Someone named Accursed Farms made a long, but detailed video about games as a service is evil. Thoughts?
Accursed Farms is Ross Scott, who I’ve linked on my blog in the past! Particularly regarding his work about discussing the legality of shutting down online games so they cannot be played anymore.
I watched this video last night, but I’ll admit, it took me most of the night to get through. Ross admits its pretty dry, and it is, but it’s necessary in order to get his point across.
That point, as I understood it, is basically that game publishers are getting away with fraud by classifying games as a service instead of as a product. There’s a hard legal distinction to be made between the two, as one carries certain legal protections that the other does not.
Ross’s point here is that when an online game gets its servers shut down with way to ever recover the game back to a playable state, it’s a form of theft, because you bought and paid for a product, which is being taken away from you.
Publishers and developers, on the other hand, are swearing up and down that these games are a service, and as such, are subject to the limitations natural to a service. Services can be canceled and revoked.
Ross spends a lot of the video defining what a service is as a means of drilling down to why exactly this is a bad thing, how companies like Electronic Arts are essentially lying about their terminology and how that actually could be super illegal.
He also touches on just how easy it would be for companies to avoid future problems if they’d just give fans ways to keep the games alive through server emulators and whatnot. This is particularly relevant now, given there’s a lot of dust being kicked up over a potential revival of the City of Heroes MMO.
There’s a long story behind that one, but essentially, a group of fans reverse engineered the City of Heroes server software and have been operating in secret for over half a decade, largely out of fear of being sued by the parent company that owns City of Heroes, NCSoft. That’s because NCSoft has a history of shutting down fan-made server emulators, even if they have no plans to run the game themselves. By Ross’s definition, that could be illegal.
Ross now seems to be speaking with an actual lawyer about the issue to clarify things further.
I like Ross. I’m glad he’s hammering on the issue of planned obsolescence like this, because I think its an important thing to do. It would be nice if something was done about it. I don’t know that anything will be done, because some of these companies are slippery snakes, but it would be nice regardless.
