Stop Killing Games, the initiative dedicated to preventing game termination and subsequent inaccessibility, has made its case for getting new regulation in the European Parliament, and the message seems to have been heard.
Committee vice chair Nils Ušakovs summarised the 45-minute Stop Killing Games hearing (available to watch in full on YouTube) nicely when he said: “Today we’ve had the opportunity to understand directly from the organisers, experts and stakeholders about various challenges that arise when video games become unplayable after sale due to discontinued services or disabled access. This initiative highlights a real concern for millions and, as far as we understand from the presentations, probably hundreds of millions of European citizens, ensuring that digital purchases remain functional and that consumer rights are respected in the evolving digital landscape.”
Ušakovs and the other chairs pledged to continue their work in investigating this issue. European Commission director Giuseppe Abbamonte, who’s a copyright lawyer, said he’d look into copyright regulations that aren’t adequately covering the area and report his findings in July. Overall, it was a very favourable response.
Stop Killing Games founder Ross Scott was part of a team of people related to the “Stop Destroying Games” project that petitioned its way into the European Parliament with more than 1 million European citizen signatures. Scott very calmly and eloquently laid out the main beats of the initiative’s purpose. “I’d like to clarify what it means to destroy a game,” Scott began. “When we say a game has been destroyed, what we mean is a publisher has permanently disabled all copies of it that have been sold so no one can ever play them again.”
This issue relates to games attached to publishers via online services, which cannot then independently exist when publishers end support for whatever reason. Concord is an example Scott used in the European Parliamentary hearing, and The Crew is the which subsequently triggered the Stop Killing Games movement when it was shut down. Other examples from this year include Highguard and Anthem. This isn’t a new phenomenon but it is a growing one.
“If you bought a book in a store, the publisher cannot come into your home and take back your book at will” -Ross Scott
The problem is multi-faceted but boiled down, it relates to people no longer having access to something they’ve paid for, and having no leverage to do anything about it because licence agreements they’ve agreed to have reserved the right for a service to be terminated at any time for any reason. “What this means is customers have no real protections when they buy games like these,” Scott said. “They are unable to keep them and they’re not informed when they will end.
“This behaviour would be outrageous in other industries,” Scott continued. “If you bought a book in a store, the publisher cannot come into your home and take back your book at will. If you bought an insurance policy, you would be informed when that policy ends, not that the seller could end it at any time for any reason but still keep your money.
“The games being sold this way are operating similar to scams. Publishers know customers expect video games to last, so they sell these in the same ways as ones that can work forever, as a one-time purchase with no expiry date and price them the same.” Were publishers to inform us when they planned to disable a game, it would of course reduce sales of that game, Scott argued, “since the longevity of a game affects how much customers are willing to pay”.
“The industry is trying to have it both ways,” Scott said, “trying to find ways to say they’re selling you a game that they’re not selling you. This creates confusion for everyone involved and it’s part of the reason why it’s taking customers to get exposure on this practice.”
Nearly every time a publisher ends support for a game, it disables access to the game in the process. Scott shared a startling statistic showing that out of 400 titles, 93.5 percent of them were disabled when support ended. “This business practice is responsible for more destruction to the medium than anything else by an enormous margin,” Scott said.
“This initiative welcomes any solution that will solve the problem of video games being destroyed on this scale. We want this to be as easy and practical as possible for all parties involved and are very open to how that is achieved. We are not even asking publishers to change their business or monetisation models, only that once they end support, they do so in a responsible way. Our only goal is to prohibit this destructive practice and thus obtain basic protections for consumers and the medium as a whole,” Scott concluded.
Bravo, Scott and the rest of the Stop Killing Games ensemble. Also, shout out to Dutch MEP Catarina Vieira for a passionate and amazingly video-game-reference-dense statement made during the MEP questions segment. It’s thrilling to see people represent games in a place like the European Parliament with such apparent understanding and passion for them.
