UK parliament debates Stop Killing Games campaign, but government doesn't budge | Hacker News Reader

UK parliament debates Stop Killing Games campaign, but government doesn't budge

videogameschronicle.com

27 pointsevah13 comments

We need new language around this (games, in-game purchases, movie rentals, music streaming). It's not digital ownership, or buying.

It's renting with all rights given to the landlord.

The language exists already its all licenses. As the reply to the petition notes licenses have been used this way for software long before it became largely digitally distributed.

> The Stop Killing Games movement highlights the growing frustration among players who see their purchases vanish

Well they should just get used to it, right?

Pétitions don't work, we need to replace politicians by something else.

Clearly they do work because this one achieved quite a lot. It’s not nothing to have a Parliamentary debate on a subject because of a petition!

The number of UK Government and Parliament petitions that have led to an identifiable policy change is so small as to be statistically negligible — effectively a rounding error compared with the total number submitted.

Right but a policy change isn't the guarentee offered just the debate. Getting to a debate is a win! Despite no concrete policy changes it doesn't mean there won't be other second order effects from having this bought to peoples attention.

If you think we're going to have government by petition then I don't know what to tell you.

I don't think people want government by petition, I think they just want petitions to have any meaningful impact at all. Which they currently don't.

What does a meaningful impact look like if forcing a debate isn’t one?

I just vote with my wallet. Ubisoft kills games? I won't be playing any more Ubisoft games then. Same for EA or any other company that does stuff I dislike.

If I cared more I would engage a bit more and try to raise awareness so as to try to get people to do the same, but I think the market in general will start shifting on its own (if only because games will start getting too expensive for this kind of thing again so we'll end up like back in the day when one bought a game and played it until the cartridge wore out).

> we'll end up like back in the day when one bought a game and played it until the cartridge wore out

Or people will just go back to pirating everything. It’s already happening with paid video and music streaming services due to increasing monthly subscription costs and catalogue fragmentation.

The petition against the online age verification law was hilarious. It got a few hundred thousand signatures and the response was just "lol no."

The Labour government had an opportunity to kill pointless government overreach and win some brownie points, instead they just carried the torch on from the Tories. I don't expect that they'll be reelected.

tl;dr: The government's argument is the old "if we mandate seatbelts, cars will be too expensive and nobody will make them except for luxury brands" argument.

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