Interview with Ross Scott on the campaign to prevent publishers from destroying purchased games

The video game industry sits at an insidious nexus of profitable and technological; it makes shady decision-making lucrative and insulates those decisions from laws and legislators who are not up to speed on the state of the industry. What results is the slow encroachment of anti-consumer practices that find their way into being normal, even expected assaults on our intelligence and our rights as individuals. Everyone balked at Oblivion’s horse armor, but microtransactions are now the driving source of profit for gaming. Enter Ross Scott. Creator of Freeman’s Mind, Game Dungeon, and Civil Protection at his Youtube channel Accursed Farms, who’s set out to attack a much larger, more pervasive problem than the abuse of workforce and customer that we have all gotten used to: the active destruction of games themselves. Listen to our full interview for a greater breakdown of his initiative and the logic behind it, but if you do nothing else, visit stopkillinggames.com to find out how you can take action in your home country.

As exemplified in an Ubisoft official’s recent comment you need to start “feeling comfortable with not owning your game”, paying full purchase price for a product no longer guarantees access to that product, so long as the product in question is a video game. For now, at least; we are seeing software lockouts make their way into cars and home appliances, so who’s to say the practice won’t spread to medical devices like pacemakers as well? A game’s destruction can be built in from the start or a surprise later on, with no notice or recourse to the paying customer. Ross is not asking that publishers support games eternally. That would be costly and unreasonable. The only requirement that this initiative is working towards is some minimal playable state, so that your purchase doesn’t get destroyed, and the hard work of almost certainly underpaid artists does not get lost to time.

Ross’ motivation is first for that artistic principle and second out of concern for the consumer. It’s patently absurd that you can pay full price for something that can get taken out of your hands with no warning, but to Ross that doesn’t match up to the fact that beautiful, sometimes personal projects can be taken away from the public forever. The Crew is not the greatest game of all time, but its representation of driving the United States has some features that can’t be replicated, and as a single player game should not require connection to a central server, but as of April 1st is unplayable including to those who have already purchased it. The Crew offers an opportunity to force governments and agencies to examine this practice and consider new laws to prevent it.

The legality of Ubisoft’s outright theft is complicated. As it sells and operates in many countries, the status of rules are inconsistent. The United States views consumer protections as humorous claptrap, but the EU and Australia pose a better chance at making a change. With enough signatures on some of the countries featured in stopkillinggames.com, government agencies are REQUIRED to respond. The end goal is to create one of two outcomes: 1. Force a change to these practices, and ensure that a game has some version of playability after official support. This could mean releasing the server source code, allowing the game to be played offline, or (and this would be obvious) not designing a game’s destruction into its infrastructure from the start. 2. If nothing else, make the world governments say out loud, to our faces, that we have no rights to the products we pay for. Get it out in the open, and start working from there. The biggest reason these blatantly anti-consumer practices thrive is because of the ignorance of legislators or the bribery that allows them to rely on consumer ignorance. If nothing else, the world should be in a state where it is no longer ignorant of these encroaching assaults on the concept of ownership.

By rights, Ross should not be here, working on this issue. He’s a creative with a career of commentary on design and a movie that’s been burning a hole in his brain for years, but instead of devoting himself to those real passions, he’s organizing the community for an existential threat to gaming. As I alluded to earlier, this is just the greatest of a number of problems we’re becoming numb to, but we should not be resigned to having our rights taken away and our purchases stolen. Don’t stop being angry about the fact that publishers are releasing worse games that cost more and take longer to make all while telling you they have no choice but to abuse their workforce to create. All of those statements are lies. Abject, feckless bullshit sold to you so that you do nothing while people with proven histories of lying make fortunes off of gambling mechanics and outright theft. Gaming is profitable enough without also needing to squeeze every cent out of the product. No one needs to crunch their workforce for months to make money. No one needs to put an internet connected camera into your home to keep their game functioning. No one needs to destroy their output forever to keep the lights on. Stopkillinggames.com has step-by-step instructions for your country of origin, whether or not you own a copy of the Crew. If nothing else, spread the word. To your friends, to your local representatives, to anyone who will listen, enough has to be enough or it will only get worse. Individuals and collectives do have power to make change, something executives spend a lot of money and time trying to convince you isn’t true.

Watch our interview, take a look at the website, and take some action if you have time.

See below for our list of partners and affiliates: