This campaign is all about making DRMed games more appealing, with a promise to keep them playable after the servers are shut down. Making DRMed games more appealing is, to me, perfectly fitting the "pro-DRM" label.

Yeah, it basically turns a long lead into a noose when someone turns off the auth servers or the certificate expires.

Or better yet, it's run on a now obsolete web technology (IE6, natch) that modern systems have carefully patched out/around to prevent from running.

The initiative's demise have been greatly exaggerated. It has gotten a large number of signatures recently and whether or not it will hit 1 million is still anyone's guess at this point.

I lean heavily for the initiative. I think the gaming industry needs a good shakeup and start respecting customers' rights more.

Might make it harder to make certain kinds of indie games that have online integrations for a time, but it's a worthwhile sacrifice to cleanup the industry and have games that don't sacrifice features (or even the entire game in some cases) to proprietary online platforms down the line. I hate those integrations with a passion. They are unnecessary and I say that from a technical perspective too.

In the longer term, platforms that provide services to those indie games (ie, Steam and even GOG's Galaxy service) are likely to get a lot of pressure to provide some kind of out for integrations into their services to run offline.

Platform integrators provide easy tooling for things to depend on their servers. They can also provide easy tooling for things to run offline.

Either that or game dev communities will come up with tooling to make things run offline and platform operators won't be in a good position to legally deny them that tooling without running afool of emerging consumer protection laws.

I mean, who is to blame if there are not backup plans to make a game dependent on Steam services run properly if Steam shuts down? You can certainly blame the game developer, but if Steam is actively against making integrations into their services run offline, they'd be in hot water too.

This is where we disagree. I think it will push drm integrators to provide dev-friendly functionality for games to run drm-free. They won't have a choice. The law will push devs to do it and the devs will demand it from whatever platform they opt to integrate into.

For example, if Steam doesn't provide an offline mode for clients that depend on their services, devs will drop Steam services like a hot potato in order not to run afoul of EU laws.

Sure, some games won't become drm-free (mostly AAA games using their own servers or a minority of indie devs that are pro-drm) until their online dependencies are shut down, but plenty of games that wouldn't be drm-free otherwise will be drm-free by virtue of the fact that there actually be a dev-friendly offline mode that will come with all those platform integrations. And that offline integration will get properly tested for a change, because somebody will be getting sued if it isn't.

Don't underestimate the number of devs that don't have strong opinions about drm and integrate into online platforms to more easily provide additional functionality for their players and don't provider an offline mode because it is additional work right now (ie, no solid pre-existing tooling for this yet) and they are not legally forced to.

Agreed. Sometimes, we need a legal framework to set the right tone for civilized behavior. It happens all the time either to prevent those with leverage from abusing their position (ex: Steam) or just to keep things orderly (sure, you can have 'if I do not own what I bought, then piracy is not a crime'... or how about 'piracy is a crime and I own what I bought'... I prefer the later personally, because with the former, we don't have an orderly well balanced ecosystem to monetize games and thus no game industry anymore).

Most of you dont seem to see beyond gaming. The corporate executives are behaving in tandem across every media platform. Its not one big conspiracy or anything though. It is a "Hey! Those guys are getting away with robbing people blind, so can we!"

Its a simple directive. Be a greedy, insufferable evil ass hole and you win. Now apply this to subscriptions. Word play manipulation and right to repair. Plus contractual circumventing of laws.

This is the recipe. Motivation is greed. There you go. Think on it a while.

For sure, passing a law demanding proper respect for ownership in gaming may help open the door for a whole bunch of other stuff where ownership rights are being blatantly violated.

During Covid, they had quite a bit of trouble maintaining respirators in hospitals, because they could only be serviced by a technician from the manufacturer (it's not even a warranty thing, the respirators were rigged to only allow a company technician to unlock it).

There is also a paralized guy who got an expensive exoskeleton which required special proprietary parts from a company that refused replacing them after only 5 years (for a 100k exoskeleton allowing a paralized person to walk).

Any rights to repair activist, whether they are interested in gaming or not, should pounce on this initiative as a baby step towards accomplishing their goal.

Stop Killing Games targets games, but this is about a much broader social issue over ownership and preservation.

you realize that GOG could pull all executable tomorrow and lock everything behind a DRM, if they really want to, right? What would that say about your purchasing habits?

also what a nonsensical thread why are you bringing up a discussion about something you haven't watched? Are you stupid? Just read the freaking FAQ that pretty much addresses every single point you brought up. You pretty much waste everyone's time with your nonsense. You should probably check how passing a law generally works. SKG won't and CAN'T write any laws.
Also: https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq Absolute nonsense point. If companies have to abide the law to let me own what they sell to me, why should I care about purchases of others in the first place? https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq Don't need to predict, if the end-of-life is already planned. https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq I really would like to see how these companies perform, if they just choose to ignore EU countries. Would be very entertaining. rightsholders who do not care about basic rights of possessing the items you buy? Yeah they can get f'd. Good riddance you have no clue what the idea behind it is since you obviously chose to not inform yourself on even a basic level. You don't even know the difference between campaigning for an issue to be addressed by a parliament and writing and passing an actual law.
Pure clown behaviour

GOG has no power to 'pull executables' of games I have purchased here and backed up. That is the whole point of DRM-free: once I have purchased a game here (and backed it up), I own and control it. It requires no online authentication and the store exerts no further control over the game.

Sorry, but I'm not quite sure what your point is here. Yes, GOG could go under next week, but the games people have already purchased can never be taken away from them (as long as they have backed them up). That is the key difference between DRM and DRM-free. I actually own my copies of the games I have purchased here.

And if GOG did go under, there are other DRM-free stores (e.g. Zoom Platform) that would quickly step up to fill the gap. I am not particularly concerned for the future of DRM-free.

Immediate bankruptcy?! Even if this would suddenly bring GOG into ruins, you realize that GOG is not even close to be CD Projekts golden horse, right?
Their financial results are publicly available. How about taking a look before making such childish nonsense statements???

many doesn't equate all. So you're alright with the scenario of the company pulling your purchases away without warning, despite the company operating fully fine, without any penalties and repercussions??? Talking about "signing your rights away" lmao.

can you proof that the backed up games don't have a killswitch or anything else malicious?

Where is the guarantee that any of these executables don't have a killswitch?

So you're just fine with companies just flushing all your purchases down the toilet. Suits at companies really love you

No GOG games have ever been found to contain such a built-in kill switch. They all work offline, on a PC that isn't even connected to the internet.

Sorry, but unless you have some proof that they do contain a kill switch, then this is just pure speculation. Whereas, on the contrary, it is widely known and obvious that Steam games, many Ubisoft games do contain kill switches (which in some cases have even been used).

You seem to be trying to pit baseless speculation against fact - an argument that you are always going to lose. Besides, unless it were proven that GOG games contain DRM, I would still take the (likely) possibility of DRM-free any day over the absolute guarantee that games from Steam etc contain DRM kill switches.

Again, GOG has no power to do that.

His point is it's complete trolling to try and equate someone complains The Crew online service game doesn't work offline, buys it anyway knowing that in advance, gets +10 years of enjoyment out of it, complains the game "dies" when the service ends, then goes back for more with the sequels that contain the same thing, with "I bought a DRM-Free game that I can still play and I don't regret that regardless of what the store might do to the cloud copy".

In an ideal world, every government on Earth will start actively telling developers how to code their games to make them run offline forever. Realistically speaking that's highly unlikely to happen for reasons discussed in this thread and SKG are likely to end up with a very watered down mixed response consisting of some countries doing little more than changing how games are advertised, and many others, nothing at all. So at some point, regardless of what SKG wants to do, SKG supporters who view this as some magical unicorn are going to have stop being such weak-willed simps, constantly complaining the AAA gaming industry "won't change" the very same things they keep throwing large sums of money at, then getting triggered and angrily reacting towards anyone who points out the obvious....

They install offline, work fine offline. Set your computer clock 50 years in the future to 2075 and they still work. The fact you're trying to defend SKG by actually suggesting you don't believe DRM-Free GOG games are 'really' DRM-Free and that 'no-one knows' if they work offline or not (something you and everyone here can test yourself) - on a 14 year account that owns hundreds of games speaks for itself as to why people are struggling to take this movement seriously...

Yes, it is trolling. However, another important point, in relation to the argument "what if GOG games turned out to contain DRM and they one day pulled the kill-switches?" is this:

If that happened, then I would have a credible legal basis to sue GOG/CDPR, since they have been selling their games claiming DRM-free for many years. If that were to happen, I could imagine there would be a class-action lawsuit on the part of GOG's customers, to allow them to recoup the money that GOG would have fraudulently taken.

On the other hand, Steam users, Ubisoft users, people who bought The Crew have no legal grounds to sue, since they accepted when they purchased the game that they were only ever buying a temporary license.

The terms under which a product is sold are important. They matter. And that is a very important distinction between DRM and DRM-free. Even if GOG one day turned out to be lying, I have legal cover, by virtue of the terms I agreed to when I purchased games from GOG.

So you've looked into the binary blobs of every single game you have backed up, to guarantee that GOG couldn't possibly do something like this?

YOU told that your backups will function fine and I am simply asking you what proof you can provide, that they don't have a killswitch,

Disney can't be sued for killing an allergic person because they buried a clause in their Disney Plus user agreement and you really want to tell me this bullshit of GOG having no power to implement something as simple as a killswitch and getting away with it?

Beside the point that none of this is in the original post. Why wouldn't the expectation be that they should have implemented a functionality for the game to remain somehow playable offline?!
You guys are so stupid...

None of my or anyone's concerns. All I want is for companies to feel repercussions if they pull back purchases and/or make them non-functioning

Don't be so hard on yourself, buddy.

AGAIN: WHAT IS YOUR PROOF THAT BACKUPS WILL FUNCTION FOREVER

You made the claim that you think GOG has been adding DRM to DRM-Free games here, you back it up. The rest is mindless trolling that so far is the biggest 'advert' in the thread for not signing it...