The Future of Video Games (and Hitman)

Hitman General
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A recurring conversation here on HitmanForum since the release of Hitman (2016) is the controversial decision from IO requiring mandatory internet connection for a single player game and if it will be patched before support ends so that we may experience the complete game independantly of the developers support like how all games used to work before this terrible practice started.

Do you care about ownership? Do you care about protecting your consumer rights? Do you care about your right to keep playing the video games you paid for forever?

Then this is your oppurtunity to make your voice heard.

Ross Scott (Accursed Farms) the creator of the Freeman’s Mind series on youtube has started a campaign to stop video game destruction and he has been working relentlessly on this for the past six months.

Ross Scott has spent months researching and consulting with EU MPs, lawyers and other professionals to find all the possible ways us consumers can fight for our rights. Goverment Initiatives in Australia, Canada and the UK, consumer protection agency coopertions in France and Germany and potential lawsuits and more.

However all you need to concern yourself with is that the European Citizens’ Initiative recently opened up for signatures. Let me be clear that this is anything but a regular petition. This has the potential to change EU law on ownership in favor of the consumer and so long as you are a voting-aged EU citizen you can easily and quickly sign this petiton and all that is required of you is your full name (including middle names) and your national identification number.

If this is successful it will prevent video game companies from destroying your games but still keeping your money. This is not about forcing indefinite support. This about legally requiring that all video games must be left functional after support ends.

This link will take you to the relevant EU webpage - click the “Support this initiative” button and fill out the form and it’ll be done in less than a minute.
https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/initiatives/details/2024/000007_en#

If you want a detailed how-to guide or if you want to know more about the campaign than this is the relevant webpage.
https://www.stopkillinggames.com/eci

This is a short 11 minute video about the European Citizens’ Initiative:
Europeans can save gaming!

This is a longer 31 minute video about the campaign:
The largest campaign ever to stop publishers destroying games

If you have any questions feel free to ask me but know that I am not working for the campaign I am merely a fan that want to help spread awareness. I highly recommend that you watch the relevant videos and/or checkout the website for more information.

Thank you for your help.

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While I can certainly understand the point of view, the only real way that developers/publishers are going to get the message that always online requirements are not acceptable is if people stop buying licenses for the games that require them. Petitions, protests, and forum posts aren’t going to get publishers to back off this unless it hurts their profit margins too.

If you look into, you’ll find that even when you bought a physical cartridge back “in the day” that you didn’t own the actual game. You still owned a license that, technically, could be revoked.

I do agree that always online is B.S. for a single player game though.

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Then again, it sometimes works out - lokk at the Hitman (2016) release on gog.com: Hge shitstorm because of the online requirement, that led to – delisting the game. gog actually stopped selling Hitman because of always online. So players are heard, at least some few times.

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This is a nonsensical line of thinking. The whole point of @474747’s post is that this isn’t a standard online petition. It’s an official European Union scheme. If enough signatures are gathered, it will compel the EU to work on a potential new law to regulate the industry.

Regulation from multinational government bodies like the EU is one of the most plausible, and potentially effective, ways to reshape the industry with more consumer-friendly practices. It would force companies to change their behaviour, regardless of profit margins.

Asserting that change can only happen if consumers, en masse, stop buying games is a recipe for nothing ever changing. This is not going to happen. And, in any case, a consumer boycott would itself required “petitions, protests, and forum posts” to gather momentum.

This pessimism has no value except serving to maintain the status quo.

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Well, I don’t live in the EU so what they do has little bearing on what happens in my own corner of the world. You’re free to call it pessimistic, naive, or even outright ignorant as you see fit but I don’t see it.

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As it happens, I am no longer an EU citizen, either, since my country (the UK) took the misguided decision to leave. However, the EU represents such a significant share of the global market that its legislation would likely have an international knock-on effect.

Take, for instance, how HITMAN could be affected by a law granting EU consumers protections for the games they have purchased. Such regulation would compel IOI to provide an offline patch (which we hope they will do regardless, but this is not yet guaranteed). With the work completed, such a patch would most likely be rolled out globally rather than just for EU markets.

Additionally, the success of legislation in the EU would be one of the best ways to generate impetus for governments around the world to introduce similar laws.

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Happy_Squirrel gets it. Thanks mate. I appreciate your explanation for the people not bothering to read what I literally pointed out in my post.

The UKs decision to leave the EU means we lost out on many potential signatures however there is an upcoming seperate Government Initiative specifically for the UK but because the recent election the last one was cancelled so it needs to be redone all over again but hopefully now with the new government Labour might care more than the Conservatives.

Regardless of where you live I encourage you to spread awareness online and to your friends and family. For the none gamers it is best to angle this about ownership in general because this unclear legal practice is exploited by game companies and it’ll only get worse if left unchallenged because this cancer will inevitable spread. Imagine in a not so distant future that the status quo is smart appliances like your fridge/refrigerator, tv, car, whatever that requires internet connection for constant updates for “optimal performance” then whenever they want to sell you the latest model they’ll stop supporting it and it looses functions that do not need internet to work.

Planned obsolecence is not acceptable and this is our chance to do something about this. Please help spread awareness.

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I am almost sure having an EU version and a non-EU version is a development burdon a company is not willing to do. Is is hard enough to support two consoles and PCs in many different configurations. And other than the always-online feature, rendering on different systems can be helped at by professional game engines.

Also, imagine the EU does not have to go online but the US has to. The US could get the EU version via VPN and can be offline too. How would the developers know? The version by law would have to be fully operational offline.

An example where EU laws bleed into other markets is that, as far I know, every Hitman player can delete their progress on the IO website, which is part of the European GDPR.

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I’d expect its more likely that this would just lead to games not being officially released in EU tbh.

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That is possible, but I am optimistic the sold copies in the EU are more profitable than not selling here and have to not follow this law.

Btw I overshot a little in my last post, this is not about ditching always-online but forcing the game to be playable offline when the support ends. Like the offline patch some users here wish for.

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For the record, while the ideal outcome of Stop Killing Games is to mandate companies implement sunsetting patches/private server functionality for online only games, the “backup” in cases where that isn’t possible for the company is to at least provide legal protection for players who make community patches and/or mandating the companies release the source code or etc to help with that process.

That isn’t really related to IOI because they are presumably in a good place financially, but I think that’s something more people need to understand about the proposal. If your game’s architecture makes development of an offline mode too hard for the dev to reasonably do, or your company goes bankrupt tomorrow, fine, but customers should be allowed to fix it themselves without worrying about lawyers.