Comment by guidedlight
12 hours ago
This has been happening with Video Games for a while. There is a major initiative called "Stop Killing Games" which was triggered when Ubisoft bricked "The Crew" when servers were shutdown.
https://www.stopkillinggames.com/
There has been some success. There is new legislation in California which has passed the Assembly. https://www.invenglobal.com/articles/22330/stop-killing-game...
And there is a citizens initiative in Europe which the the European Commission must respond to: https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/initiatives/details/20...
It's good legislation. I would love to see this extended to "Stop Killing Software" in general, with the same provisions.
Hopefully SKG can serve as a precedent to help consumer rights expand.
This is much worse. The Crew was always framed as an 'always online' game, even if that was technically a farce. This would be more like if Bethesda rolled out an update to cripple Skyrim after releasing a new Elder Scrolls game to lackluster sales.
I think you should be allowed to stop supporting software or shut down your servers.
If this removes people’s access to products (software licenses count as products here) someone payed fir once. Then you should only be allowed to do that if you enable people to continue using the product.
Releasing the server code should be a requirement. Software updates shouldn’t be required. Unless the product has a moment where it will stop functioning on the hardware it was build for built in (such as an expiring certificate).
> I think you should be allowed to stop supporting software or shut down your servers.
That has nothing to do with Stop Killing Games.
At least the servers bit seems very related no? I’d love to know more though.
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You should not be able to shut down the ability to play a game if it cost money to buy.
You should at least have to refund customers when you take away the ability to use a product they purchased.
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Yes you should!