Stop Killing Games

Official or not, I've never seen the government care even a little bit about a petition, beyond paying it lip service until the news cycle moves on to the next current thing.

As a European, and avid gamer, I support part of the intent here, but I don't think that this has any chance of causing any kind of practical change. The petition is way too broad and doesn't address any specific instances of consumer deceptive practices.

- It's often not practical: There is a vast spectrum of business models where "playable state" requires significant investment, or is even not technically feasible. It could require the company to give up additional intellectual property (server side). It could require them to relicense 3rd party brands (such as The Crew had license for car models), or assets (music). It could involve 3rd party software re-licensing.

- There's a precedent of existing software licensing models. The EU would need to tear up such models completely to enable this.

- You already agreed to the EULA/ToS when you signed up for the service. You were informed that the service could go down. Chose other games if you don't like this.

- Out of scope: The EU will look at business practices if they involve deception and exploitation, but other than that, markets are generally liberal. We don't just demand specific services from companies. At best, we can hope for clearer information to ensure that consumers are well informed of what they are paying for (perpetual license vs time-limited subscription to a live service.

What does it mean to be safe in this case?

- "useful"

Virtually no petitions ever reach the thresholds. The effect of this system is to blunt the formation of actually-effective organized political groups, by burning their time and energy and feel like they're "participating" in EU lawmaking—and subsequently gaslight them into thinking they lack popular support, and should probably give up. When in fact many of the petitions are broadly popular among anyone who's polled; it's just that at its core it's an anti-democratic system set up to perpetuate laws in the opposite direction of what >50% of people actually want.

Few people are truly passionate about–in this example–video game consumer protection laws, but I'd wager an overwhelming majority of anyone who's asked would side with consumer protection over consumer abuse.

Only EU users can sign, to be clear

but there should be a VERY CLEAR definition of what counts as "reasonable playable state".

There's a weird idea online that laws are super specific and technical and that if you don't nail things down exactly people can side-step and go "wahaha I didn't break any rules!" when that's simply not the case.

Laws are more general and very much about the spirit of actions, and then the specificities get proven in court down the line. Those cases then get referenced in further court actions and end up informing the law overall, without having to have hyper specific wording for all edge-cases enshrined forever. This also provides fluidity for a changing and evolving legal and social system as a judge can take the specifics of that case into account. Every games definition of playable is going to be different, you can't codify something like that.

Online games that aren't sold as services (like WoW with a subscription) wouldn't need to work online or with servers. The bare minimum this asks for is some state of playable which could include just the ability to run around on the map on a local machine... Ross Scott has talked about this a lot. We would love more, but we are asking for bare minimum.

I'm really skeptical of modern online infra. I've worked on two MMOs as a Tech Artist and the way artists, designers, etc worked on the game was with a local only build! One of these companies actually barred WAN access from our dev machines so LAN only also worked for internal playtests! Trends to make dev builds online only are quite awful for developers in the trenches and are more about exec control than any usefulness added by such requirements.

Complex server infrastructure that you mention is also not needed if you ask me, at least not to the point to make it too hard to widely ship. I'd be fine if someone still had to stand up a centralized matchmaking server still, just allow any player to do it.

As an example, compare Helldivers 2 and WoW. WoW is vastly more complex but Helldivers 2 uses more modern cloud "tech" that didn't exist 20 years ago. Both had issues keeping up with player demand on launch. So what's the point of this newfangled tech? Well, it's devs convincing players they're getting a better service or good (don't know which!) and that this complexity based lock in is worth it. And it's also cloud providers like AWS and Azure convincing devs to create architectures like this which lock devs into these platform holders. I'm not convinced were seeing real improvements on the dev or player side... Scamming turtles all the way down if you ask me.

It also turns out a lot of this stuff is able to reverse engineered. I'm right now playing original Demons Souls with full multiplayer connectivity (including matchmaking from a central private server) which required PSN support of the PS3 days. WoW private servers also required a great deal of reverse engineering. If online randos can do it...

Plus WoW private servers literally revealed a new revenue stream to Blizzard in the form of WoW classic: "After a month or so of large scale protests, Blizzard invited the Nostalrius team to the Blizzard HQ to present the case for Vanilla. An eighty-page "post-mortem" document describing the development of Nostalrius, the problems that happened and some marketing strategies was presented to Blizzard, and after some time, released on the Nostalrius forums" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Warcraft_Classic

Others have also mentioned middleware licenses as a problem. Those licenses would adapt just fine. A single game will ship with multiple binaries of RAD Tools, Havok, SpeedTree, etc. So now a player has potentially hundreds of copies of different versions of all these binaries and libraries. This is a completely solvable problem that won't stifle development or even require leaking of trade "secrets".

Also, this is relatively new problem in the industry. The market grew just fine allowing for players to use their goods more freely. That any such regulation would hurt the industry is dubious at best, corporate speak at worst. In fact, I'd argue that enabling player freedom an creativity over their purchased goods has helped the industry grow to where it is today! Counter Strike was a mod, TF2 was a mod, PUBG was a mod (Fortnite wouldn't exist with out it), DOTA was a mod! Minecraft in part exploded cause of mods. A healthy and innovative free market demands player and user freedom!

The FAQ mentions does "server emulators" made by fans, so "reasonably playable" could possibly mean just removing restrictions to using those. Basically removing the phone-home restrictions.

Keeping the game working but offline-only also seems to be a suggestion, the list of "real-world examples of publishers ending support for online-only games in a responsible way" include some games that are playable offline-only.

But your point stands, this should be discussed with more clarity before turning into law.

https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq

I agree. This is a heavily vibes-based petition, seemingly designed to be emotive at the expense of clarity. Is it about DRM stopping games from working? MMOs being shut down? Live services dying?

In the best case scenario, this would be relatively narrowly targeted at something like DRM servers, requiring a final patch to strip DRM. What I fear is more likely to happen is that you end up with something with loopholes that causes many more games to go down the SimCity (the shitty version) route of faux online features to get them to fall into some sort of online-required carve-out. Or you end up with the GDPR route, where the big names will violate it anyways and just don't care about the penalties for doing so.

I think massively online games are the tricky part.

I'd be happy if this stopped publishers killing games were small teams on a private server were viable.

Hell - I've had games I bought killed where there was a viable single player mode. There's no justification for that.

Someone please define "reasonable playable state".

Wouldn't this be the job of the lawmakers?

Source and internal sysops documentation?

Maybe, why not. MMORPGs are the exception here, so most games will not necessarily be forced to deliver them.

You will likely need a separate server architecture that works independently of the userlist and matchmaking system. Bear in mind these systems are usually not made to be modular, they are custom-built to work in a given environment.

Just open the APIs and let the community build their own. Maybe, the gaming-industry could even move to open standards, have open source-projects for most of those stuff, which would be beneficial for everyone.

but there should be a VERY CLEAR definition of what counts as "reasonable playable state".

Why? In worst case, it has to be decided game by game. And for most games this is probably not a big deal, as they are not that hard entangled with online-features. I think any law should also giver the industry some leeway to establish a useful ground on their own.

I mean, a solution here could go from removing licensing and allowing people debugging, so they can build their own backends. Or forcing companies to deliver the whole backend, including documentation and whatever. This is a pretty big range of options.

I think it aims mainly at games that use an online connection as a DRM mechanism, such as Hitman 3 and Gran Turismo 7. Both games are single player games that shouldn't necessitate online connection in the first place.

Legislation is always intentionally vague so that edge cases can prove themselves in court. I think they made the right choice by adapting the demands and wording to something that appeals to legislators.

I am honestly not sure where I stand on this ( MMORPGs especially, because those were designed for being played on the internet -- unlike offline games that merely have internet connection requirement ), but FFXI darkstar project was likely a good example of what could be done.

<< Bear in mind these systems are usually not made to be modular, they are custom-built to work in a given environment.

Lets say that somehow this requirement ( 'reasonable playable state' ) was mandated. It would likely result in more modular architecture. I call that a win.

Looking at the most relevant questions of online games, I notice few answers and no concrete examples - it’s just “not at all” followed by what sounds like a teenager student trying to bluff their way through an assignment they didn’t read. The online gaming and licensing “answers” conspicuously read like they did not involve anyone with experience actually building or operating software applications.

The critical flaw in this proposal is the attempt not to “interfere with any business practices while a game is still being supported”. I have some professional involvement in software preservation and would love to see more things preserved, but that’s going to require changes to how games are developed and sunsetted. As a simple example, the incorrect “not at all” assertion at the beginning of the multiplayer answer is directly contradicted by the acknowledgement buried in the middle admitting that this would require the game to be designed for preservation from the beginning. That’s actually correct because it’s rare for someone to develop a game from scratch, which involves reusing tools and content which are not licensed under the same terms as the original game. You could, and arguably should, require games to be developed in a more sustainable manner avoiding dependencies which can’t be easily removed or replaced at end of life but that absolutely is a change in business practice. Similarly, game developers license engines, content, etc. under terms which have limits or activation fees and that would need some sort of interference in existing business practice to change – again, arguably a good thing to do but it needs to be upfront about it similar to how we can’t just say people should stop using single-use plastic packaging without doing something about the economic factors which make it widespread.

This is especially important when you remember that preservation is most useful when it’s easily accessible: if your game is preserved but that requires running a couple of nested emulators and some patches downloaded from one dude in Moldova, very few people are actually going to do so. What you really want is to keep the game buildable so it can run on normal operating systems and bugs & quality of life improvements can be made. For example, many multiplayer games in the past only supported IPv4 but there are a growing number of people in the world who only have IPv6 so it’d be good for long-term preservation to be able to add support but maintaining a build tool chain would really hammer the licensing issues.

The costs associated with implementing this requirement can be very small, if not trivial.

This is too naive. While it may be the case for single player games that use online connection only as a DRM mechanism (Hitman 3, Gran Turismo 7), for some games it's not trivial at all.

For example, The Division 2 servers do not only act as a "coordinator" between players like CS:GO servers, but also run logics for NPCs and environments. The server and the client are too tightly coupled.

That page is hard to understand. It is presented in my own language, but gives the impression of being translated by a drunk person with a dictionary, with plenty pages torn out.

While I can get a general understanding of the points being raised by translating key words back to English and think about the context it is being used in, I'm not sure it's worth the bother.

Here's another petition: If you want to be taken seriously, do not use translation tools.

edit: Found the language dropdown in the top right corner. It was obscured by my web browser. If you have trouble understanding the text, select English there. It is a coherent text and therefore likely the intended language. ("Take action", I could never have guessed that one, no one was supposed to steal anything.)

Echoing what the others said, these arguments don't hold water. It ignores all of the practicalities of what would actually be involved in doing this, the impacts on licensing, business models, security (and saying "there's no security risk" doesn't mean there's no security risk - there's a reason we don't distribute game server binaries for many games), and lastly the sheer development effort involved.

Consumers don't always make decisions in their own best interest. They are also often under informed. Their buying habits can often follow less than rational psychology. Businesses know these things and devote a great deal of resources to exploit it. People shouldn't be punished for being imperfect and businesses shouldn't be able to weaponize human psychology to take advantage of people. If we made seatbelts and airbags optional they probably wouldn't have caught on either.

Because most users of games don't really care for this. They are either too young, or to busy with other facets of life that they just want to play the game.

It is only a small percentage that are dedicated enough to care, either because they really enjoy the game or because they want to support game preservation.

If you make it opt-in, companies won't care to add it and they will only lose a few percentage points (I would be surprised for anything higher than 1%) of people that will be put off by the lack of "EOL support" guarantee.

What if, in stead of a requirement, we created an opt-in obligation for companies?

Yes, we could call it "copyright".

The purpose of copyright is to reward artists for the creation of works via a temporary monopoly. If they want to permanently hoard the ability to run the game they've sold, then they don't need, and shouldn't be given, any legal protections whatsoever.

That way, consumers can reverse-engineer the game, and companies don't have govt interfering with their business practices. It's a win/win! Unless the corporations need govt-enforced copyright.

and pay some fee

Why should the government make money from checking up on someone?

I have thought about this for a while. I think that a lot of labeling could be done with regards to promises of consumer products. Publishers (of any kind of digital product) cannot expect to transition to a model where we don't own anything and they make no assurances on the product they serve.

It would be great to have a badge of the sort "this product will not have ads, will not have microtransactions, will be able at least until 2030, etc.".

The non-indie market isn't saturated enough for that, and publishers will collude to never allow any of their games to promise this so gamers won't get the chance to get used to it.

For IoT devices, the upcoming regulations will probably include a stipulation that vendors need to specify a guaranteed support period for the devices. I would prefer the same kind of commitment and dependability for games to a simple badge. It would combine free choice for how to build your business model with the ability for customers to make an informed choice ("they can pull the plug in 5 month? I'm not paying EUR 60 for that"). At least as long as there isn't a malicious compliance cartel, e.g. all big vendors only guaranteeing a month and "kindly" supporting it for longer…

(And my highest preference would be for vendors to be forced to publish both server and client code as free software, if they don't continue selling their service for reasonable prices. Not only for games, but for all services and connected devices. Getting political support for such regulations is, of course, extremely hard.)

I do not like the mandate because I prefer the lightning connector as the objectively better connector.

I’m always amused when people say they don’t see a difference. The difference to me is significant.

I feel that usb-c mandate is the best thing in the world of consumer electronics since mobile phones were invented. I need 1-2 cables instead of a battery of connectors. In fact, i normally just have 1 on me - my laptop's, which I use for everything.

The RoHS directive is the better analogy.

possibly through tax credits or other benefits for depositing source code or playable copies with national archives.

How would that work in practice? You could play your game yesterday, but you can't play it tomorrow because the company shut off the servers. But fear not because your tax dollars paid for the executables to be deposited in an archive Ark of the Covenant style.

That might be satisfying with an oil painting. But games are meant to be played with.

Can one check it out and run it? Can one modify the game to keep it running on new hardware or operating system? Can one re-distribute those modifications to others? Can one pay for someone else to run the servers for them?

However, as some users have pointed out, implementing these requirements could significantly disrupt how games are developed, particularly when games rely on proprietary servers or content licensed under restrictive terms.

"Yes." I believe is the universal answer here. Fill in your local custom version of, "I'm OK with that", "I'm failing to see the problem", etc.

particularly when games rely on proprietary servers or content licensed under restrictive terms.

The software to run proprietary servers could be sold as part of the game.

Content with too restrictive licenses won't be marketable anymore, that's a problem that will solve itself.

the idea of preserving games for future access aligns with broader movements toward digital preservation, similar to efforts in other digital media industries like film and music

And from the FAQ:

If this practice is not stopped, it may be codified into law and spread to other products of more importance over time, such as agricultural equipment, educational products, medical devices, etc.

So there is a notion of using games as a step to 'stop' companies from being able to discontinue services.

If this passes for games, next would be software in general.

Next thing you know if you develop and sell any software you will have to make sure it is usable forever. Any MacOS updates or Windows updates (or iOS/Android updates) breaking a software or app you once sold to a few people and discontinued? You will have to fix it until you die or face penalties.

Do you have software with a cloud component sold under a lifetime license? Be prepared to maintain that service forever or release its complete source code if you don't. Additionally, you would need lifetime licenses for any critical proprietary third-party components your cloud service relies on or be prepared to cover their service fees indefinitely.

While this perspective may seem exaggerated, there is always a double-edged nature to such regulations. The sword slices both ways.

I think all games/software would then convert to a service/subscription based model, cause there would be no limit to future liabilities when selling any lifetime license.

Pay monthly to play the game. Pay monthly to use any software (including downloadable software and apps.) Pay monthly to use the OS.

EDIT: Actually thinking about it, it seems this proposal wants to cover mmorpgs which already are subscription based.

In that case if the same rules applies to software in general, then any software that is subscription based would also have to be usable indefinitely even if you sold just 1 month subscription and went out of business.

This kind of creates a bad incentive where users of software / players of games might want the company to die so they can use the software or play the game for free forever.

From the link:

neither does it expect the publisher to provide resources for the said videogame once they discontinue it while leaving it in a reasonably functional (playable) state

This could not possibly mean forcing e.g. WoW to keep their servers running forever. It just means that if your game could be written without a phone home "feature", then it must be.

In other words, it would not justify an increased price. Publishers may choose to increase the price, because they don't actually need a justification in order to do that. But this legal change would not be a good reason.

Games that are good, are going to be popular

Games that pass a certain quality bar and were designed with mass appeal in mind are going to be popular.

I've played at least a few live-service games that I consider good, but were shutdown due to lack of popularity. Some of them I can't even find client files for to start working on a server.

Value is subjective - tons of games that are now considered cult classics didn't gain any meaningful popularity on release.

A good way to justify games costing 100 USD/EUR or more, due to longer support period.

You're not required to support it longer, you just need to ensure the game is still playable after the support period for the people whose money you received.

Ubisoft killed The Crew servers and then actually revoked the game license from people who've bought it, so even if you bought and "owned" the game, it would no longer actually be in your library.

https://www.eurogamer.net/ubisoft-reportedly-revoking-the-cr...

It is self-regulating pretty well.

No it is definitely not. Companies are very abusive to consumers, especially as more games move to a live service model.

Good regulation, I hope it passes.

As for the price, I am not concerned. If customers reject higher price points, they will "self regulate" back to an acceptable level.

" If games are a kind of software, why must games face this kind of regulation when other kinds of (actually more important) software doesn't / won't? "

I am neutral to the iniative but I can answer this question very clearly: Games are cultural products and you want to get the exact same experience (as you want to see the same film and not something else)

Using GIMP or Photoshop is a very different experience: Does it matter? Not so much. You can use an alternative and in case user will change. The Crew or Gran Turismo? You don't want to change so much.

A reasonable requirement would be having the server code, data, and assets be released to public domain when they shut down the service. If they're not operating it, I don't see any good reason to allow people to squat on content that people want to run for themselves. A year after the last commercial offering is sufficient time.

If you run a SaaS and then shut it down, game or otherwise, then you should have to release that software under a permissive license, or to the public domain, along with any non-code assets necessary for functionality equivalent to the last commercially offered state.

The world would be better, we'd end up with fewer leeches and rent seekers.

By selling software, the developers benefit from the protections of copyrights. Mandating the release of source and assets after the end of commercial activity benefits society. This would require government to work with an archive organization of some sort - maybe offer tax incentives to any site that freely hosts said content, for up to 5 years after the release.

There are all sorts of valuable things we could be doing that benefits society and individuals instead of making it all about ruthless corporate bloodsucking and maximizing markets.

Since the only wording is "providing reasonable means to continue functioning of" when someone interprets this as extreme as "MMORPGs must run their servers in the cloud forever in case someone tries to sign on 70 years from now" and someone else interprets this as mildly as "Games with single player modes must be allowed to launch without server connectivity at the time cloud services are retired" it becomes difficult to immediately refocus talk about how "this" does/doesn't should/shouldn't will/won't apply to other software since it's not even a strong agreement on "what" we're really talking about.

That said I'd hazard a bet most people supporting this also support similar feelings about generic software as well. Sometimes it's just easier for regulation to start in one "obvious" case and spread out from there rather than hope to wait for everyone to agree to change everything at once.

The problem there is that games don't usually advertise a subscription, like basicall all SaaS products do. They masquerade as a good for a one-time payment, then turn around and pretend it was a rental all along.

Note that it's not about running servers for all eternity. It's about patching out the requirement of an _official_ server and/or releasing dedicated server software, at least _after support ends_, like games have done for decades already.

MMOs can be both. If it quacks like a good, it is one, no matter what they say in the ToS/EULA. Stuff like World of Warcraft would likely be unaffected, because they are up-front about the duration you pay for.

1. It passes, and subsequently a large amount of games just don't launch in the EU

Unlikely, it's a huge and valuable market.

2. Nobody can write enough caveats to make it workable, and it's abandoned.

The EU has demonstrated they care about companies following the spirit of the law, not the letter. It'll be fine.

3. People don't care because it's just videogames.

Clearly they do. It's been making the rounds online for the past few days and now even made it to the top of HN.

I don’t want my taxes poured all over this Your taxes are already poured all over things you don't care about, and things that are ridiculous expenses.

There's no incentive to keep a game alive after the server costs outlive the monthly income generated. Only a handful of games have been kept alive out of pure preservation or low cost (or in some cases, because the publishers just forgot about it).

Regulation might be necessary since in the last 8 years of gaming, less and less games have been able to be preserved. And we had had outrageous examples like, The Crew, where fans have been able to reverse engineer an analogue to Ubisoft's servers in less than a year. Ubisoft have no incentive, so maybe it is time they are forced to.

is regulation really the answer?

What other alternatives are there when the market has clearly demonstrated that it's not going to regulate itself in favor of the customers?

The initial direction of the campaign was to investigate whether or not this was legal at all. The short version is - they refuse to answer and sidestep the question.

Here's a video where Ross got a chance to directly ask the EU about the legality of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-g1_nZKC-k

Is it a property though? You are buying a non-exclusive revocable license for specific piece of software, it's not an NFT. You don't own anything, you only get permission to use thing you paid for in a set of specific circumstances. Usually it is written somewhere in the license agreement.

Vote with your money.

This does not work with video games, unless you were a whale to begin with. Whales spend magnitudes more money on games than the average players [1]. Companies know this and exploit this weakness in the human psychology.

Just because you decided to not buy a game for $60, that will not stop a whale from dropping thousands and more.

[1]: https://sg.news.yahoo.com/whales-games-genshin-impact-compet...

I absolutely support that, but you need to differentiate a bit.

If a game has a functioning single player and a company chooses to shutdown multiplayer/matchmaking after some time I think that's fair. Sure, it would be nicer if the servers were open sourced or an alternative was provided, but at least there is some way to still play.

However, there are also games that only have multiplayer - here a company can just take away your ability to play the game completely. A prominent recent example is "The Crew".

It's also not 100% clear when buying, "The Crew" certainly had a large story aspect to it and it wasn't common in 2014 for such games to be "always online". It's quite a difficult path to find a solution to all of this as we can't force companies to operate servers indefinitely; on the other side we are loosing consumer rights and history.

No, thank you, I am tired of EU regulations.

Okay fine then, abolish the copyright laws that forcibly prevent us from solving the problem ourselves. This is like expecting full rights to a patent with none of the responsibility of publicly documenting your innovation. Make it legal to leak the source code of abandoned games.

Vote with your money is by definition an approval of oligarchy, not democracy. It is appalling it is so common a refrain nowadays. People with more money shouldn't necessarily get more say in our society's norms. You are free to your opinion but when you say that people should vote with their money one whale is going to come along and swamp your "vote" 100x. Your opinion should be just as valid as theirs not less because they spend more. If I got it wrong and you're the whale then I just hope you can have some empathy.

Launchers aren't necessarily a problem when they are held to reasonable standards on data privacy, refunds, and durability among others. There is unique value that they can offer which is typically lessened by not being interoperable with one another. Many of the norms were hard won via EU and other national regulations. On the other hand, far too many companies want a piece of the data pie without even attempting at interoperability and egress. The Helldivers 2 debacle is an indication that clearly something is wrong.

The markets are still highly polluted with things that should be a violation of our norms even though things are getting better.

You're making grandiose claims that are obviously uninformed.

"This petitioner" Ross Scott is fighting remote kill-switches in games. Here's a recent video, but listening in should be enough https://www.accursedfarms.com/posts/dead-game-news/dead-game... Even if the outcome of all of this is merely correct labeling, it will be a win in his view.

What's important is setting a precedent that no, it's not fine to take money for something that will only work until a box somewhere in the world is turned on if you won't say how long you will keep that box on.

It stops being their property when they sell it. They keep owning the IP, but not the individual copy. Anything else is just someone coming to your house and stealing something you bought back.

Basic property rights are not up for negotiation.

Because it comes from gamers and people concerned about preservation of games. Why broaden it if the people who are pushing for the initiative don't care about other stuff?

Software is in fact eternal. Maxwell’s Equations of Software (Lisp) is still a thing to this day [1]. Even for software designed for arcane architectures. You can simulate the Apollo Guidance Computer and its software today [2], which got people on the Moon. Technological progress must never come at the expense of people's rights.

[1]: https://github.com/jart/sectorlisp [2]: https://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/

WTF are you talking about? I played SimCity for DOS just the other day through an emulator. Easy as pie. It's only be going out of your way to make it hard to emulate by unnecessarily depending on an online infrastructure that you kill archivability.

This isn't aimed at MMOs. It's aimed at games like Super Mario Run on my phone, which is totally single player and refuses to start up half the time until it spends 10 minutes downloading hundreds more megabytes of "updates" that don't seem to change the game at all.

I am certain I won't be able to play Super Mario Run 20 years from now, despite having paid good money for it, unless Nintendo happens to in their benevolence allow me to re-buy a reissue of it again. Super Mario World from 1993 on the other hand, plays perfectly, and there is a cottage industry of nostalgic streamers competing for better and better times speedrunning it.

That's what this is about. Being able to play a classic game from 30 years ago with your grandkids, just as you can watch a classic movie.

FYI if I click play nothing happens. Also not clear how to get the game on iOS (I love a good advance wars-like game)

"Stop Destroying Games" is a much better title. (Third link)

I thought this was about violence in video games the first time I clicked.

I think this is slightly less common for general software. But I remember some cases of old software failing to install because the online DRM servers were taken offline.

The issue is that I might like them, but someone shuts down a server that does nothing more than check my license and I can't even play it offline.