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UK petition of "Require videogame publishers to keep games they have sold in a working state" just got thrown back to the Government (feddit.uk)

submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by sirico@feddit.uk to c/games@lemmy.world

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I just received this email saying that the response "did not respond directly to the request of the petition"

You recently signed the petition “Require videogame publishers to keep games they have sold in a working state”: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/659071

The Petitions Committee (the group of MPs who oversee the petitions system) has considered the Government’s response to this petition. They felt the response did not respond directly to the request of the petition. They have therefore asked the Government to provide a revised response.

When the Committee receives a revised response from the Government, we will publish this and share it with you.

Thanks, The Petitions team UK Government and Parliament

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[-] g0nz0li0@lemmy.world 22 points 6 months ago

He talks about that. I think the gist is that a lot of games that are online services could run locally, the publisher just chooses not to. That's why Ross chose the Crew 2 as his hill to die on: there's evidence that an offline does/did exist and just wasn't enabled. That's a practice that needs to be challenged.

The argument goes that a game that relies on server side technology to run in any form shouldn't be sold as a product that you can own. This needs to be reflected in the price and licensing model. That seems fair.

The big question is why TF we're at a point where a company should be allowed to sell you a product and say you own it then remove your right to use the product arbitrarily. I bet there's IP in the server side code, but having a system where a corporation's IP and ability to make money from the IP is more important that the concept of ownership is deeply fucked up.

Technology Tangents did a video where a game he bought on CD and tried to play on period-correct hardware won't run because there was DRM that called a server to check the date and to make sure it wasn't leaked early. Decades after the release, the server is gone and the game can't run, ironically, because it's so far outside of its release date. That's the kind of bullshit that absolutely shouldn't be tolerated.