With the rise of the live-service model, video games have shifted from a product you buy to a service you rent, one that publishers can switch off whenever they want.
Yes, it actually spends the majority of its word count on the Stop Killing Games movement as-is, then notes in a single section at the end that industry practices for developers are also killing games (since developers make the games). Thus if you support Stop Killing Games uppercase because you want the industry to stop killing games lowercase, reforming that part is important too.
I’m sure everyone is for better treatment of developers but in the context of the movement they’re not important. The movement is concerned with preservation not with who will do the preservation. The movement in general has positioned itself to not care how preservation happens as long as it happens. If a game company wants to fire everyone and then hire a completely new team to do the preservation then as far as the movement is concerned as long as games get preserved that’s just fine.
The second point is that the movement has focused primarily on the EU market (because initiatives elsewhere have failed). EU already has pretty good labor laws and most of the things mentioned in the article are already enforced to some extent in the EU. Furthermore most layoffs happen outside the EU so there’s also very little argument to be made that EU should step in on the mistreatment of labor. And if it should why just game developers, why not broaden it to other industries where people also get mistreated?
The inclusion of labor rights is just going to derail what the movement wants to achieve in the EU. Instead of trying to fix the entire world all at once lets start by fixing what is realistic to fix and fix the rest when Americans stop being corporate cucks. After all the vast majority of labor mistreatment happens in the US.
I’m sure everyone is for better treatment of developers but in the context of the movement they’re not important.
I’m not sure I agree with your premise. If developers with good work conditions had their say over whether games were killed or preserved, I think most would choose the latter. The two issues are perhaps not as insular as we wished they were for the sake of a clean and simple “message” for SKG.
And now you’re growing initiative into a full blown socialist movement. You can’t add worker rights into this movement without grossly changing scale of the movement.
Yes, it actually spends the majority of its word count on the Stop Killing Games movement as-is, then notes in a single section at the end that industry practices for developers are also killing games (since developers make the games). Thus if you support Stop Killing Games uppercase because you want the industry to stop killing games lowercase, reforming that part is important too.
I’m sure everyone is for better treatment of developers but in the context of the movement they’re not important. The movement is concerned with preservation not with who will do the preservation. The movement in general has positioned itself to not care how preservation happens as long as it happens. If a game company wants to fire everyone and then hire a completely new team to do the preservation then as far as the movement is concerned as long as games get preserved that’s just fine.
The second point is that the movement has focused primarily on the EU market (because initiatives elsewhere have failed). EU already has pretty good labor laws and most of the things mentioned in the article are already enforced to some extent in the EU. Furthermore most layoffs happen outside the EU so there’s also very little argument to be made that EU should step in on the mistreatment of labor. And if it should why just game developers, why not broaden it to other industries where people also get mistreated?
The inclusion of labor rights is just going to derail what the movement wants to achieve in the EU. Instead of trying to fix the entire world all at once lets start by fixing what is realistic to fix and fix the rest when Americans stop being corporate cucks. After all the vast majority of labor mistreatment happens in the US.
I’m not sure I agree with your premise. If developers with good work conditions had their say over whether games were killed or preserved, I think most would choose the latter. The two issues are perhaps not as insular as we wished they were for the sake of a clean and simple “message” for SKG.
And now you’re growing initiative into a full blown socialist movement. You can’t add worker rights into this movement without grossly changing scale of the movement.