It’s amazing what a difference a little bit of time can make: Two years after kicking off what looked to be a long-shot campaign to push back on the practice of shutting down server-dependent videogames once they’re no longer profitable, Stop Killing Games founder Ross Scott and organizer Moritz Katzner appeared in front of the European Parliament to present their case—and it seemed to go very well.
Digital Fairness Act: https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-say/initiatives/14622-Digital-Fairness-Act/F33096034_en
I’m not going to play perfect analogies hunter with you.
The point is, it’s human to preserve interesting things, and it’s corporate to thoughtlessly destroy.
The whole purpose of laws is to keep corporations in check without physically cutting the heads off of the parasites that run them.
We keep forgetting that. (But it’s not my head, so maybe I shouldn’t keep bothering to talk about it.)
Anyway, disused game server code can (and should) be shared after it is no longer profitable, rather than being speculatively bought and sold in a phantom portfolio before being accidentally lost.
And companies that want to make a big deal about how their server code is sacred magic - can just keep running the servers, to prove they aren’t just bullshitting.