An increasing number of videogames are sold as goods, but designed to be completely unplayable for everyone as soon as support ends. The legality of this practice is untested worldwide, and many governments do not have clear laws regarding these actions. It is our goal to have authorities examine this behavior and hopefully end it, as it is an assault on both consumer rights and preservation of media. We are pursuing this in two ways:
TL;DR this is an EU petition aimed at making sure that companies are obligated to distribute binaries of the server code of their multiplayer and live service games. Currently, video game companies of online/live service games use a form of SaaSS (Service as a Software Substitute) model where the “game” someone has purchased is simply a license to run the game in only the way the company sees fit (their servers, their platform, their rules). If a company were to go under or simply not run the servers required for the full game to function, then the user is out of luck as they’ve effectively had the game taken away from them.
This is just another example of why ALL leftists must strive to fight for free software. If we don’t consider software which respects your freedom an important endeavor to uphold, then we make ourselves vulnerable for further and further exploitation. If you’re reading this, this includes you as well.
One example of a ‘multiplayer’ game being kept alive is GTA San Andres. It never got official multiplayer support, not even its anniversary remaster. But players developed their own over the decades and it’s still active. A lot of lesser known/less popular inactive games have received fan revivals with varying degrees of support - Wizards 101, GoonTown, FreeRealms, Arctic Combat, to name a few.
If car manufacturers, and manufacturers of physical goods in general, are required to continue supporting their discontinued products, recalling defective shit, and repairing them, I don’t see why a software company shouldn’t be forced to do the same or release the source code and release itself from that responsibility.