The “Stop Killing Games” campaign has hit a roadblock in the UK.
“Stop Killing Games” was started by YouTuber Ross Scott, with a video on his channel Accursed Farms. Scott argued that if gamers organized to file complaints for video game shut downs, they could force game companies from cancelling said shut downs. The proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back seems to have been the delisting of 2014 racing game The Crew.
As explained by IGN, the US itself has a legal precedent, ProCD, Inc. v. Zeidenbger, that allows companies to defer to End User License Agreements in situations like these. That means consumer complaints can’t necessarily compel the game companies to end those shut downs, at least in the legal sphere. But there’s a bit more behind that, of course.
In the 2000s, when an online game like Tabula Rasa or APB: All Points Bulletin was shut down, fans may be disappointed, but the idea that the companies can be forced to not cancel their games was not yet taken seriously. Destination Games and Realtime Worlds, the studios behind both games, went out of business after those games failed. So who would be around to pay to keep these games up?
The change in this attitude did come when the bigger game companies, like Ubisoft and Rockstar Games, started to make more online multiplayer games. While some games, such as the Call of Duty franchise, have servers still up to play even the oldest of those games, there are more of these games that have been taken down, even when the games were successful and had active player bases.
Now, more people felt the pain of missing online multiplayer games that were no longer online. The notion of video game preservation has also spread as part of gamer culture, which brings up ideas that future generations of players should get to play old games, even ones that are online only, as the only way to preserve that culture.
As reported by GamesIndustry.Biz, however, this movement is already facing a setback. After filing a government petition to “Require videogame publishers to keep games they have sold in a working state” and gathering 10,000 signatures, the UK government has made its mandated official response to the petition. The response says:
“Consumers should be aware that there is no requirement in UK law compelling software companies and providers to support older versions of their operating systems, software or connected products.
There may be occasions where companies make commercial decisions based on the high running costs of maintaining older servers for video games that have declining user bases.
If consumers are led to believe that a game will remain playable indefinitely for certain systems, despite the end of physical support, the [Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008] may require that the game remains technically feasible (for example, available offline) to play under those circumstances.”
So the UK government claims that if a game developer made some claim that their online game will stay online indefinitely, they could be held liable for UK law. But the current terms of the petition makes it unlikely to prosper.
If the petition reaches 100,000 signatures before the petition ends in October, the UK government will have to launch an investigation into it. So that’s where the movement goes next.
But it doesn’t seem like the movement has had better foresight to figure out how to actually leverage the movement to success in the first place. For example, why did this movement choose to go to governments instead of the game companies? And did they think through the ramifications of different legal regulations across different regions? It looks like they are just going to find out what they can and can’t accomplish at the same time we do.
