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.
Great. It should come at great risk to build a product for customers that’s designed to self-destruct. It reduces the number of multiplayer games that we’ll be able to play in a decade. Even bad games should be playable indefinitely, but plenty of these are very good games that simply go through the natural ebb and flow of popularity. The solution is to allow me to host the server, connect to a host directly via IP, play over LAN (which means VPNs work too), etc. If you haven’t seen the Accursed Farms video, the root of this campaign, you should watch that. He sets the bar pretty low just so we have the absolute minimum. The go-to example for this is The Crew for the purposes of this campaign.
And honestly, I’m pretty regularly on the side of free market, let people do what they want with their money, but even if this didn’t bother me because of what this means for preserving the history of an art form, it’s become extraordinarily difficult for me, the consumer, to even know what I’m buying. Games with online requirements often hide it in fine print italics in the Steam page; in the case of games like Palworld, that disclaimer is actually wrong, and you can play offline just fine. Games with LAN often don’t advertise it on the list of features, and I have to either ask an existing owner of the game about it or hope the developer answers my question in the Steam forums. We need consumer protections for this stuff codified into law.
This proposal doesn’t solve any of the issues in your second paragraph, and I wholly agree with you that those should be solved. Those would be much easier to regulate, as truth in advertising is kind of important.
The first paragraph probably feels good to think about, but right now, you don’t have any right to any of that. Perhaps start there if it’s important to you to change things?
My second paragraph is mostly solved by the first paragraph. If every game lives forever, guaranteed by law, then I hardly have to care, but mostly I was stressing that there’s not even a free market solution to this problem. The point of this campaign is to give us these rights, because it’s truly stupid that we’ve gotten away without having them. Perhaps with the right legal challenge in the right country, it will be seen to already violate some consumer protection law currently on the books. That’s one of the things we’re hoping for, and this campaign is our best shot. I’d strongly encourage you to follow whatever steps on the web site you’re able to based on where you live and/or whether or not you own a copy of The Crew.