[babypuncher]

It's not free if you weren't considering this when designing your game.

It's 100% free if you keep this requirement in mind when making your game in the first place.

Some publishers having to spend money today because they played with fire by eroding consumer rights seems like a worthwhile price to pay.

[brigadier132]

Is everything a right now?

[SkyBelow]

That you own what you buy? Sounds reasonable. Perhaps they should rent the software instead of selling it if they don't want to support the owning part of buying while still supporting the getting paid part.

The core problem is government granting businesses copyright, which prevents players from doing what they want with the material they buy. This is for apparently reasonable reasons, but there is some downsides to it. So it is less that we are adding another right, but more that we are specifying the right given to the business to begin with to ensure they aren't being given something that shouldn't be a right.

Ending copyright would also solve this, but with many other side effects that we probably don't want to invoke.

[horsawlarway]

I would say it's fairly well established concept that there is a doctrine of sale, and that the purchaser gains rights to the item in exchange for the sale price - notwithstanding the interests of the copyright owner.

Publishers are playing with fire by trying to undermine that doctrine for digital goods.

So if your question is in good faith (and I very much doubt it is...) then at least this has a long history of established rights.

[johnnyanmac]

Thing is you don't have a physical product, you have a license to run this software or acces this server. There is no "item" to own. It's like asking to own a spot in an amusement park. you pay for the experience, not the literal land or coasters or slides.

[rimunroe]

> Thing is you don't have a physical product, you have a license to run this software or acces this server. There is no "item" to own. It's like asking to own a spot in an amusement park. you pay for the experience, not the literal land or coasters or slides.

Again, this is the literal thing that's being debated. Companies are currently allowed to treat game sales as such and this group is arguing the law should stop them from doing so.

[toomuchtodo]

If made into laws collectively agreed upon through a political process? Yes, of course. Participation in the marketplace is voluntary. If you don't like the rules, don't sell into the marketplace, it's as simple as that. Consumers are entitled to protections, businesses are not entitled to revenue nor profits. Policy implementation timelines allows time for business to adapt to the new landscape, but they can also opt out of this market if they don't believe they can pass this cost along to their customers.

[rimunroe]

Many people (myself included) argue that this is a part of consumer rights ...hence the legislation we're discussing. You might disagree with it, but you can't pretend that a lot of people don't believe a company shouldn't be able to disable a game they already "sold" to you.

[brigadier132]

A lot of people thinking something isn't a good argument. Unless stated by the law your rights are what you agreed to when signing the terms of service for the game. Stop acting like people were duped when servers were shut off for a game that doesn't get played.

Right now when you play games online you don't pay for dedicated servers (which are very expensive), with this law expect that to change. Expect to also have to pay for a team of software engineers to manage the games into eternity.

[rimunroe]

> A lot of people thinking something isn't a good argument.

I don't think you can get to a much more foundational definition of democracy than "decisions are made because a lot of people agree they should". You might disagree with the results, but it's an excellent argument for something becoming law.

> Unless stated by the law your rights are what you agreed to when signing the terms of service for the game.

Laws make contract provisions unenforceable all the time. This is not a new thing, and I have a hard time imagining the effect of laws if you couldn't invalidate agreements with them.

> Stop acting like people were duped when servers were shut off for a game that doesn't get played.

But people do feel like they got duped when that happens. That's why people get upset. You might disagree with it, but just saying "don't feel that way" isn't a good argument. Why shouldn't I feel that way? It's how games worked in the past. Games that have been shut down in the past and rendered unplayable have been made playable by fans before. Why shouldn't we expect companies the companies who made them to make an effort to do so as well?

> Right now when you play games online you don't pay for dedicated servers (which are very expensive), with this law expect that to change. Expect to also have to pay for a team of software engineers to manage the games into eternity.

I'm not entirely clear why you're taking this as a given, but I trust you'll elaborate. But humoring your (I suspect flawed) premise: personally I think it would be great if we went back to player-run dedicated servers. Some of the games I've played the most lately (Valheim, Minecraft, V Rising) are ones I've rented dedicated servers for. Hosting dedicated servers these days is extremely easy and quite cheap. Further on this tangent: I think we've lost a lot of online community because most games pour everyone into the same matchmaking buckets. This means you don't get as many small communities centered around specific servers popping up like you did back in the late 90s or early 2000s.

> Expect to also have to pay for a team of software engineers to manage the games into eternity.

Could you explain which part of the legislation requires this?

[brigadier132]

> Democracies literally function via consent of the people.

Do I really need explain why the majority thinking something is good does not make it good? Look-up tyranny of the majority.

Obviously the vast majority of people are consumers and create nothing so it's naturally good that we just leech off creators to the largest extent possible since they are a smaller group.

I am always biased in favor of people that create. They are a smaller group but vastly more important.

[rimunroe]

> Do I really need explain why the majority thinking something is good does not make it good? Look-up tyranny of the majority.

No, of course not, but if you look at what I wrote you'll note that I did not say that. Majority is obviously a terrible way to decide what's morally/ethically right. Within a democratic system though, it is the way we decide what rights to grant people.

> I am always biased in favor of people that create. They are a smaller group but vastly more important.

I'm glad you point out your bias. I don't know why people who "create" (this seems to have a specific meaning for you) would be more important than anyone else. How far does this bias lean? If Blizzard updates their user agreement and sneak a clause in there where I agree to give away my house if the other party asks for it, am I wrong to think that shouldn't be enforceable?

[triceratops]

Property ownership has been a right for quite a while now, actually.

[johnnyanmac]

we don't buy property when we buy a multiplayer game. Not unless you are fine going back to couch co-op.

[triceratops]

Why can't the single player functionality continue working indefinitely?

And maybe we can also mandate that companies release detailed server specifications when they turn down a game. Everything that might be needed for someone to rewrite the server. Then someone else might step into a breach - a different company, an open source project - and continue providing the service.

[rimunroe]

> we don't buy property when we buy a multiplayer game. Not unless you are fine going back to couch co-op.

Again, you're taking as a given one of the things which some people want to change. Why shouldn't the developers of the newest matchmaking-based shooter be required to release the binary for a dedicated server when they shut the game down? Obviously this won't be feasible for some games, but I can imagine plenty of games where it seems like it should be reasonable to factor it into development costs.