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Comment by EarlKing | Hacker News Reader

If only those 1.3 million signatories pledged to never buy from a company that Kills Games again...

Boycotts are the weakest form of protest.

Yet, most people don't do even that much.

How do you reckon? Boycotting has a concrete immediate effect, unlike for example, picketing, signing letters. Weak, maybe, weakest?

It's the standard problem of devolving responsibility to individual action: the effect is so diffuse as to be negligible in all but the most extreme cases. In most cases, one wouldn't even be able to correlate change in sales with the boycott action.

On the other hand, actions like picket lines produce a clear relationship between the issue (look at the sign) and the action. Contacting advertisers and shareholders to get them to pull out their funding also has a direct effect, and connects more cleanly the effect to the cause.

This movement stems from Ubisoft’s The Crew, and judging by how Ubisoft is doing financially, maybe they have already.

>Ubisoft has released its financial results for the full 25-26 fiscal year, reporting a sharp decline in revenue and net bookings, down 21.8% and 17.4% year-over-year (YoY), respectively, due to the "softer new release schedule" and new operating model.

EU already have markings for lots of things, like how efficient a dishwasher is.

I think a reasonable middle ground here is to just have EU mandate something similar for games. To receive an A rating the game has to be installable and playable fully offline, for example, and so on.

They could allow for publishers to guarantee a minimum support period, with full refunds guaranteed if the publisher does not honor that. So an E rating may be a game that's guaranteed playable for 2 years and requires online connection to play.

Then those who purchase can make informed decisions. Do I want to buy this game with a rating that signals the game may stop working at any point the publisher decides?

Yes. Exactly. I, for one, am following this credo: If your single player game has an “always online” clause; I am not your customer. No ifs, no buts, no “but i like this franchise”s.

Vote with your wallet. Do not hesitate to boycott.

I'd like to see legislation to require publisher to clearly state if game works offline, and if not, what is the committed, guaranteed operational life ("at least to June 2030" prominently displayed, for instance).

I agree, and i think one more thing should be also explicit; save files.

Whether the game works offline, and until when the servers are guaranteed, is one part. But the savegames and progression data should also belong to the user.

The game is made by the studio, sure, but the save file is the part I construct by playing. It is my time, my choices, my progress, my world state and my memories.

So I would add a clear principle that the publisher should not be able to kidnap the user's save data.

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