One of the realities of modern gaming is that your favorite game could become unplayable due to its servers or online support getting cut. A new petition is aiming to get new law(s) enacted that will prevent games from doing this and literally making your product unusable.
In the past year alone dozens of games have been taken offline or have become unplayable due to them requiring an online connection, or worse, are only playable online. A popular YouTuber and games preservation advocate, Ross Scott, is taking matters into his own hands to stop this.
If Scott’s name is familiar, that’s because he started the long-running YouTube webseries Freeman’s Mind. Now, Scott has helped plan and launch a European Union petition seeking 1 million signatures in the hopes of getting laws to ban the above practices by game developers or publishers.
If passed into law, the “European Citizens’ Initiative” would enable the following:
- Require video games sold to customers to be in a reasonably working state at the time of shutdown / end of support
- Prohibit any requirements for video games sold to customers to connect to the publisher or affiliated parties after support ends
- Require the above also apply to video games that sell assets or features (microtransactions) to customers
This is a very clear-cut proposition for law that would only seek to stop game developers or publishers from destroying games by making them unplayable.
What the new initiative would not require game developers or publishers to do includes:
- Require publishers to give up intellectual property rights
- Require publishers to give up source code
- Require endless support
- Require publishers to host servers
- Require publishers to assume liability for customers actions
- Interfere with business practices in any way while a game is still being supported
The key takeaway with the new proposal for consumer-friendly law is that if a game is taken offline it should remain playable in some state so the consumer actually keeps their product. This wasn’t as big of an issue before the digital era, back when every game sold was on physical media that you could keep forever.
Another goal with the initiative is if a game has online capabilities or is an online multiplayer-only game, fans could host their own servers after it’s taken offline from official servers. Some games were available for barely a year, like Babylon’s Fall (pictured above), only to become completely unplayable – even if you bought the game.
A very interesting goal with the initiative applies to free-to-play games that have microtransactions – things like skins or paid-for features. Since these are paid for with real money they are products that you legally should be able to keep owning, indefinitely, so keeping free games playable would be mandated.
Here’s a video from Scott explaining the anti-consumer practice in gaming, and how the initiative hopes to change that:
In the video Scott compares the practice of shutting down games by publishers or game developers to when movie studios used to burn their own films after they were done screening them, to recover the silver content for new film. All of those films are no longer available, the same way games have been made unplayable.
The European Citizens’ Initiative is part of Scott’s larger movement called Stop Killing Games, which the games preservationist has been advocating for some time now with publishers, to no avail according to his above video.
“Since I’ve started Stop Killing Games I want to say everyone I reached out to never responded,” Scott said. “So me reaching out doesn’t work, it’s a total failure rate.”
While Scott is an American citizen and ineligible to sign the EU petition, if passed into law in Europe it would likely mandate the same policies for games sold in the Americas, and elsewhere. The concern is the practice of making games unplayable is becoming so common, in the future we’ll truly own nothing and we’ll be expected to be happy with that.
“An increasing number of videogames are sold as goods, but designed to be completely unplayable for everyone as soon as support ends,” the campaign website states. “The legality of this practice is untested worldwide, and many governments do not have clear laws regarding these actions. It is our goal to have authorities examine this behavior and hopefully end it, as it is an assault on both consumer rights and preservation of media.”
The petition has a year to get a million signatures and even if they manage to secure that much support – it doesn’t guarantee the proposal will become law. However, it’s an easy win for politicians and they wouldn’t have to do much work to structure the law, it would simply be a blanket ban on making games unusable as products that consumers own.
