and the petition authors views it would be fine to remove the content once the licence expired.
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If the licensing agreement does not differentiate in between "customers purchasing new copies" and "previously purchasing copies being available" then therein lies the problem.
Looks like the possibility of regulations will fix that. That in the Year of our Lord 2025, when online channels are many times the only possibility of purchasing a game, licensing agreements do not cover that, it seems that proper regulation is very much necessary.
That’s because distribution is seperate from sale. For example Spotify has a license to distribute music but not sell it.
I suspect if you’re expecting to undo decades of IP law with this then you’ll be disappointed. I also suspect that the requirement to be functional rather than complete could also mean as long as the game continued to work removing the content would be fine.
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