Ross Scott is the founder of the Stop Killing Games movement and makes video game-related videos.
The “Stop Destroying Videogames” citizens’ initiative is asking for something most customers take for granted: that when you buy something, you are entitled to keep it.
Most video games work indefinitely, but the industry is pushing a paradigm shift where a game’s functioning is completely dependent on a publisher continuing to support it. This has led to customers owning nothing, nor even being informed when what they paid for will expire.
The blatant unfairness of this practice has led over 1.4 million citizens to sign the initiative. The message is in the title: They want publishers to stop destroying customers’ video games.
The problem has become a threat to the medium itself: An informal study showed that games with an online requirement get effectively destroyed about 70% of the time, with the industry doing nothing to allow (or actively preventing) customers from retaining their purchase in 97% of instances.
What is happening is planned obsolescence under a new banner. The industry sometimes justifies this practice by saying games sold to customers are now services, not products, but that rings hollow; services inform you how long they can be accessed. The same is not true of the vast majority of games requiring a connection to the publisher.
If they are indeed services, this would be akin to an insurance company selling a policy not for one year or two, but for an undisclosed length of time that can end whenever the seller wishes.
It is currently unclear how legal this practice even is. The licence of almost every game that requires a connection to the publisher contains terms like “can terminate at any time for any reason.”
When asked about the legality of this, the EU Commission claimed it was possible that this violated the law, however existing remedies only refer to the “duration of the contract”, but most game licences typically have no stated duration, only that they “can terminate at any time.” One lawyer has called the current law on this “unfit for purpose.”
The industry has many excuses for why it finds this practice to be necessary. They are reminiscent of the auto industry’s excuses from the 1960s for why cars should not be required to have seatbelts, arguing they would stop selling cars in certain markets if such a law was passed. It was a bluff back then, as it is now.
This is especially the case as the costs associated with providing an “end of life” plan for a game can be a rounding error for many companies, particularly if planned for from the start. In fact, most video games already do this, but even those that don’t typically have a testing environment for the development of their game, which could easily serve as a basis for an “end of life” version.
Finally, the excuse that publishers will lose intellectual property rights is patently untrue. Companies write their own terms in their licence agreements. All commercial video games have to sell some rights simply for customers to be able to play the games in the first place.
The citizens’ initiative asks only that customers do not have the limited rights they were already sold taken away from them. Just as authors own the rights to their works, but cannot enter your home to repossess books you bought from them, the initiative is asking for the same of videogames.
It is the least for a customer to ask.
