Ross Scott Gets A Second Chance For His ‘Stop Killing Games’ Crusade
from the second-chances dept
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- The above cannot be superseded by end user license agreements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.
Filed Under: preservation, ross scott, stop killing games, video games
Comments on “Ross Scott Gets A Second Chance For His ‘Stop Killing Games’ Crusade”
I wonder…if a games company were sued under a class action lawsuit for making purchased games unplayable, would it be possible to demand said game’s source code as part of a settlement, or a subpoena?
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You couldn’t demand the source code through a subpoena unless the source code proved something in the case and even then, it wouldn’t be disclosed directly to the plaintiffs, but to the lawyers and maybe experts who would analyze it.
You could ask for the source code to be released as part of a settlement, but that’s only if you win or have a strong likelihood of winning or at least costing the company enough in legal fees to make it worth settling.
The court likely wouldn’t award it in a victory though. If a company was bankrupted by the cost of the loss, they would sell off the property (including source code) to pay off debtors and not necessarily to anyone associated with the case. You might just have a different owner of the source code that has no obligation towards the players.
The primary issue with this is that the company owns the code and can do what it likes. The consumers rights angle and the concept of a purchase vs a license doesn’t really touch the ownership of the code at all.
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I reckon that’s also why the initiative makes it clear it isn’t trying to transfer ownership of any kind; simply that a product that a consumer spent money on is left in a reasonably functional state.
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Ross Scott did look into trying to get countries to enforce existing laws to keep games operational. Class action lawsuits were never discussed and people gave him advice that left him thinking that legal action in the US is unlikely to go anywhere. So there is probably some reason why a class action lawsuit isn’t worth the cost to attempt it.
The only hope for preserving games in the US seems to be wins elsewhere in the world that cover enough people that publishers can’t afford to abandon those countries.
There are efforts to use consumer protection laws of other countries to preserve the games we bought. Those are separate from the petition to change EU law and could give us a big enough win even if the petition fails.
Is a strawman.
Strawman Argument
Who’s going to be the one to point out the obvious bullshit straw man argument to them? “Games sold must be left in a functional state” is not equivalent to “continue server support indefinitely.” This is just a pathetic attempt to make it sound impossible.
You could make sure you can still play in an offline capacity with local hosting. You could make sure you can do offline matchmaking with your friends without a central server. You could release the server software so people can run it themselves and allow the clients to connect to it.
There’s a multitude of ways to keep a game playable in some capacity. Running servers is only ONE way – and even that can work if you leave it to the community (see City of Heroes: Homecoming.) It’s amazing what a community will do for fucking free, if you just give them a god damn chance – but Nintendo and their Ilk are not exactly famous for embracing public participation.
Well over a hundred years of copyright isn’t enough for the copyright industry; they want the power to terminate access at any point before that. I loathe the copyright industry and their lobbyists. They are a cancer on society.
“Video Games Europe” is mostly constituted of major American publishers
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And what has that to do with the price of melamine eggs in China?
Oh boy internet drama with Pirate Software… I really hope this takes off and people just ignore Thor, honestly.
draws unnecessary MS Paint doodle unrelated to comment
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Looking at the titles of videos Youtube recommends to me, it seems that this drama has got people looking closer at Pirate Software. They are finding things that have them making videos with titles that sound like he’d be doing better if they had ignored him.
But that’s just the titles. I haven’t watched the videos.
The EU is repsonsible for a lot of things
The legislation getting up in the EU regarding games would affect markets worldwide. Same with USB standards and whatnot.
Abandoned gaming communities
There are people running games on privately funded servers who have thousands of hours in games that have been abandoned by their creators. Rye Games covers them some are for people who don’t have any other social support or memorials for people who have died.
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Yes, some games have private servers. But those do take significant work to reverse engineer the server, unless the devs release that information.
For what it’s worth, it’s not like Ross Scott is an expert in campaigning either – hell, he explicitly said in one of his recent videos that he thinks he’s the wrong person to head a campaign like this, but he’s the only one that stepped up at the right time, due to being passionate on the issue. He’s expecting to end his involvement entirely once all options are exhausted.
I’m just happy that the alarm that the EU petition might fail supercharged it instead.
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He even admitted that he might have taken the wrong approach when responding to Pirate Software. For most of the year, his responses were trying to avoid drama.
Then he got to the point where all the promises of support from various companies had fallen through and the petition looked likely to fail. That was when he made his point by point response to Pirate Software.
The drama seems to be what led to this surge in signatures.
It’s because of issues like this that I have never purchased a Steam Deck, but would purchase such a platform if it were released by GOG.