This petition is part of the Stopkillinggames.com campaign led by Scott Ross (Accursed Farms), to end in Australia the practice of software licensors to render purchased software completely unusable at arbitrary points in time.
This petition closes relatively soon so please get the word out to your fellow mates.
It is only right that if a publisher wants to reap the immediate benefit of selling something digitally that they should then be responsible for maintaining owners access to that digital content. If they don't want to maintain it, release it on physical medium with offline play and eat that cost. No worthwhile product ships for free.
Universal compatibility is too much to ask of anyone imo but I agree that DRM free would be the absolute best possible solution. But compromise seems a necessity
Even if the legal conclusion ends up universally being, "own nothing and be happy", it will be a step up if any country can get games-as-a-service type software to display upfront an expiry date or minimum guaranteed usability date. People will be more informed in what they're actually getting, and companies can find ways to make their game usable for longer (like an offline mode or dedicated server self host file) so that they can avoid needing to put the date on.
It’s sad that that’s probably all we can hope for, but it is what it is. The playing field is not even remotely level. Fight and scrape just to get the bastards to be transparent about their thievery.
Yeah it likely is. For whatever reason it's only open for a handful of weeks so I'm trying to remind anyone that hasn't signed but wanted to or told their friends about it before it closes.