Sorry for the big disclaimer, but some people are just really fucking allergic to anything deeper than "ur mom gay lmao", and generally anything that doesn't align with the way they think the world is run or should be run
I absolutely sympathize with the basic frustration that Stop Killing Games is based on
It is a slap in the fact that you can spend money on a game, love it, depend on it, then wake up one day to find that it's been murdered by its own publisher
It's a betrayal of trust, a reputational disaster, and even a cultural tragedy if it is a historically significant game
I disagree with the solution proposed by Ross though
Pressuring the EU to mandate that publishers must provide "end-of-life" plans for games is dangerously wrong-headed, ethically and strategically
The tragedy is that the goal can be achieved without resorting to statist enforcement, but that requires an examination of the false frame first
The core assumption of the campaign is "If a game is sold under terms that allow the publisher to revoke access later, that term should be considered invalid."
Because it's "unfair", because it "defeats the reasonable expectations of the player", because it "kills preservation".
The problem is that the terms were in the contract. If someone clicked "I agree" to a license that said access may be revoked at any time, then what they purchased was a gamble, not a guarantee. It may be a dumb deal, but it was a voluntary one.
To Ross's credit, he doesn't argue for inventing new rules out of thin air, he points at existing EU consumer law which voids contract terms deemed "unfair"
That's valid on paper, you will not find anyone who agrees that every contract is binding - there absolutely are invalid contracts and invalid terms
But the devil is in the criteria
A contract is invalid if it involves coercion, fraud, mutual impossibility, or violation of property titles
But Ross and the EU twist this into a floating abstraction: "The clause is invalid if it's too lopsided, or if it violates what the average consumer expected."
That's not justice, that's populist paternalism
It's a way of saying "you're too dumb to read the TOS, so daddy government will rewrite it for you"
And it opens the door to making
any private agreement retroactively voidable if it proves unpopular enough
Now let's not forget why the games industry is a cartelized mess in the first place
There is a reason why DRM, service-side authentication, revokable licenses, and dependence on proprietary infrastructure exist
They're not some kind of market "inevitability", they are market distortions, and most of them are downstream of state intervention
To name just a few examples:
- Copyright law incentivizes centralized control and IP lockdowns, punishing preservation
- Licensing law creates artificial scarcity in digital distribution, limiting resale and modding
- Tax regimes and corporate compliance burdens push devs towards publisher-backed short lifecycle models to minimize liability
- The EU's own regulations create an environment where developers must lock things down to avoid future legal risks
And now the solution is supposed to be... ask that same coercive apparatus to rescue the consumer from the conditions they helped create?
That's like calling the arsonist to help put out a fire.
My proposed solution, or the answer to the question "then what should actually be done?", is a cultural and reputational shift
What that could look like is a combination of these things:
- Build reputational pressure
- Support projects that offer an open infrastructure
- Normalize piracy as the archival backstop
- Educate customers about revokable licenses
In detail:
Just like more intelligent gamers treat microtransactions and lootboxes with scorn, we need to do the same for games without proper archival paths. You don't need laws to create reputational risk. The community can push outlets to flag server-killable games prominently in reviews, add preservation risk warnings to digital storefronts, and create trustworthy developer lists and curators based on archival commitments
Games that allow LAN play, self-hosting, or modular modding deserve praise and money. We can promote design norms that voluntarily accommodate future preservation without legal compulsion. Buy from studios that support this, pirate from those who don't. Let market discipline sort them out.
When a dev refuses to keep a game alive, and no contractual fraud has occurred, then market actors still have disrespect as a last resort. DRM cracking and gray market archiving is ethically defensible when the original owner abdicates their own legacy. No need to pass a law, just act quietly, effectively, and without asking permission.
And most people don't understand what they're agreeing to. That is a tragedy, but it is also an opportunity. We needed clearer language, better consumer info, and maybe even standardized term indicators on games. Imagine a different indicator showing preservable / server-locked / DRM-encumbered. We don't need the EU to enforce that, all we need is communities and platforms to demand it.
I'm not gonna deny that Ross was right about the problem, namely that it is unjust that people lose access to what they pay for, it is cultural vandalism to let historic titles vanish forever, and it induces seethe to see companies yank products from people with no recourse. However, you don't fix broken market incentives by breaking the market further, you don't restore trust by handing more power to regulators, and you don't empower gamers by reinforcing the very consumer infantilization that created the problem in the first place.
The same bureaucrats who spent the last two decades turning tech into a permissions-based nightmare are not the ones who will stop games from being killed.
You will stop games from being killed by treating fragile, revokable products as radioactive. By torching reputations and praising better alternatives and refusing to fund bad design. All you need to win this "war" is a spine, not a law.
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