Just like the UK variant, this is an official government petition to look into the issue. Unlike the UK variant, the only signature threshold is 50 signatures - that said, more is better in this case.
Deadline: 20 May 2024
Here’s the Stop Killing Games campaign site for those unaware or not from Australia.
I have literally worked at a game company startup that ran out of money and shut down abruptly.
And have you not been paying attention to the news lately? Game companies are shutting down weekly.
Fair enough. My experience is mostly tied to companies where even shutting down would be run through a process of sunsetting all projects and tying up as many loose ends as possible before that so my perspective might be a bit skewed.
I can see this being an issue for a small or indie developer but something like Embracer Group shouldn’t have any leeway in that regard - they could absolutely afford keeping a studio (at least a skeleton crew) long enough to release a single server package/patch.
It feels like developing the problem space through examples and situations would be better than trying to think of preferred solutions and working backwards.
It might also be a decent exercise for someone to go through this separately from a consumer protections policy perspective vs a culture preservation perspective, which you mention.
For instance, if the law only applied to corporations that continue to exist past the end of the product, that would be a reasonable consumer protection, but would miss most games that disappear to time from a preservation perspective.
And if preservation is the issue you want to solve, then is this the highest priority in gaming? Maybe this could be solved through a non-profit funding the transitions of server code to the hands of the consumers, or through reverse engineering efforts to rebuild servers for games that have shuttered.
But yeah, it would be nice for this problem to go away, I just hope that attempts at regulating it don’t have bad unintended consequences.
It’s the question of both though - sure, game preservation aspect is important but it would also be nice for the law to catch up to technology and decide whether companies should have the right to remove your ability to use the product you bought.
If the law would go through in the way envisioned by the campaign, games should be designed and developed in a way that releasing a patch/server software should be possible even for a company at the verge of closing. We’re not talking about creating these releases at the last moment but baking their creation into the development process from the start.
At the end of the day all the possible solutions proposed by the campaign are just ideas to give lawmakers some kind of starting point. If this goes anywhere it’ll be debated and decided upon by people with far more law and customer protection knowledge than anyone involved in the campaign itself. The important part right now is to bring the issue to someone willing to look into it.