A little over a year ago we discussed YouTuber Ross Scott’s attempt to build political action around video game preservation. Scott started a campaign and site called Stop Killing Games when Ubisoft shut down support for The Crew, rendering this game that people bought unplayable. The goal of the site was to build political action among gamers by contacting lawmakers in various countries and/or signing petitions for political action based on the following concepts:
The Stop Killing Games’ end goal is that governments will implement legislation to ensure the following:
- Games sold must be left in a functional state
- Games sold must require no further connection to the publisher or affiliated parties to function
- The above also applies to games that have sold microtransactions to customers
- The above cannot be superseded by end user license agreements
I was very much a fan of this. As someone who has advocated for greater efforts towards game preservation only to watch everyone do little to nothing about it, this seemed like a real step towards building political action around a framework that is very hard to argue against.
Unfortunately, after its launch, the campaign languished. Adoption was low and slow, which is how you want to cook your smoked ribs, but definitely not what you want for political activity. Scott said as much in a video a couple of weeks ago, in which he attempted to tackle the reason that the campaign didn’t pick up much steam.
In it, Scott laid out why he thought the initiative has run out of steam and was failing, laying no small part of the blame at the feet of fellow YouTuber Jason “Thor” Hall, a former Blizzard developer more commonly known by his indie studio pseudonym Pirate Software. Scott accused Hall of leveraging the latter’s big viewership to misinterpret and spread falsehoods about the “Stop Killing Games” initiative, in part by casting it as naïve and unworkable in the modern gaming landscape where always-online and server-centric releases are flopping all the time.
It wasn’t the first time Scott and Hall went into a tit-for-tat post-and-response spree on YouTube, but it may have been the most beneficial for the “Stop Killing Games” movement. Scott’s video, which elicited a fresh round of debate from Hall, netted over 750,000 views. More importantly, other big names started chiming in. Content personality Charles “Critikal” White Jr. posted about the topic in a June 24 video that hit over 2 million views, with the entire exchange becoming ripe for YouTube’s algorithm-fueled drama industrial complex.
The end result is that Scott is getting a second chance at this. And I am very much hoping that it goes much better this time, because there is obviously a decent amount of interest out there among the gaming public for this sort of thing. This battle of ideas has resulted in over a million signatures for an initiative in the EU, along with other methods for getting involved.
In fact, it was enough that Video Games Europe, a lobbying group there, decided to put out a response to the petition. You can go read the entire thing for yourself if you like, but I really wouldn’t waste your time. It’s the typical lobbying pablum. In fact, it mostly sidesteps the entire idea of fans running their own servers if gaming companies don’t want to bother.
“As rightsholders and economic entities, video games companies must remain free to decide when an online game is no longer commercially viable and to end continued server support for that game. Imposing a legal obligation to continue server support indefinitely, or to develop online video games in a specific technical manner that will allow permanent use, will raise the costs and risks of developing such games,” the lobbying group claims. It also states that companies are already committed to “serious professional efforts to preserve video games.”
It lists companies investing in their own video game collections as one such effort, linking to Embracer’s private archive. What could be more reassuring than leaving the fate of preservation in the hands of one of the most ill-fated, acquisition-fueled gaming conglomerates in the industry?
That’s essentially what we’ve been doing to date and it’s completely failed to achieve anything remotely like real game preservation. So, sorry, but given the bargain that copyright is supposed to be with the public, and the complete negation of that bargain when a company that gets a copyright monopoly can suddenly disallow the game to ever go into the public domain through planned obsolescence, the status quo isn’t going to work.
Now, it’s very easy for me, someone who is not building a political action campaign around this topic, to tell someone like Scott that he needs to do better this time. But I’m going to do it anyway. I want this to work. I want the needle to move faster towards preservation of our gaming culture and towards the fulfillment of the copyright bargain with the public. So, please, let this go better this time around.