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Because that’s what it is. I think some of it might have to do with the limited content of the petition itself (a pretty short description about “customers being robbed” without any broader ideas suggested by the campaign) and some with the fact they get plenty of petitions so the first reaction is to stick with what’s already there. That’s my guess at least.

I hope that if this petition reached 100k signatures and went to a parliamentary hearing there could be a chance for a more nuanced presentation of the topic but who knows, maybe I’m just being naive.

It’s the question of both though - sure, game preservation aspect is important but it would also be nice for the law to catch up to technology and decide whether companies should have the right to remove your ability to use the product you bought.

If the law would go through in the way envisioned by the campaign, games should be designed and developed in a way that releasing a patch/server software should be possible even for a company at the verge of closing. We’re not talking about creating these releases at the last moment but baking their creation into the development process from the start.

At the end of the day all the possible solutions proposed by the campaign are just ideas to give lawmakers some kind of starting point. If this goes anywhere it’ll be debated and decided upon by people with far more law and customer protection knowledge than anyone involved in the campaign itself. The important part right now is to bring the issue to someone willing to look into it.

Fair enough. My experience is mostly tied to companies where even shutting down would be run through a process of sunsetting all projects and tying up as many loose ends as possible before that so my perspective might be a bit skewed.

I can see this being an issue for a small or indie developer but something like Embracer Group shouldn’t have any leeway in that regard - they could absolutely afford keeping a studio (at least a skeleton crew) long enough to release a single server package/patch.

Just so we’re clear, this is not my petition. It’s related to the Stop Killing Games campaign mentioned in the post description, though it was slightly modified by the author (one of the volunteers helping with the campaign).

I’m not sure I follow your example.

First things first - companies don’t poof out of existence suddenly. Secondly, the whole reason behind the end-of-life proposal is for devs/publishers to have a ready and easy to execute plan in case of ending the official support (whether it’s closing the developer run servers or closure of the company). The whole idea is that something like that would be planned and prepared for during the development.

This specific petition was broadened to involve all software rather than just games which is why it mentions pinging home instead of focusing on multiplayer servers.

The general idea of the campaign as a whole is to force publishers to create software with a specific end-of-life plan that would include one of the few possible options:

• relase the server software to allow players host them themselves
• patch the game to not require company’s server (even if not all features would be functional)
• allow people to create their own servers after official ones are dead (think private MMO servers)

Any of those options would come into effect only when the official support for the game were to end.

How exactly would that increase the risk of creating multiplayer games? Private server hosting was a thing for years and the only reason we’re here now is because publishers decided they should be the only ones allowed to do it.

For clarity I’d also like to add this post by Ross who mentioned petition being “hijacked” to increase the scope to all software instead of just games. He still asks to sign it if you’re Australian.

Additionally, few Aussie users replied that this broadening might actually be a good thing due to the Australia law. Can’t say anything about that myself but seems reasonable.

Here are the few I’m familiar with:

• Anodyne - tried it few years ago and it seemed pretty decent, need to go back to it eventually.
• Coffee Talk - still in my backlog but looks like a coffee version of VA-11 Hall-A. Nice art style, saw positive opinions about it.
• They Bleed Pixels - fun but challenging platformer with lots of bloody combat.
• Wandersong - got pretty famous for a while. Haven’t played it myself but what I saw seemed like a great little title.

Happens to the best of us.

Here’s the campaign website with links and instructions for each region.

Just finished Drakengard 3 and feeling empty - both because the final boss fight took me 4 days to beat and because, despite many issues I have with the game, ending still managed to hit pretty hard. I love this shitty game.

On the contrary, the last few years were pretty much fully focused on Squadron, with SC being maintained by (almost a) skeleton crew - hence the slow updates.

Now updates are seemingly picking up, though it’s early to say for sure since we only got one quarterly patch so far, with next one probably targeting April-May (depending how porting some of new additions goes).

I absolutely agree with this point. I think CIG’s inability to openly communicate when things go bad is a big reason for the scam allegation (that and loooooots of issues with planning, especially early on). I see it’s as a serious problem for a project that presents itself as “open development” (which it is, don’t take me wrong, but not as much as it should be).

I think both CIG and players underestimated how long it takes to build a company, tech and two big budget games at the same time. It’s 100% on the devs to realize and communicate that, which they failed to do.

For better or worse, S42 is officially in its final stretch. Is it really? Transfer of people towards SC seems to confirm that but we’ll see when the game finally releases. When that happens we’ll also see whether game taking this long was worth it.

For those wondering about why such basic features are mentioned here it’s because work on Squadron 42 (single player part of the project) moved to the polishing stage and everything created for it is being ported back to Star Citizen (multi player part).

Is it worth an article? It is if you’re interested in the game, I guess?

Is SC a perfect project? Of course not, far from it. I do find it interesting however how… angry it makes people and how much they want it to fail. Yeah, I know $1000+ packages and so forth (not needed if you just want to play the game btw).

For those interested in actually checking for themselves whether it’s a scam or not, there are free flight events multiple times a year - you get to see the current state of the game with everything good and bad it entails. Surprisingly enough, they tend to bring in more players every single time.

Tim partially retreads the stuff that was already mentioned by various people in the industry (including Gabe Newell) but it’s by no means a bad thing - especially since he adds some personal stuff as well.

If anyone is interested in game design and history of the industry Tim’s channel is a great watch in general. There’s lots of cool stories and tips for aspiring devs.

According to this tweet by the dev game will also be available on mobile (albeit after the PC release).

Damn, that’s a good chunk of info! Thanks for taking the time to go into details on how things work.

Thanks for the links, that’s exactly why I wasn’t sure where things stand currently. While I am familiar with EFF, I wasn’t aware of that article so it was an interesting read.

The one I kind of remembered (even though only partially) was the Reuters article, which contains this quote I was referring to:

The office reiterated Wednesday that copyright protection depends on the amount of human creativity involved, and that the most popular AI systems likely do not create copyrightable work.

It’s obviously a bit more complicated than how I mentioned it initially so I’m glad I could read it again.

The original ban was always meant to be temporary as far as I understand, Valve simply wanted some time to decide rather than make a rash decision (it’s easier to open the floodgates than it is to clean up after the fact). I’m sure things will change in the future as AI tools become more and more common anyway.

I’d like to mention that I’m not exactly up to date with AI related legislation so treat what I’m about to write as a genuine attempt to understand their worries rather than trying to be smart.

I remember there being a lot of uncertainty about the legality of what and how can('t) be used in training models (especially when used for commercial purposes) - has that been settled in any way? I think there was also a case of not being able to copyright AI generated content due to lack of human authorship (I’d have to look for an article on this one as it’s been a while) - this obviously won’t be a problem if generated assets are used as a base to be worked upon.

As for illegal content - Valve mentioned it in regards to live-generated stuff. I assume they’re worried about possibility of plagiarism and things going against their ToS, which is why they ask about guardrails used in such systems. On a more general note, there were also cases of AI articles coming up with fake stories with accusations of criminal behavior involving real people - this probably won’t be a problem with AI usage in games (I hope anyway) but it’s another sensitive topic devs using such tools have to keep in mind.

Again, I’m nowhere near knowledgeable enough to write this stuff from a position of confidence so feel free to correct me if any of this has been dealt with.

Is it really dumb?

AI generated content has a lot of unanswered legal questions around it which can lead to a lot of headache with moderation and possibility of illegal content showing up (remember that not only “well meaning” devs will use these tools). It’s seems reasonable for a company to try minimize the risk.

As for disclaimer, it will allow people make an informed decision - not sure what’s wrong with that.