Ross's ideas towards this initiative are filled with naïveté and thinking so lacking for correlation that he may as well ask for a unicorn; nearly so magical as granting me the status of King of Sweden and equally unlikely to happen; even if it could, the circumstances are just that unlikely.

The core of the idea is appealing, but the execution, solution, and onus are backwards; classic carriage before even building the train.

If he wants a game that looks and does what The Crew did but have it live forever, he should band together a crew of people to do what the FlightGear team have been doing for the last 27 years for Flight Simulation: Painstakingly make it.

And he wouldn't even have to start from scratch thanks to things like Rigs of Rods, TORCS (or Forks), Vdrift, Super Tux Kart, whatever he wants! There's assets, engines, and more for whatever suits his ideas; reality can be whatever he wants if he wishes to become the artisan instead of the plebeian.

Also that weird Pitfall game with the source code stuck in a bank lock box. There's a game that needs preservation.

Well, again, the point is GOG's entire gimmick is that they're DRM-free. It's their lifeline, take it away and they die. Ross, the dude who made the initiative, says it's reasonable to keep the DRM as long as the game is supported, or that his petition would do absolutely nothing to the game while it's still being supported, companies can do whatever they want. (Kudos to AB2012 for timestamps)

Think about how it would look like when someone scrutinizes GOG's association with Stop Killing Games and then realize the initiative's front man is if not Pro-DRM then DRM-Neutral as long as it doesn't bother him (for example, when the servers actually shut down)......

For someone like me to go "GOG BAD" over their reluctance to align with this initiative, Ross has to admit that the issue at hand isn't that developers and publishers throw away the key to the lock after they're done. It's that the lock exists in the first place. But he hasn't. He said it's fine, a statement that runs counter to GOG's lifeline. Ironically, if they chose to align with Ross in this case, I'm more likely to go "GOG BAD."

"But once its shut down, then this is the equivalent of locking things up and throwing away the key."

I'm not being funny but that attitude towards DRM-Free gamers (people who take Game Preservation more seriously than most) is probably why support fell flat. There are positive ways of answering people's questions / addressing entirely valid concerns that this movement is serious about changing the law and not just an angry The Crew fanbase, and the above ain't it.

I posted this last night highlighting the legal challenges involved in changing IP / contract law, etc, if you actually want governments to force businesses to give away IP (eg, force server-side source code to be published) that's a huge legal can of worms and has massive ramifications in general (far outside gaming). Instead of responding you just post meme's and cheap shots? And it's everyone else whose "toxic" and "precious"...

Calm down. Take a few deep breaths. Stop being so angry. And try and simply answer the questions - HOW would you go about forcing software companies to open-source their games against their will without massive changes in IP law? HOW would you go about banning things like time-limited licensed content (cars, sports teams, etc) or "I know I agreed when I signed up to Steam / Ubisoft that's a service but I don't want that bit to count" without massive changes in contract law? These are serious grown-up questions that will be the very first things the same governments you want to "get involved" will ask you. If you can't handle people in forums asking entirely valid questions / pointing out obvious contradictions without flying off the rails, that meeting will be over as soon as it starts.

I'm Ross (the guy mentioned here doing the Stop Killing Games campaign). Since I referred to our dealings with GOG recently, I thought I should maybe clarify some things here. I can't promise I'll be able to keep up with all replies, but I saw a few things worth responding to.

First off, there have been two main arms of the campaign:

1. Making complaints to consumer protection agencies on "The Crew" as a test case for remotely disabling games that have been sold in general since there is a large legal grey area on this practice in multiple countries. It's not really about The Crew specifically, but hundreds of games being destroyed in a similar fashion. The Crew was just a target of convenience, since its shutdown had multiple characteristics making it ideal for getting the attention of regulatory bodies. This action is now fully underway and had nothing to do with the GOG promotion

2. Proposing new law to various governments addressing the problem of video game destruction, the largest being the European Citizens' Initiative:
https://eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home
This is what we was discussed about GOG mentioning. It's entirely separate from our other action and doesn't target any specific company. Additionally, my name, nor "stop killing games" is mentioned anywhere in it. While I'm of course a large promoter of it, I'm literally ineligible to have any authority over this.

The initiative is not retroactive. This would primarily be applying to new games being made in the future. Existing games could either end sales before the law went into effect or possibly be grandfathered in, in which case no one would have to alter anything out prior to then. It would mean future games would need to be designed with an end of life plan however. Speaking of finite shelf life, the fact that customers are given no time frame how long that shelf life is at the time of purchase when that functionality is 100% in the control of the publishers is part of the reason this part of consumer law has some teeth. The only games that are likely unassailable like that are ones like World of Warcraft, where they specify exactly when access ends at the time of purchase. About 99% of online-only games do not do that.

I'd like to emphasize again that the European Citizens' Initiative does not target The Crew at all. Even if it passed, it would not save The Crew because it's not retroactive.

Different people will have different interpretations of game preservation. It's fair to say this initiative doesn't preserve games in itself. What it would do is prevent making it IMPOSSIBLE to preserve games, that's a key distinction. Preservation can take a lot of work, but if you find an old Commodore 64 game or DOS game, it's POSSIBLE to preserve it. The game would be preserved in the sense it would have to be functional effectively without DRM at the time of shutdown, but you're correct that it would not preserve games beyond that; it would be up the community at that point, the way it is already with most old titles.

Regarding the time frame, again, the initiative would require end-of-life plans, which means any sane developer would do this during the development phase at the start, exactly as you're mandating for.

Also I wouldn't say I'm "perfectly happy" with DRM, of course I'd rather it not be there at all. However, my ONLY goal in this campaign is I want games to stop being destroyed, full stop. Publishers care a great deal about DRM since it can prevent piracy (The Crew was NEVER pirated, as an example) which they perceive as lost sales. Regardless of how accurate it is or not, the industry cares DEEPLY about this, so I'm trying to thread the needle of making this as light a regulation as possible AND still stop games from being destroyed. It's worth remembering right now we have NO consumer rights in regards to being allowed to keep your game. Getting a foothold like this is hell enough already. Trying to eliminate DRM in the entire industry all in one step strikes me as effectively impossible. If you wish DRM to be gone one day, having this pass would absolutely be a valuable foothold to build upon.

If this passes, you WOULD have a backup for every game you buy essentially, but not until support ended for publishers that chose to run DRM throughout its entire lifespan. Of course that's not as good as something like GOG selling DRM-free, but again, my ONLY focus is to stop games from being destroyed outright. I can live with compromises if it means that goal is achieved. I think it's unfair to characterize us as dishonest as I made a 40 minute video (timestamped with questions) trying to answer every question people had on this a while back. I've tried to be transparent about everything with this campaign.

Well we've actually achieved 2 things:
1. Getting this issue brought before consumer agencies in France, Germany, and Australia to get clear answers as to whether this practice is even legal or not. Again, it's a grey area in the law that isn't clearly defined.
2. While we never expected this or asked for it, Ubisoft has committed to adding offline modes to The Crew 2 and The Crew Motorfest in response to the campaign. So, we've incidentally saved 2 games.

As for someone wanting to buy a game with a short shelf-life, the problem is customers are buying a game with a completely unknown shelf life. "The Culling 2" lasted for 8 days before shutdown. "Guild Wars" has been going for over 20 years. Both were one-time purchases. There are no standards in the industry at all on lifespan, so customers are making a complete gamble with how long it will last. This evades protections present in both goods AND services and could be a violation of statutory consumer law in some countries.

This is exactly what the initiative is asking for, it just wouldn't go into effect until support ended. I realize that's not as good as from the time of purchase, but that distinction is likely worth billions to the industry and would trip over many additional laws trying to implement.

[I was going to reply to a few more, but the GOG forum simply won't let me post it, some sort of bug I guess. Maybe I can later.]

It depends a bit on what you mean. What you do as a private individual in your own home is one thing.

However, even if a developer and publisher (in other words, the license holder) that originally owned the license has gone out of business, that doesn't mean the license no longer exists. A license is a form of property, and when a company closes, that property is typically transferred or inherited by someone else. So someone will always old the license, even if we, or even them thmselves, do not know it. The only ways a license becomes freely available to the public are if it expires or if the license holder explicitly releases it into the public domain.

Therefore, even if the license holder is no longer in business or unknown, cracking and using the software without permission is still considered piracy under the law. That’s why companies like GOG cannot legally distribute such software.

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So, what’s the result of point 1 so far? And how are all those petitions going? I know it reached the UK Parliament, where it was quickly dismissed - just as I predicted. When it comes to getting clarity on ownership of digital goods, that is something that has been going on for much longer than your campaign.

As for point 2, I believe that’s more of a reaction to the lawsuit brought against Ubisoft in California, rather than the result of your campaign. Even if they win that case, it serves as a form of protection to prevent something similar from happening again. That’s the kind of action that has a more meaningful impact..

I’ve always believed that people have the right to make foolish choices if they want to. I lean a bit libertarian, and if someone wants to gamble on buying a game that only lasts three days, that’s entirely their decision. It’s not something that should be dictated or enshrined in law. I’ve always felt that legislating leisure and art is a generally a bad idea.

I think we all know deep-down that DRM isn't going away, but at the same time it also wasn't that long ago when the gaming community actually had a backbone and pushed back hard against SecuROM PA (online activation limits) in the late 2000's during the time-frame it mattered. In the end, it was so unpopular that only approx 100 games out of +100,000 (0.1%) ever made used it with many studios backtracking on their plan to use it (and many titles that did use quickly re-released without it). Fast forward a decade and that Gamers have turned so completely soft in the 2010's clapping & cheering on first Denuvo then always-online single-player modes, then Ring 0 anti-cheat "Sony Rootkit 2.0", etc - that seriously unhealthy unnecessary online-dependency normalization mixed in with large-scale complacency / apathy is exactly what's really been killing newer game preservability.

An awful lot of people commenting on these initiative videos though, seem to think the whole thing is some "magic beans" solution to continue to buy quadruple-DRM'd, always online games then coast along in a new state of complacency thinking "some lawyer" will make everything playable forever as some substitute for pushing to have less DRM in them / actually preserving them. Gamers need to start being realistic and admit "offline-friendly" modes realistically need to be in large, complex games from the start / design & development phase and in many cases simply can't 'just' be tacked on 15 years down the line, post end-of-support regardless of legalese as the work required to make such large, complex always-online by design games run offline is increasingly exponentially greater today than simply applying a 1KB NoCD patch to an old CD-ROM game that it's not even in the same ballpark. In theory, this initiative is pushing for that but in practise, there's a real concern many studios may respond by making always-online games, streaming-only leaving many "I don't care about DRM" gamers in for a rude awakening down the line.

I also think some things need clarifying better. Example this screenshot, points 2 & 3 on the right seem contradictory. MicroTransactions by design are in-game purchases that rely on DRM checks to an ongoing connection to the publisher (they obviously have to have ongoing access an online to account that has a record of what DLC / MT content was purchased by whom in order to know what to unlock per user). No matter how the initiative frames it, that stuff will realistically never be preservable or DRM-Free due to how it works on a technical level. If there's no connection to the publisher, you won't know who has bought what. The publisher can't give out databases of financial / purchase records to modders to use on open source servers (Data Protection Acts), and modders can't just mass unlock all content for everyone including stuff they didn't pay for (piracy). The only option is the base game may have some Offline Mode but is missing all the DLC / MT content. In a realistic sense, even if you manage to get an offline mode contingency put into a base game, a lot of MT's will die with the online servers by nature of how MT's work. Same with mobile games that don't work with Airplane Mode on because they need to go online to check your Google Play account for how many 'coins' you've spent and unlock related content, realistically such games are Disposable by Design.

I think an enormous amount of faith is required to believe "you WOULD have a backup for every game you buy" when an Offline Mode that removes the need for a game specific server, but still requires an online client to start isn't really a "backup" of a game in any meaningful sense. Example - The Crew 2's "offline mode" sounds like the game will work post The Crew 2 server specific shutdown but will still require the Ubisoft client running, do a DRM check on every game start, and the game would still be rendered unplayable in the event Ubisoft themselves shutdown due to failed DRM checks. As you said "different people will have different interpretations of game preservation" but no-one would regard encrypted WMA files that require Zune Marketplace stay around forever to unlock as a "backed up / preserved music collection" just because a secondary additional former need for each album to require its own specific server was removed...

They were defeated by Heineken? That's funny. Did they drink too much?


As for: Ross clearly explained this in his podcast on youtube. ... yea. Sure. "IT IS TRUE BECAUSE SOMEONE SAID SO ON THE INTERNET!!11!11!1" ... A classic! :-)

Anything longer than a couple sentences that I write here gets stalled out. I can say that pastebin link addresses your points here. Small additions:
-If a game was marketed with online multiplayer, offline mode wouldn't be good enough, it would need to be adapted to have private server functional at EOL like Knockout City did.
-I explain the microtransaction solutions in the pastebin post. Battleforge literally did one of these, minus the actual EOL part.
-The initiative says "without a connection to the publisher or affiliated parties". So if the EOL build still requires a connection to an online server, it wouldn't meet the requirement. It would have to actually be a functional backup.

For me it's actually plain simple.

GOG can and should support initiatives that want to make games DRM-Free.

GOG, however, should not support initiatives that do not mind to have DRM in games. This is simply because DRM is a ticking time bomb that WILL make the game unplayable some time in the future. In short - Allowing DRM is completely against the whole concept of game preservation. A game with DRM in it cannot be preserved - Period!

So no. I do not think GOG has done anything to be ashamed of. As long as a initiative allows the existence of DRM it goes straight against the whole purpose of GOG. So logically GOG cannot and should not support such a initiative.

Just my two cents on the whole case...

Recently, I had to resurrect a game (built on UE4) with a help of one wrestler. The game didn't want to launch and was showing a Fatal Error message, because it forces to launch online services before starting the executable. The online services are long gone, but the exe file is still connected with them. Just passing by to share my current shitty experience with DRM leftover that literally made the game unplayable until I found non-official solution.

GOG forums can be a pain in the behind sometimes. But there's a few tricks you can employ:

- You can cut out parts of a quoted post that aren't relevant to the point. Further you can split the quote into multiple quote boxes to respond to each part separately - it's a ton of manual work but you and we will appreciate it. (You can try cutting this part out if you reply)
- If you're unable to post something, make a "test" post or something, then edit it. If the edit doesn't go through, edit again and keep removing parts until you get some chunk in - you may have a word that trips some filter or you exceeded the char limit.
- If for whatever reason your earned reputation is low, you won't be able to post links - but if you include any quote boxes in your post even if they're empty, you'll be able to post links.
- If you're on mobile, click the same link for earned reputation above and change your Forum color scheme (skin) to experimental for a mobile friendly layout.

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Now I wanted to ask you something I mentioned in my posts but didn't have the luxury to ask you directly back then (I'm glad you're here with us! It just feels so much better talking with you than about you, plus helping out clear misunderstandings):

Do you think GOG is reluctant or stalling to sponsor you further because of your statements that DRM is fine as long as the game remains supported? I get that ideally you want it gone and you're arguing from a position of trying to compromise with the game industry. But the way you phrased these sentences as seen in my post #63 would make it so GOG is sponsoring someone whose position can be seen as DRM-neutral at best or pro-DRM at worst - a values clash with what GOG is known for.