If 1 million people sign a petition, a ban on rendering multiplayer games unplayable has a chance to become law in Europe

Gaming IndustryIf 1 million people sign a petition, a ban on rendering multiplayer games unplayable has a chance to become law in EuropeWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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There are two tragedies when games go dark. First off, the work of all those programmers, artists, writers, animators, modelers, and everyone else who labored on a game, maybe for years, is gone forever. Killing a game is also anti-consumer because, y’know… people bought that game. They paid for a product, the same way they’d buy a book, a movie, or a song, and they should be able to use that product for as long as they like. Troublingly, there’s no legal recourse when a game you paid for gets shut down.

But there are people trying to get laws passed to protect both the games and the people who buy them. For a more enjoyable explanation of the effort from someone more interesting than me, please direct your eyes to the video below:

Europeans can save gaming! - YouTubeWatch On

Europeans can save gaming! - YouTube

You’ll probably recognize Ross Scott’s voice immediately—he’s the creator and narrator of YouTube webseriesFreeman’s Mind—and he’s one of the organizers behindStop Killing Games. Scott compares the practice of publishers shutting down games to movie studios during the silent film era “burning their own films after they were done showing them to recover the silver content,” pointing out that “now most films of that era are gone forever.” Game preservation is a concern, definitely, but so is protecting consumers.

“An increasing number of publishers are selling videogames that are required to connect through the internet to the game publisher, or ‘phone home’ to function,” the petition reads. “While this is not a problem in itself, when support ends for these types of games, very often publishers simply sever the connection necessary for the game to function, proceed to destroy all working copies of the game, and implement extensive measures to prevent the customer from repairing the game in any way.”

Understanding that developers and publishers can’t support games forever, the initiative would expect “the publisher to provide resources for the said videogame once they discontinue it while leaving it in a reasonably functional (playable) state.” That means giving players the tools to host the game on their own servers, for example, and removing the requirement for games to connect to the publisher’s (defunct) servers in order to be played. This is what thedeveloper behind Knockout City didwhen it pulled the plug on the game’s official servers.

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Not only does this initiative apply to games that are sold, but includes free to play games that have microtransactions for assets (like skins) or other paid-for features. The thought is, if you purchase an item in a free game, you should have the right to continue to use it indefinitely—which means keeping that free game playable in some form.

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