The devs would probably prefer if their work for several years wasn't thrown in the trash. It's the publishers and suits killing games.

This initiative sure would make things more complicated for the game publishers, yes.

Because they're currently not doing the bare minimum.

If they weren't so accustomed to not doing the bare minimum, maybe they would have different opinions! Just saying.

Edit: Just signed the petition. Didn't think this was necessary before because, as soon as I heard of it, Finland was already top of the list percentage wise. But I did sign it, just for the hell yeah of it.

Because most devs are just codemonkeys implementing what they're told to. This is pure manipulative propaganda from the suits who are already robbing wages from good devs.

It's not just for the hell of it!

Invalid votes will be removed when it's time for the final tally, so the initiative needs a solid buffer to still he over a million after.

There's been a talk of some people using bots to inflate the numbers in a misguided attempt to help the initiative, so every vote is still very welcome.

Also, I kinda want to see just how high Finland can go above the threshold.

Tell your friends!

But that still means an entire industry of people are going to have to change how they make things.

Companies do that all the time in response to government regulation. You like seat belts and backup cameras in your car? No sawdust in your food? Transparent pricing when buying internet access? Government regulation. None of those companies went out of business.

Whenever a large games company talks about "developer choice" you know they're referring to one of a few things:

1. Think of the shareholders!
2. Think of the rich CEO who adds zero value to the company!
3. The people don't know what they want and therefore we need to tell them exactly what they want and need!

I don't know how you could do that without staying exclusively on open source

I'm old enough that the games I'm nostalgic for are on floppy discs on my shelf, but now the games I play are downloaded and rely on whatever company keeping a server up to authenticate me

Who knows what Microsoft will do with Minecraft in 30 years

Who knows what Steam will do with the licences it's sold me

Minecraft has private servers (at least on Minecraft java) as well as their own server platform "Realms", also every client is also a server. Though the authentication system is a Microsoft account so that's likely to still be online well into the future

Fun fact a company did this with DVDs back in the day, once you broke the seal on it the air would react with a coating on the disk which would become increasingly dark until it became unreadable.

So just don't let them join/kick them from your server?

I think providing human rights to it's citizens is definitely more important, not sure if it is necessarily the primary one though.

But you are not buying a game, you are renting it.

I absolutely agree that companies shouldn't be able to say they're selling you a game. They should make it 100% clear that you are renting it.

I'm also onboard with requiring p2p/LAN functionality for multiplayer.

Before you can do that, you need to determine whether someone is cheating. This is the purpose of anti-cheat software.

What you're referring to is deterrence, and it doesn't apply to online gaming the way it does to theft of property. One cheater doesn't ruin the game for one other person, they ruin the game for dozens or hundreds of other players.

Why are you comparing theft to game hacking out of nowhere? Did you accidentally reply to the wrong person?

And the efficacy being so bad...

Source?

full access to the system itself.

What do you mean by system in "full access to the system"? Too vague to even say anything about.

And the guys writing the cheat software just have to put in the effort once to defeat the anti-cheat and then they sell it to people who install it like any other software. The cheaters who use the cheats have it easy.

The potential guys that can write the cheat software and how quickly it can be developed is the part that matters. Much like when it's easy to use an exploit once it's already discovered. Someone still has to discover the exploit.

Maybe so, but that's a decision they make. Surely I as customer shouldn't be taken away what i paid for because of that? And if so they should have mentioned clearly upon sale that they would take away my product after 3-4 years (though maybe that's the case in those dense ToS?) . Everything else should be considered illegal and fraudulent if they planned/knew it from the start. Which is the case if it's a licensing issue

Besides, I'm pretty sure after those 4 years the code is outdated and they could renegotiate the license to be more open to release a binary.

This is exactly why I said:

But I think it's worth communicating that we all understand new government regulation is likely going to be a pain in the ass. We just think it's worth the pain/money.

So did many of the other big AAA devs, then they changed. You're not making any point at all. And don't get me wrong, what Larian has done is amazing, and the response from the rest of the AAA game studios is both hilarious and depressing, but sadly not surprising. Most AAA studios got big by doing good, they wouldn't have gotten that big otherwise. But then either new people came in an fucked them up or the ones already there got greedy and lost touch with reality, it's the same with many other things.

All games become subscription only in 3..2..

I don't know why these companies think they can talk their way out of this. No one is buying your BS. Just STFU.