Video Game Preservation: Saving Yesterday’s Games for Tomorrow’s Players | Ars Live
This week, Ars hosted a live discussion with Ross Scott about the Stop Killing Games movement and its ongoing efforts to ensure that games remain playable even after the original publisher shuts down the online servers undergirding them.
Scott talked with Ars Technica Senior Gaming Editor Kyle Orland, saying said he felt the situation around long-term game access was already “intolerable a decade and a half ago” and that he “kept hoping someone else would kick this off, [someone] more experienced or knowledgeable, but it felt like nothing was happening.” Scott said he felt making the effort to organize a movement against the practice was like “[drawing] the short straw on this, essentially.”
During the conversation, Scott noted how the standard practice of shutting down game access for any reason, at any time, with minimal notice, would seem ludicrous in other areas of life:
Let’s say… the plan was to shut down [a game] in five years if it didn’t do well. That needs to be communicated then, if you want to go down that road, because this manner of things doesn’t really apply to other goods and services. Compared to, let’s say you got… a warranty for a product, and it doesn’t tell you a year or two; it just tells you, ‘Well, we’ll tell you when it expires.’ Or an insurance policy: ‘Yeah, we’ll tell you when your insurance policy expires.’ Like that would trip up other laws than that.
From the technical side, Scott said that when a publisher plans ahead for the end of an online game, the costs to transition to third-party servers can often be minimal:
I think many developers will back me up on this, that if you’re planning for this from the beginning, where that’s an established requirement, we need to have some way to run this game at end of life, while you’re designing it. As I understand it, the cost can be extremely low then because it comes down to developing the game differently rather than having to have all these additional costs.
Because even online, most online-only games, as I understand it, have what are called local test environments. Because let’s say it does depend on Amazon servers to host their game, but there’s an interruption, or it’s down for a while, or there’s incompatibility that they missed. Well, then you don’t want all your development to come to a standstill because of that. So you usually have to have some version of the server that’s operational that you can kind of keep testing. If they already have that, that’s half the battle right there.
Scott also said he has been disappointed by the way the EU Parliament has handled the movement’s concerns so far, but he remains hopeful for action in the near future:
One of the biggest problems we faced on this is so many governments and ruling bodies aren’t sure how the law applies to this. So I figured, OK, if we can have a million people coming to the EU commission saying, ‘Hey, please resolve this.’ Even if they don’t agree with it, clarify the law on this. Like, do we have protections on this? I thought, OK, they’ll look at that and they’ll settle it one way or the other. Nope.
Instead, they managed to just dodge it in every way and say, “Oh, yeah, we’ll let the courts in each country handle this, even though our part of our job is to harmonize policy across the member states.” In my opinion, they’re not doing their job. Not because they disagree with us but because of their charter for this.
But during that time, all the attention from that helped us to gather a lot of support and attention from EU Parliament. And they’ve been very favorable to what we’re trying to do. And right now, we’re scheduled, so far so good, to get included into the Digital Fairness Act, which, it’s a complete coincidence, but it happens to cover many issues that we’re practically a perfect fit for.
Kyle OrlandSenior Gaming Editor
Kyle OrlandSenior Gaming Editor
Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.
