"Champions" of preservation GOG wont promote the STOP KILLING GAME campaign...

[_oBSOLEte_]

Hey there! If you are interested by videogame preservation and consumer rights in general you might have already heard about the "Stop Killing Game" initiative. This movement was brought by retrogamer/youtuber Ross "Accursed Farm" Scott. Today they announce they got denied promotion by GOG after nearly a year of discussions.

Spoiler: A bit of context :

"Stop Killing Games" is a consumer movement started to challenge the legality of publishers destroying video games they have sold to customers. An increasing number of video games are sold effectively as goods - with no stated expiration date - but designed to be completely unplayable as soon as support from the publisher ends. This practice is a form of planned obsolescence and is not only detrimental to customers, but makes preservation effectively impossible. Furthermore, the legality of this practice is largely untested in many countries.

The main piece of the campaign has taken the form of an European citizen initiative. It's a system specific of the European Union aiming to develop new laws by means of a petition, and their goal is to have one million electronic signatures (via European ID cards) so that the EU parliament start working on some new consumer laws to solve the problem. They're halfway there.

In his last vlog Ross gets in the details of the campaign updates and the work they're doing to contact influencers, sponsors and promoters. It's interesting to hear his piece and get some insight about how difficult it is to get some traction when the industry rooted itself with a massive network of influencer's partnerships. After one year long of negotiation with GOG representatives, while they showed interests at first to promote the movement in their newsletters (reaching millions of users worlwide), Ross's correspondent there got fired and GOG now decided it would be bad for their business.

So what's your opinion on this? Were you ever affected by forced game obsolescence? Are you interested by "Stop Killing Games"? Dont you find ironic that GOG spend so much time on marketing themselves as the new "champions" of videogame preservation, but turned their back on the campaign? Are we witnessing a big enshitification of that service, now that they announce just going to cater for a few hundred good ol'games they can still profit of, while destroying more and more abandonware sources?

Have you signed the initiative yourself?

 

[Nebulon_Galaxy]

If it doesn't give GOG money than what's the point? They are in it for the money not for anything else. Marketing at its finest.

 

[Ikagura]

Most petitions are useless sadly. One million people is nothing in a world scale.

 

[Hourai]

Would be nice if the petition did anything, but I have my doubts it will.

Anyway, I try to avoid live service games. Haven't quite succeeded going by my Runescape and Gayblue Fantasy playtimes, but those aren't dead yet. I also play Sonic Runners Revival. I don't get how people can spend money on those kinds of games, though. They're practically telling you that it's a waste of money by placing a clock above it and hiding how long it has to tick down.

 

[Ikagura]

Would be nice if the petition did anything, but I have my doubts it will.

The Union won't be interested in it sadly...

Anyway, I try to avoid live service games. Haven't quite succeeded going by my Runescape and Gayblue Fantasy playtimes, but those aren't dead yet. I also play Sonic Runners Revival. I don't get how people can spend money on those kinds of games, though. They're practically telling you that it's a waste of money by placing a clock above it and hiding how long it has to tick down.

And when a company shuts down who would pay to make the servers still online?

 

[Hourai]

And when a company shuts down who would pay to make the servers still online?

I don't see why it should be online. There are offline versions of once-always online games. As for companies who shut down, I don't know. I have no idea how game development works. That doesn't mean that I don't recognize it as a problem that should be fixed, or that I should pretend it isn't a problem because I'm ignorant of how these things are made.

 

[_oBSOLEte_]

If it doesn't give GOG money than what's the point? They are in it for the money not for anything else. Marketing at its finest.

I thought it was funny to talk about the irony. Their whole marketing nowadays is based on their "preservation" program after all. Is it false advertisement?

Their sunday spam mail could easily reach the million users needed for the law to get voted.

Post automatically merged: Yesterday at 8:56 PM

Would be nice if the petition did anything, but I have my doubts it will.

Anyway, I try to avoid live service games. Haven't quite succeeded going by my Runescape and Gayblue Fantasy playtimes, but those aren't dead yet. I also play Sonic Runners Revival. I don't get how people can spend money on those kinds of games, though. They're practically telling you that it's a waste of money by placing a clock above it and hiding how long it has to tick down.

It not a petition, it's an EU citizen initiative. Like a referendum but on a smaller scale for public interests, and votes are done via electronic signatures.

The planned obsolescence extend beyond live service games. It affects any kind of game that just require to phone home to activate for DRM.

 

[RageBurner]

Their marketing pushes preservation because it makes them look good. A good image means more sales.

 

[_oBSOLEte_]

Their marketing pushes preservation because it makes them look good. A good image means more sales.

Is it just for the pose? Or is preservation a real concern for today users, to the point it could affect their purchase decisions?

I wonder really.

 

[moonbits]

did you watch the video because he does say that GOG does support it, they even mentioned it in their own video. They just couldn't agree on using their newsletter to share the initiative.

 

[Cantarella]

You should say what you actually think instead of asking a bunch of leading questions.

It sucks that things fell through and that Ross made a statement bc he believed there would be more official support from them. He seems like a cool guy. But I don't feel like speculating on what GoG's motives are. There could be any number of things going on on their end or legitimate reasons as to why they felt they couldn't go further with this.

 

[garnavis]

While GOG does seem to support it, explicitly promoting the campaign would probably hurt their business relationships. For example, they have some kind of partnership with Amazon Luna, a cloud gaming service, and you know Amazon wants to be able to kill games. (Luna may well go the way of Stadia and OnLive, and they don't want to be on the hook for keeping all that shit running.) But that's just one of many possible reasons for their decision.

As for who's responsible for keeping online games online, I've been thinking it would be a good solution to, once they shut the game down, make the source code for their server software available with a non-commercial license that retains the creator's commercial rights. Then they get to wipe their hands of the whole thing without being responsible for "killing" the game, and they can still spin up their servers again if they want to do some kind of revival.

 

[Ikagura]

I've been thinking it would be a good solution to, once they shut the game down, make the source code for their server software available with a non-commercial license that retains the creator's commercial rights.

This makes sense. I mean a private server making money on a dead game would be as bad if not worse than killing it;

 

[Raziya The Seeker]

As for who's responsible for keeping online games online, I've been thinking it would be a good solution to, once they shut the game down, make the source code for their server software available with a non-commercial license that retains the creator's commercial rights. Then they get to wipe their hands of the whole thing without being responsible for "killing" the game, and they can still spin up their servers again if they want to do some kind of revival.

I agree with this notion. Some defunct MMOs have fan servers made for them in a similar light -- ToonTown, Earth Eternal (last I checked) and a quarter-assed attempt for the original GraalOnline (Graalians doesn't even deserve the full half of an ass, so to speak). This seems excellent for dedicated fanbases to keep their game going, and even gives a company an out when it's time to pull the plug.

 

[_oBSOLEte_]

did you watch the video because he does say that GOG does support it, they even mentioned it in their own video. They just couldn't agree on using their newsletter to share the initiative.

Did you read my post?

It was not about "supporting". It was about promoting it like they said they initially would. Like in any company, there will always be a part of the workforce willing to "support" literally anything. And then there's actual actions, or here, the lack thereof.

I think this whole "preservation" marketing is bullshit for gullible nostalgics and it's only one more proof on the pile. But If you don't see an issue with that that's OK really.

 

[Waffles's iconWaffles]

I interviewed Ross a few years back.

He's a genuinely cool dude with immense passion for his craft and someone whom I deeply believe to be the right person to be leading the charge here... But it's just too bad that the average consumer couldn't be bothered to sign an online petition.

We didn't ask for much, just 1M signatures... Out of a whole continent! If people are gonna be that lazy, then they truly deserve to be steamrolled by the industry and their paid (and, infinitely more grave, UNPAID) goons that did nothing but to launch smearing campaign after smearing campaign against the initiative AND its leader.

 

[_oBSOLEte_]

I interviewed Ross a few years back.

He's a genuinely cool dude with immense passion for his craft and someone whom I deeply believe to be the right person to be leading the charge here... But it's just too bad that the average consumer couldn't be bothered to sign an online petition.

We didn't ask for much, just 1M signatures... Out of a whole continent! If people are gonna be that lazy, then they truly deserve to be steamrolled by the industry and their paid (and, infinitely more grave, UNPAID) goons that did nothing but to launch smearing campaign after smearing campaign against the initiative AND its leader.

I think a big issue is also the current euro-scepticism (that I share, ironically). IME a good portion of the french speaking retrogaming influencers have a far right wing public, specially in France were nationalists have for long used Youtube influencers to promote themselves after being soft-banned from mainstream medias.

When they're not affiliate to Ubisoft, it's the nationalist party... Eurosceptics by trade, it would be out of character for them to start talking about consumer rights and citizen initiatives.

 

[mistymermaid]

To be honest, live service games are a bit outside GOG's territory.

 

[Strategist's iconStrategist]

Unfortunately, a petition isn't going to do much, at least from what I've seen of politics in the United States. The public has no power against the special interests and the tech lobbies. Maybe in Europe it is different. The real way to elicit change is to speak with your money. Refuse to buy games with invasive DRM or always online features. Talk with your gamer friends about these issues and educate them about preservation. Support places like GOG that sell products with no DRM.

 

[Waffles's iconWaffles]

The real way to elicit change is to speak with your money. Refuse to buy games with invasive DRM or always online features. Talk with your gamer friends about these issues and educate them about preservation. Support places like GOG that sell products with no DRM.

I couldn't agree more.

But unfortunately... "Voting with your wallet" has always resulted in failure, mostly because we ain't winning an attrition war against companies that can afford to buy a Ferrari to their presidents each month or to pay juicy severance packages to employees laid off for BS reasons before they take them to court.

 

[_oBSOLEte_]

Unfortunately, a petition isn't going to do much, at least from what I've seen of politics in the United States. The public has no power against the special interests and the tech lobbies. Maybe in Europe it is different. The real way to elicit change is to speak with your money. Refuse to buy games with invasive DRM or always online features. Talk with your gamer friends about these issues and educate them about preservation. Support places like GOG that sell products with no DRM.

It not a petition, it's an EU citizen initiative. Like a referendum but on a smaller scale for public interests, and votes are done via electronic signatures.

Also, GOG does not sell "products with no DRM". They sell products that got cracked by pirates, and their DRM *removed*. If they could make a buck putting them back in, they would. Just like they managed to remove the same ISOs from the abandonware sites.

 

[Strategist's iconStrategist]

It not a petition, it's an EU citizen initiative. Like a referendum but on a smaller scale for public interests, and votes are done via electronic signatures.

Also, GOG does not sell "products with no DRM". They sell products that got cracked by pirates, and their DRM *removed*. If they could make a buck putting them back in, they would. Just like they managed to remove the same ISOs from the abandonware sites.

Why would they put DRM back in the games? That makes no sense. To say that they don't lose money by having this policy is ridiculous. I'm sure there are games with DRM that sell well and they lose money by refusing to sell them.