Which is why I buy games on GoG whenever it’s an option.
Essentially, the new law will mean that storefronts like Steam will no longer be able to use terms such as “buy” or “purchase” when advertising a game that always requires an online connection. Since you won’t technically own the product and servers being taken offline would render the product useless, a different word will have to be used.
The official phrasing in the bill’s summary reads, it will “prohibit a seller of a digital good from advertising or offering for sale a digital good, as defined, to a purchaser with the terms buy, purchase, or any other term which a reasonable person would understand.”
That’s actually a very good reason IMO.
I’m waiting for something like this since forever. I hope other states and countries will follow. This is huge.
It’s not only steam, but also Amazon, Apple, you name it.
Buy means buy, not “rent until we decide to render your product useless”!
I’d rather have them force the stores to actually sell the products
Can’t wait to see what marketing BS replaces it.
My money is on Experience!
Or Activate!
Or Join!
Or Unlock!
You know something with an exclamation mark.
Exclamation*
“Add to your library” is my guess.
To long and no explanation mark, it would never work.
Hopefully “license”, since that’s what it actually is
Money’s on subscribe.
SUBSCRIBE!
Wait so if a game doesn’t not need online connection it can say buy?
That is such a huuuge advantage to indie devs that can let you own things.
No, it’s not just about DRM, currently the storefronts do not guarantee continued access to the content.
For example, Valve can just close your Steam account at their discretion and you would no longer be able to log in or download any of your games
To be honest, it sounds like it would affect ALL digital products, not just those requiring an active online connection. Or at the very least even those with Steam DRM for verification.
I wonder if even without this law, one could claim false advertising against any subscription service that looks like a bit to own service.
It doesn’t fix anything however
I don’t see why there’s a distinction for always online games. You don’t “own” any game you buy off steam. All you get is a license to play the game off steam. You can’t sell or trade them.
Support GOG! Fuck DRM! Own your shit!
A while back I was discussing Ross Scott’s ‘Stop Killing Games’ proposal in the EU, in some other lemmy thread.
If passed, that law would make it so you cannot make and sell a game that becomes unplayable after a person buys the game, or you have to refund the purchase of the game itself as well as all ingame purchases.
If gameplay itself is dependant on online servers, the game has to release a working version of the server code so it at least could be run by fans, or be refunded.
If it uses some kind of DRM that no longer works, it has to be stripped of this, or properly refunded.
Someone popped in and said ‘well I think they should just make it more obvious that you’re not buying a game, you’re buying a temporary license.’
To which I said something like ‘But all that does is highlight the problem without actually changing the situation.’
So, here we are with the American version of consumer protection: We’re not actually doing any kind of regulation that would actually prevent the problem, we’re just requiring some wordplay and allowing the problem to exist and proliferate.
All this does is make it so you can’t say ‘Buy’ or ‘Purchase’ and probably have a red box somewhere that says something like ‘You are acquiring a TEMPORARY license that may be revoked at any time for any reason.’
US gets a new content warning. EU is working toward actually stopping the bullshit.
If gameplay itself is dependant on online servers, the game has to release a working version of the server code so it at least could be run by fans, or be refunded.
I replied to one of it a while ago and basically, this part is impossible since developer also “license” 3rd party backend/plugins/software solutions to make their server working. The developer do not have the right to release licensed code/api etc.
meaning, say if a backend have the free learning version of license, the developer are bound to the commercial license, which dictates if they can release code that involve 3rd party code/api.
To which I said something like ‘But all that does is highlight the problem without actually changing the situation.’
I think the idea is, that the minimally invasive regulation only has to fix the information imbalance between producer and consumer. Then, once the consumer has all the information, they can make an informed racional market actor descision. That’s supposed to price shitty rip offs out of the market eventually.
… yeah I don’t believe it works either.
It doesn’t make any sense if the whole market is shitty rip offs.
In this case I’m not saying all games are bad, shitty games, but they are all shitty rip offs in the sense that they all legally can, and many do just suddenly deactivate, and you’re not even compensated for this.
The whole fundamental legal trick the software industry has pulled is making everything into a license for an ongoing service, as opposed to a consumer good.
And the problem is that this is now infecting everything, expanding as much as possible into anything with a chip in it.
Even if the consumer is perfectly informed, it doesn’t matter if the entire market is full of fundamentally unjust bullshit, as there aren’t any alternatives.
All you get is consumers who are now informed that their digital goods can poof out of existence with no recourse.
But the whole market isn’t shitty rip offs.
Can’t Stardew Valley, Undertale, Outer Wilds and No Man’s Sky also be legally removed from your Steam library for any reason?
Yes, and if you don’t like it you don’t have to buy them. It’s why I prefer not to use Steam.
Please reread the second sentence.
The second sentence isn’t true.
They’re just gonna go all in on marketing to Kyle and his CoD buddies, and ignore the nerds who care about weird shit like ownership.
Honestly, that really does track with how shit works in here.
“The orphan crushing machine may contain components known to the state of California to cause cancer”
And we’re done! Fixed all the problems!
There are two different problems. One is easier to solve.
At the same time, both need to be done, your solution doesn’t solve the fact that it’s only a license you’re purchasing and you depend on a third party service to download the game in most cases.
You don’t need to be protected from video game sales, you need to be protected from fraudulent game sales, that’s it.
If you want to buy a game that runs on proprietary servers that will shutdown one day, you should be allowed to do that.
The Stop Killing Games concept is not stopping or protecting anyone from buying video games.
… Neither is slapping a warning label onto games that says ‘hey you don’t own this the way you own a blender.’
That’s very strange framing to use.
What SKG does is mandate that your purchased product be technically possible to be usable in perpetuity, or refund the cost of it.
Everyone knows servers cost money to run, so its not reasonable to mandate every game that is totally online only just have servers up forever, maintained by the publisher.
But what is also unreasonable is needless, always online DRM that shuts down one day (Games for Windows Live, anyone?) or having a massively online game that could still be enjoyed by dedicated fans, willing to front the cost for one or two servers… but cannot, because reverse engineering network code is orders of magnitude more difficult and costly than the publisher just releasing it to the public when they no longer want to officially maintain it.
SKG would completely allow you to purchase an online game whose official server support would end someday.
It… just augments consumer rights by mandating either a refund at that point, or a pretty effortless and costless release of the server files and configs.
I am really struggling to see how you are interpreting this concept as somehow preventing the purchase of games.
If games have to be playable in perpetuity, then you can’t buy a game that isn’t playable in perpetuity.
But what is also unreasonable is needless, always online DRM that shuts down one day.
There are lots of video games without forced online DRM, and video games aren’t a necessity. You can simply stop buying games from these services and let people who don’t care about such things continue to buy them.
What SKG does is mandate that your purchased product be technically possible to be usable in perpetuity, or refund the cost of it.
That’s a ridiculous requirement. If you want to buy games that are playable in perpetuity, buy games that are playable in perpetuity.
People should be allowed to smoke and gamble, too.
I still don’t think it’s good that they do that, though.One of the aims of Stop Killing Games, as far as I’m aware, is the preservation of history, which seems like a very odd thing to be indignant about.
It exists partially because many great games, for a long while, before widespread internet access, could not be played if they were no longer directly sold without either paying out the nose for a working, used cart or disc, and console… or via emulation, which is apparently basically illegal, in practice, technically, its complicated, etc.
Then the video game landscape changed with widespread internet access, much more oriented toward what used to be seen as buying a fancy pants board game into well now you’re just buying a ticket to a fancy pants board game that can be revoked at any time, and now you just have an expired ticket to a box that is magically superglued shut and will light on fire if you pry it open.
Some of us olds still view software as a product, a good, not a service.
Oh yeah, absolutely. The fact that we own nothing these days is crazy.
So you want to legally require game companies to “preserve history” in perpetuity, unlike every other kind of company in existence?
’
Are there books in libraries? Yes, and the publishers don’t have to do a thing. And it is good for society. Similarly, can you fix an old car, even if the manufacturer went bankrupt? Of course you can.
We have precedent, my friend.
There are also video games in libraries, and there are books in libraries with components that are unusable these days. Nobody is required by law to support these components in perpetuity. Nor is any publishing company required by law to maintain support for a book in perpetuity in any way.
Nor is anybody required by law to help you fix your classic car. People with classic cars spend tons of money to find spare parts or even get them manufactured. This is despite the fact that cars are much more of a necessity than video games.
Likewise, if you paid a video game to keep their servers open, or paid them for their source code, they’d give it to you. If you paid a smart person to reverse engineer the network protocol and write an equivalent server, you’d have your part.
To fair to that rather silly commenter, Stopkillinggames puts the onus on the publisher while your examples are based on the individuals or other third parties providing the “fix”
Only if the publisher has taken steps to stop individuals from preserving them through more traditional means.
As in, the publisher has stopped them preserving it otherwise, so now the publisher must make it accessible somehow?
I’m sorry, did you not want to play Ocarina of Time in the year of our lord 2046?
“Subscribe”
Fits well. Everything is a subscription nowadays.
“Rent”
There should be an exception: If they want to still say “buy” or fail to comply, they will need to refund the full original purchase price if they ever shut down the server.
Next do planned obsolescence and products that are designed to break a week after the warranty expires.
Then they would need to pay everything back they ever earned if the company ever goes bankrupt. I imagine a bankrupt company doesn’t have much to pay back.
I think they’d do two things if they want to keep the buy button. 1) Not require always online connections to play, or properly remove the online requirement or convert to P2P in the case of multiplayer games if they want to end support, or 2) sell their server infrastructure to a third party.
I assume this law is to preempt demand for something similar to the EU’s “stop killing games” petition. It’s a way to say that consumers were made aware and agreed that their games are only temporary licenses, so they can’t demand refunds or continued support when the company wants to stop.
The 2 reasons you provide are actually why games that offer an offline mode functionality (more specifically that the seller cannot revoke access to after the transaction, which includes making the digital good available at the time of purchase for permanent offline download to an external storage source to be used without a connection to the internet) are exempted from needing to follow this law.
I don’t think this is a preemption of the SKG campaign but actually one of the realistic goals of that campaign. I don’t think the ability to rent software for a limited time is an issue, but tricking people into thinking they can use something they purchased forever, to have it unilaterally taken away due to 3rd party licensing, decommissioning servers or other excuse is the problem.
They’ll just change the button from “Buy $59.99” to just “$59.99”.
As much as I lament the fact that we can’t just own things anymore, it’s not like this legislation will change anything. Storefronts aren’t going to drop their DRM just so they can use the word ‘buy’ again.
“Get” “Get now” “Aquire” “Access now” “Add to account” “license now”
This doesn’t make any difference.
it has the potential to make a game actually saying “buy” somewhat more valuable, which perhaps could lead to a shift from “it’s easier to require online and there’s no down side” to “perhaps we should spend a little bit of time thinking about this to get 1% boost in sales”
“Add to cart”
“Check out”
“Pay”
Probably not.
As a purchaser of many games online, that makes sense to me. Especially for younger people growing up with this kinda stuff it would be nice to differentiate the two.
If https://www.stopkillinggames.com/ gets to go before the EU commission, this might even go much further.
If you change what it is called, you dont have to change whats wrong with it.
True but the point is honesty here… people should know they are not buying. if they chose to license, that’s on them. at some point, people need to make decisions as long as they are not lied to, they have to own them.
Hopefully this pushes Valve to include drm free copies of games
Drm free doesn’t necessarily change the license attached to it.
I remember some game from steam can just copied and played, DRM free, just that they don’t have steam feature like achievement. Not sure if it’s true now.
I imagine GOG is exempt?
Gog doesn’t* (as often?) sell licenses that can be revoked as part of purchasing eula and therefore shouldn’t really have to remove the misleading ‘buy’ word.
Many steam games you don’t own and aren’t buying, you’re being granted access that can be revoked by the property owner. That’s not just steam.
*I’m not a big Gog or games purchaser in general so I’m not sure if that’s accurate. I’m sure you get the point though.
Probably not, sounds like it would apply to all digital store fronts. And a game from GOG could still become unavailable if it relies on game servers that are taken down.
If they did make an exception for stores like GOG, then some steam games would theoretically also be exempt because they don’t use steam drm. So you could have some guys labelled “buy” and others labelled “get”.
then some steam games would theoretically also be exempt because they don’t use steam drm.
I think the main difference that would arise between these and GOG would be the provision of installers. Even though some Steam games don’t use its DRM, they’re still reliant on Valve’s servers and an online connection for installation. GOG games are reliant on CD Projekt’s servers and an online connection for installer downloads, but upon download completion, one may install and reinstall games even while offline.
That’s a critical difference in digital distribution, in my opinion.
That’s true. The drm-free steam games can usually have their install directories moved around freely between computers, but it’s true there isn’t an installer program provided outside of the steam client itself.
Why would they be? They sell games, and have a storefront and launcher.
Because I can download and save installers for GOG games and install them without needing to connect to GOG at all. It’s more akin to buying physical media than it is to Steam or other storefronts.
It’s talking about games that require an always on connection. You can save the installer for games like that, but the game still won’t work if it can’t phone home.
I’m well aware — that’s the whole point of DRM-free games.
You still need your gog account to download games though. And they have multiplayer games anyways.
It’s far better that it applies to everyone.
You still need your gog account to download games though.
I need an account to make the purchase and download, but I can then delete my account and keep the installers on a hard drive.
And you can delete steam and still play the games on your computer.
GOG guarantees that every game is DRM free and can be offline. Steam makes no such guarantees, and most games there will ship with some form of DRM.
No most games do not have drm. You can play most games on steam without launching steam.
I don’t even understand why you guys are trying to argue. This new law should absolutely include every game store on the Internet.
But there’s no installer, so I can’t reinstall it on another device. With GOG I have an installer just like I’d have with physical media.
It doesn’t matter. GoG should still be held responsible to the law. Every game store should be.
You dont need an account to launch the game, so you own it.
Same with steam. You don’t need steam to play most of the games you buy.
