Comment by hodgehog11
8 hours ago
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...
EU parliament unlike nearly every other parliament can't propose legislation, only amend it. That is because it's a fake parliament and the EU is a fake democracy to give the people the illusion that the EU cares about them.
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.
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
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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.
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