One YouTuber’s Quest For Political Action To Preserve Old Video Games

In all of the posts we have done on the topic of video game preservation, I have often made the point that it’s probably long past time that there be some sort of political action to address the real or potential disappearance of cultural output that is occurring. The way this works far too often is that a publisher releases a game that is either an entirely online game, or an offline game that requires backend server calls or connections to make it work. People by those games. Then, some time down the road, the publisher decides supporting the game is no longer profitable and shuts the servers down on its end, disappearing the purchased game either completely, or else limiting what was previously available. Those that bought or subscribed to the game are left with no options.

Well, one YouTube channel is attempting to generate some political action to combat all of this, using Ubisoft’s The Crew game as its muse for doing so.

Ross Scott, who runs Accursed Farms, posted a 31-minute video on the channel, which outlines the problem and how he believes drawing attention to The Crew’s April 1 shutdown could cause governments to enact greater consumer protections for people who purchase online games. As laid out in the video, consumer rights for these situations vary in different countries. France, however, has some pretty robust consumer laws, and Ubisoft is based there.

“This isn’t really about The Crew or even Ubisoft,” Scott says in the video. “It’s about trying to find a weak link in the industry so governments can examine this practice to stop publishers from destroying our games.”

You can watch the entire video for yourself below.

With The Crew, millions of copies of the game were played around the world. When Ubisoft delisted the game late last year, the game became unplayable. On top of that, because of copyright law, it would be illegal for fans to keep the game alive themselves by running their own servers, even assuming they had the source code necessary to do so. So fans of the game who still want to play it are stuck.

In addition to the videos, Scott has also spun up the Stop Killing Games website and campaign. There, Scott is attempting to do what many would say is impossible: get the gaming public to take collective action around the world. By promoting not just awareness of the culture-killing aspect of all of this, but also providing information and quick links as to how people can take political action tailored to their country’s laws, the idea is that the gaming community make enough noise so as to no longer let our representatives ignore the problem.

The Stop Killing Games’ end goal is that governments will implement legislation to ensure the following:

• Games sold must be left in a functional state
• Games sold must require no further connection to the publisher or affiliated parties to function
• The above also applies to games that have sold microtransactions to customers
• The above cannot be superseded by end user license agreements

I’d love to hear an argument from someone as to how any of this is unreasonable. It’s as good a method for combatting the “you don’t own what you’ve bought” trend in video games as I’ve come across. Essentially, publishers can’t architect games in such a way so as they can be ripped away from buyers when the publisher or developer is tired of supporting them and wants to move on to something else. The only thing I’d add, so as to not make all this too arduous for publishers, is that fans should be granted code access and rights to run their own servers in the event the publisher no longer wants to. Scott’s plan instead calls for online games to be architected so that they must be run on fan-servers.

Regardless of the route this ends up going, the point is that games, otherwise known as cultural output, cannot simply be yoinked out of the universe at the pleasure of the publisher.

“If we win, can you imagine how good it will feel in the future knowing all your games are safe and you only have to think about whether you like the game or not,” Scott says. “That’s my vision of gaming for the future. It’s a little different than the industry’s. And if we lose, we’ll at least get told straight to our faces that, in a democracy, you can never own video games that you pay for, no matter how many people want that to happen. I guess this will be a civics lesson.”

If game preservation is something you care about, go check out the video and website. Even if you don’t care about video games specifically, you might still consider advocating for cultural preservation via the site anyway. After all, there is nothing that says the antics of the gaming industry won’t be replicated to other forms of media in the future.