This guy is a legend

Should video game publishers be allowed to disable games for you that you bought European Parliament hearing? This right here. So, we all know Aursed Farms, right, Scott? Like, this this is the guy. This dude has been out trying to push this for Stop Killing Games for literally When was the first video he did about this? I I just want y'all to see where it's at. So, where did it go longest? I I think maybe this is really the first one. Is that right here? um 2 years ago. Two years ago, he invested a lot of time and energy into this. And now, two years later, over a million signatures later, here he is in the European [ __ ] Parliament. That's right. I am the founder of the Stop Killing Games Consumer Movement, which has many shared goals with the initiative. I'd like to clarify what it means to destroy a video game. The second slide. When we say a game has been destroyed, what we mean is a publisher has permanently disabled all copies of it that have been sold so no one can ever play them again. It would be like removing every single copy of a book or film in existence, effectively erasing it from the culture. The way this practice works is first a publisher sells a copy of a video game. However, it has been designed so that it must connect to the publisher in order to function. True. This acts as a potential kill switch. The customer is also given no information when the game will stop working even though the publisher has decided to assume that responsibility. Then after an undisclosed length of time, the publisher disables all existing copies of the game but keeps the customer's money. Yep. The publisher also enacts counter measures to ensure repairing the game. Oh, sorry. that sure repairing the game is almost impossible even for experienced software professionals from this point onward no customer can ever run the purchase again. I think that's a really good point, right, is that it's not enough that they simply stop providing support. They also actively inhibit support. Besides destroying the game, this practice is also subverting customer expectations. Most video games can work indefinitely, which has been the customer standard for half a century, including ones that connect to the internet. Alternately, a small number of video games operate as subscription services, but those inform the customer exactly when their access ends at the time of payment. The games we're referring to do no such thing. Uh it's a bit of miscommunication. They almost always contain terms stating they can end at any time for any reason. What this means is customers have no real protections when they buy games like these. Exactly. They are unable to keep them and they are not informed when they will end. This behavior would be outrageous in other industries. If you bought a book in a store, the publisher cannot come into your home and take back your book at will. True. If you uh bought an insurance policy, you would be informed when that policy ends, not that the seller could end it at any time for any reason, but still keep your money. The games being sold this way are operating similar to scams. Publishers know customers expect video games to last, so they sell these in the same way as ones that can work forever, as a one-time purchase with no expiry date, then price them the same. Publishers know that if customers were informed exactly when they plan to disable their games, that would reduce sales since the longevity of a game affects how much customers are willing to pay. It's actually a very good point, too, that like the fact that they're withholding this information is basically correlated to them getting more sales. So, it's basically like it's another example of a seller withholding information from a buyer that would give the buyer a more educated understanding about their purchase. It's like another It's another form of like just malicious like bad faith behavior. It's a very good point. I didn't think of that. Industry is trying to have it both ways. Finding ways to say they're selling you a game that they're not selling you. Yeah. This creates confusion for everyone involved and is part of why it's taken customers so long to get exposure on this practice. Um the legality is also unsettled. Earlier, members of Parliament assisted us in asking questions uh to the EU Commission about how legal the terms and game license agreements were, especially being able to terminate them at any time for any reason. The commission stated directive 9313EC prohibits unfair terms causing a significant imbalance in the party's rights and obligations to the detriment of consumers. The commission also recommended consumers file complaints with businesses across member states through the European consumer centers network. In 2024, we had volunteers across the majority of EU countries submitting complaints against the French company Ubisoft for disabling the game The Crew. Yeah, remember that the responses we received from the ECC network were extremely inconsistent. Some officials said there was nothing they could do. Others said the company was required to run the game indefinitely, which is unrealistic, but the majority stated there was no clear regulation on this practice. Nobody knows. We were independently able to get thousands of complaints submitted to consumer agencies in France and Germany, but there still has been no decision on them on the legality either. To the best of our knowledge, no one in the EU has ever been compensated for this and hundreds of other titles. Never. In short, governments and EU countries are not sure how to handle this situation and customers are overwhelmingly not being compensated for the loss of their purchases. It is an ideal I hope that this is the beginning of the end for these malicious online video games like these games that basically scam you in like 10 different ways with like different currencies and [ __ ] like this. Like I think this needs to be like way way more regulated because and and this is the reason why I think it needs to be regulated is because it's being done deliberately to misuse the sorry to mislead the user. And I think that when you're in a commercial transaction and you do things that are meant to mislead the other party, you are engaging in bad faith behavior and that's not something that you can do ethically. So they're engaging in bad faith, unethical behaviors in order to get more money out of people by, for example, reframing all of the ways that they look at monetization as like crystals or coins or tokens or, you know, like primo gems or something like that. And meanwhile, uh, you know, people don't actually know how much money they're spending. There's no reason for that. It's not even games. This washes over to all digital goods. You're right. And this is the problem is that because the digital goods marketplace is evolving so fast that the legal marketplace and the legal ramifications of that are not keeping up and the result is a bunch of completely unfair, broken, badly designed and consumer unfriendly practices that aren't regulated because the industry is moving so fast situation for clear regulation. This is not a new practice. It started approximately 2005 and began negatively impacting customers from them for them around 2010 on back then. However, it often affects a minority of customers who whose complaints can get lost in the system. It wasn't until a large case affecting millions that any attempts to get government attention were possible and there still is no answer. The EU Commission says this must be handled on a case-byase basis, but this practice is extremely widespread. Uh future slides. Uh, we have formed an amateur study examining over 1,100 video games that require a connection to the publisher. The majority of these have been deliberately disabled by the publisher, with many of the rest still at risk of being destroyed. Under the strictest interpretation of what it means to disable a game, the study found that out of over 400 titles, publishers disabled a customer's purchase 93 and a half% of the time when ending support. Wow. This business practice is responsible for more destruction to the medium than anything else by an enormous margin. There is also a strong correlation between this practice and the size of the publisher as most small studios do not engage in it as it requires far more resources, work, and liability than they can handle. So even though this impacts the minority of games, it disproportionately affects customers due to the scale of the largest offenders. From sales figures, it impacts tens of millions of customers minimum in the EU. This impacts developers as well. This may seem obvious, but based on interviews and feedback, we found the majority of game developers do not support having games they've worked on destroyed. Y they can spend years of their lives creating them, but they are often not the ones making these business decisions and sometimes even sign non-disclosure agreements so they cannot voice their opinion on the matter. Yep. Or not. The main point I hope that does not get lost in this hearing is this initiative welcomes any solution that will solve the problem of video games being destroyed on this scale. We want this to be as easy and as practical as possible for all parties involved and are very open to how that that is achieved. We are not even asking publishers to change their business or monetization models only that once they end support they do so in a responsible way. I think that if you're not providing an alternative yourself, then somebody should be able to do it for you. That's my outlook on it is that if you're not doing it yourself and then the game gets shut down, somebody else wants to make a private server, you shouldn't be able to shut down the private server. Like that that's literally it. Like I don't think that you need to require them to run the servers. You don't have to make them give up the code. If somebody wants to recreate the game and do that, then I think that it's totally fine. Like City of Heroes. Yeah. One of many or Wildstar. Our only goal is to prohibit this destructive practice and thus obtain basic protections for consumers and the medium as a whole. I'd like to add a little bit on the economic aspect. Um again, when planned for from the beginning, the cost can be very small. the it's mostly about when it's undoing that. That's more of a cost related. Um the earlier the game Concord was mentioned. That's actually an ex that's when he raised his eyebrows. He read Concord. Um the earlier the game Concord was mentioned. That's actually an excellent example because it's publicly stated that that at least €370 million were spent developing that game and it did not include an end of life plan like what we're seeing million. Most of the cost for developing games tends to come from other areas like art assets or marketing. This is just one element out of hundreds that already go into making a game. Um, the other thing is sometimes industry costs or estimates of how much this would cost or can be faulty because they're expecting the game they're asking for it to have every last feature it did while it was being supported. And many of those can be retired and don't even make sense for a game that's no longer being supported like administration or anti-che measures or account management or things like that. So that can drastically there could be hundreds worth known as microservices associated with these that can be disabled. Gamers will win. It's not a matter of if gamers will win. It's a matter of when gamers will win. It's inevitable because there be there are more of us every single day. Every day every year there are more gamers. customer still has the core gain. So that should be taken into account when figuring out potential cost and it might have been mentioned earlier but we also want to emphasize the the companies have been paid already once for the working game. So we that should be factored into the budgeting. Uh there were some other points mentioned on the right to repair uh whether we need it and how long a product should work. The with right to repair that's a little bit different issue. Well, that's certainly welcome having the right to that. As I mentioned in my presentation, the there are deliberate countermeasures to prevent repair that it it's honestly a small miracle when it does happen from extremely experienced software professionals for resurrecting a game. The However, if there were repair instructions, that would be very welcome. I think we would even consider that a viable alternative to what we're asking if it was practical to resurrect the game that way. Yeah, of course. and um for how long it should work. It's kind of too again the cons customer standard is indefinitely as long as they keep the game in good working order on their end where it is. We're not trying to hold any publishers responsible for updates that break things that wasn't their doing. So, uh how long they choose to support it, we're completely open to. I mean, I think there's already existing EU regulations on that, but I mean, as far as we're concerned, they could end support. Does this theoretically mean that Concord would have to stay open for like five years? Like imagine your game dies in a month or like it well your game is never alive. Your game dies in a week and then like you have five more years of paying for the servers the next day. But as long as the game isn't destroyed, we would be find that acceptable. And the last point uh on the Oh. Oh, yeah. If we're doing this through the existing just doing this through the courts through the legal action, yeah, that still doesn't get to the heart of the matter of the game itself being destroyed. We're not really refunds and compensation. Those are a secondary measure that when the game itself can't be reinstated, we just want the game preserved. So doing it through the existing framework doesn't quite get us there necessarily. It's kind of crazy for us to imagine the fact that Concord and High Guard are now into the void. We can't play them ever again. They're gone. That world that we used to live in has moved on beyond us. And now we're living in a different universe beyond Concord, beyond Highguard. And that's it. And not missed. Oh, I agree. I agree. But I think that you should be able to go back like it wouldn't it be a good thing if in gaming schools you were able to play Concord the same as you can play like ET on Atari and see, oh, that's why it was bad. I get it. Yeah. Yeah, it makes sense, right? Like we need to have that listed out there so everybody knows what the hell they're doing wrong. It's a cautionary tale. Exactly. So that's what I think they need to do. But you know, like again, I I am a uh I'm a big advocate of this. I've supported Ross through this entire thing. I completely support this as well. I linked you guys the video. Give it a like. Give it a sub. I want to see more of this happen. I do. And uh you know, again, the stop killing games movement is something that I've agreed with for a very, very long time. So uh yeah, that's really how I think it. Can't sweep the skeletons into the closet. I know, bro. You're teasing Contoured creators with more players after the game's been dead for months. Well, look, man, it would be funny if people were able to do that. Not acceptable to make the cost uh to make the cost for that fall on the company. Well, the reality is that when you spend money on something, you should expect to get what you paid for. And the problem that a lot of these studios have is that they don't actually deliver that. That's the main issue is that they're not delivering the thing that they said they were going to deliver. And if the game shuts down very soon after, you're not really getting your money's worth, are you? And so, and don't sell it then. Exactly. Yes. And the entire idea, this is another component, is that we know that these video games are designed like they don't have to make the games this way. They make the games this way on purpose so they can control more aspects of the way that you play them than what they should. And so what I think the problem is is that they can they have a monopoly legally through that control. If they didn't have that control, you wouldn't have this problem. The problem is derived from the control. It's like car manufacturers should end up producing no replacement parts and blocking third party production of parts. Exactly. Yeah. Like a car manufacturer should not have to make replacement parts forever. But at the same time, we could make a law. We could just do this. We could just simply write a law and say you have to provide replacement parts and produce them at this ratio for at least 5 years. And if what do you think every car manufacturer is going to go out of business and they're going to stop selling cars in Europe and America? No. They're going to work around it and they're going to follow the [ __ ] rule. So this entire idea that like oh well they can't do this. Of course they can absolutely do this and you'll see it immediately. So again you are the like we live in democratic societies like if we're in America western country we can just simply tell them what to do because we can we can just change the rules. We can just say there's a rule that says like theoretically we could take it and make it to our gotacha games were no longer allowed to have energy in those games. We could say that any form of acquisition and recovery of items or you know rewards in the game can't be limited to a certain amount of times per day. We could just do that. We could get enough people together and we could just do that. We can do anything that we want. Understand that. All you need to do is get enough people together. That's all you need to do.