Video Games Europe has explained their opposition to the Stop Killing Games movement.
The Stop Killing Games describes itself as “a consumer movement started to challenge the legality of publishers destroying video games they have sold to customers.” They have been bringing complaints to various consumer agencies, and also petitioned for new laws for this goal. We reported last year on their petition being rejected by the UK.
They currently have an open petition to the EU, currently with 1,314,272 signatories. If there are enough valid signatories, the EU will eventually make their comment to it. However, an industry lobby named Video Games Europe expressed their opposition to the petition, stating that “these proposals would curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create.”
As reported by Dexerto, Video Games Europe has now shared a more detailed explanation of their position. You can read the five page document here, but we’ll share our summary of its salient points.
Video Games Europe says this:
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. It will have a chilling effect on game design, and act as a disincentive to making such games available in Europe.
It is far from a trivial modification or a simple addition to the game development phase. It would ignore material reputational, safety, and security concerns.
Video Games Europe also asserts that Stop Killing Games’ desire to add requirements to provide online services for as long as a consumer wants them, and to provide a very specific form of end-of-life plan where the game is altered to enable private servers to operate, are not proportionate demands. They argue that online video games are being designed in a way that they have an interconnected dependency with its online features.
But from our understanding, their real argument is that there are other factors to making online video games that Stop Killing Games did not know about or haven’t considered. In our summary:
- Game companies have legal obligations to protect consumers that they cannot secure if they give access to online systems to the public
- It will be more technically challenging and expensive to produce online games in such a way that they can stay online indefinitely, even if fans take over with their own servers
- They may lose some of their intellectual property rights
- They may be tied up by legal obligations with other companies, such as their webhosts
We recommend readers go through the actual document to understand Video Games Europe’s arguments in full, if they wished to engage with them. Whether you agree with these arguments or not, Video Games Europe has made public the arguments that they will make to oppose the EU petition. It won’t do Stop Killing Games as a movement any good to dismiss these arguments outright, misrepresent them, or to engage with them in bad faith.
For now, we’ll have to wait and see what the EU’s response will be, but if Stop Killing Games is ready to argue their case, so is EU’s video game lobby.
