Dead Game News: Response from the European Commission (www.youtube.com)
from ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net to gaming@beehaw.org on 21 Jun 2024 16:31
https://slrpnk.net/post/10748433

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Kissaki@beehaw.org on 21 Jun 2024 17:47 next collapse

… any text form?

ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net on 21 Jun 2024 18:03 collapse

This is a summary from @Essence_of_Meh@lemmy.world:

TL;DW:

  • Patrick Breyer and Niklas Nienaß submitted questions to the European Commission on the topic of killing games (the latter in contact with Ross and two EU based lawyers).
  • EU won’t commit to answering whether games are goods or services.
  • EULA are probably unfair due to imbalance of rights and obligations between the parties.
  • Such terminations should be analyzed on a case-by-case basis (preferably by countries rather than EU).
  • Existing laws don’t seem to cover this issue.
  • Campaign in France seems to be gaining some traction. Case went to “the highest level where most commercial disputes submitted to DGCCRF never go”.
  • UK petition was suppose to get a revised response after the initial one was found lacking. Due to upcoming elections all petitions were closed and it might have to be resubmitted.
  • Also in UK, there’s a plan to report games killed in the last few years to the Competition and Markets Authority starting in August (CMA will get some additional power by then apparently).
  • No real news from Germany, Canada or Brazil.
  • Australian petition is over and waiting for a reply. Ross also hired a law firm to represent the issue.

This is a simplified version of simplified version.

Kissaki@beehaw.org on 21 Jun 2024 18:12 next collapse

Thank you

tal@lemmy.today on 21 Jun 2024 20:02 collapse

EU won’t commit to answering whether games are goods or services.

I think I’d have a category for both.

You can’t call an SNES cartridge a service, but similarly, you can’t call, oh, an online strip poker service a good.

I suspect that most good-games have at least some characteristics of a service (like patches) and most service-games have at least some characteristics of a good (like software that could be frozen in place).

I think that the actual problem is vendors unnecessarily converting good-games into service-games, as that gives them a route to get leverage relative to the consumer. Like, I can sell a game and then down the line start data-mining players or something. I think that whatever policy countries ultimately adopt should be aimed at discouraging that.

HawlSera@lemm.ee on 06 Jul 2024 00:24 collapse

Personally I feel like service games have an obligation to provide offline functionality ala Mega Man X Dive Offline.