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.
It exists partially as that 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.
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.
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 as that 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.