How to Save Your Video Games ► Ludology Now! ft. Ross Scott

You don’t own most of your games. You own a license to play the game, but that license can be revoked at any time. If you live in America you probably also signed away your right to challenge this using anything other than an arbiter in California, thanks to EULAs. This is how companies like Activision or Rockstar can issue lifetime bans to accounts, preventing players from accessing anything previously purchased. This is also how a company like Ubisoft can attempt to get away with shutting down servers for The Crew, a game players paid money for and can now no longer access.

“The analogy I make is to something like Uber. When that first came on the scene it wasn’t clear, ‘Wait, is this a taxi service? Employees or contractors?’ The law just wasn’t prepared for this kind of situation, and I think it’s very similar in video games.“

That’s Ross Scott, creator of Accursed Farms, the mega-popular Freeman’s Mind video series, and Ross’ Game Dungeon, among other projects. For the past few years, Scott has been spending an increasingly large amount of time focused on something else: the Stop Killing Games campaign. The extremely short version is that, just by signing a petition (links below), you can help get a law passed that says you get to keep the games you buy. Below is a slightly longer, but still very short, explanation from Scott.

Games preservation is something I am deeply invested in, and that includes preserving upcoming titles as well as old ones. Recently, I spoke with Scott over video call to discuss the Stop Killing Games campaign, the progress that’s been made so far, and what we as players can do to help. Portions of that conversation, edited for clarity, appear throughout this column, along with some (but not nearly all) of Scott’s videos on the subject.

End-Of-Life Planning For Games

Every country and/or region has different consumer protection laws. Publishers from all over the world have hung players out to dry in the past, but Ubisoft is a French company. That’s why The Crew specifically is a perfect target for the Stop Killing Games campaign— consumer protection laws in France are much more strict than they are in places like the US.

“I did a lot of research trying to find any openings I could internationally, with the idea being that, if a major country decided this wasn’t a lawful practice, that could probably change the entire industry. The amount of work and cost it takes to add an end-of-life plan to a game from the design period onward (as in, the game hasn’t even been made yet) is relatively negligible in the overall scheme of things.”

The “end-of-life plan” Scott mentions is the core of what the Stop Killing Games campaign is all about. It’s not asking developers to support games indefinitely and infinitely, it’s just asking for them to still be playable once the company decides to move on. And if they legally have to do that in one part of the world, they might as well just do it for everyone.

“If a major country would ban sales of this [theoretical] game unless they had an end-of-life plan, it would be the cheaper option for the companies to just have it rather than lose out all the sales in that region. And this has actually happened before. In Australia, where Valve didn’t allow refunds of games, the Australian government sued them over that. Valve lost, and then afterwards they rolled out refunds globally. So I think it’d be a similar strategy.”

The Stop Killing Games campaign isn’t asking for all games to retain 100% of all their features after developers withdraw support. Scott says they worked hard on the wording of the government petitions to give maximum flexibility to the developers and publishers on just exactly how this end-of-life support should be included. All the petition asks for is for the games to be left in a “reasonably functional state.”

“The thing is, in order to get more specific than that and still solve the problem, that would put even more burden on the developers… if we’re asking for 100% of all features now, that’s a bigger ask than reasonably playable. Because now you’re asking for matchmaking or social network stuff that might have been extra. If we’re asking for a fully functional server software, well, maybe they don’t want to do that. And they’d rather just patch it so that the client can keep the server software in-house. We’re not asking for source code.“

What We Can Do To Help Save Games

It’s a good plan, and one which has already seen a lot of support. However, the petition in the EU still, at the time of writing, needs 500,000+ signatures. The petition in the UK has passed the first threshold of 10,000 signatures, which means the government will give an opinion on it, but it will take 90,000+ more to bring the issue to Parliament.

SIGN THE STOP KILLING GAMES EU PETITION

HELP SAVE GAMES

Hence the purpose of this week’s spotlight – people need to be signing these petitions; specifically, people in the EU and/or UK need to be signing them. As an American citizen I can’t sign them myself, but given the surprisingly global reach of Bonus Action and these Ludology Now! columns, I can at least tell people about it.

“Obviously it’s not as serious as many other issues, but I see this like a minor tragedy. Like I said in one of my videos, to me, seeing these games shut down, it evokes the exact same reaction as if somebody were to walk into a museum and set fire to a painting. I look at it pretty much the same way.“

SIGN THE STOP KILLING GAMES UK PETITION

HELP SAVE GAMES

The Stop Killing Games Campaign needs your help. If you’re in the US, tell your friends. Share this article, share any and all of the many videos Ross has made. If you’re in the UK or the EU, sign the petitions above AND share them. If you have ideas, join the official Stop Killing Games Discord and tell people about them. This isn’t just about The Crew, this is about every game that could be saved in the future. That’s worth a little bit of effort, isn’t it?