The game publisher lobby group Video Games Europe has issued a statement in response to Stop Killing Games passing the 1 million signature point on the European Citizens’ Initiative. Would you be surprised to hear that they are less than enthusiastic about the notion that they might have to provide a minimum level of functionality for games to be played offline?
Stop Killing Games is a community movement that will petition lawmakers to implement some kind of rules to prevent publishers from killing games through the removal of online services. In the interests of game preservation, SKG hopes that publishers can be forced to provide end-of-life plans for games with online components so that they remain playable in some state. This does not demand that all functionality remains, but rather that a core experience is still available to purchased games.
The lobbying group has board members from Warner Bros. Games, Epic Games, Electronic Arts, Activision, Embracer, Microsoft, Nintendo of Europe, Sony Interactive Entertainment, Take 2, Ubisoft, Bandai Namco Entertainment, Square Enix, Level Infinite, as well as for regional industry groups UKIE, VGFC, SELL and game. As you would expect, pretty much all of these companies have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.
In their statement, they say:
“We appreciate the passion of our community; however, the decision to discontinue online services is multi-faceted, never taken lightly and must be an option for companies when an online experience is no longer commercially viable. We understand that it can be disappointing for players but, when it does happen, the industry ensures that players are given fair notice of the prospective changes in compliance with local consumer protection laws.
“Private servers are not always a viable alternative option for players as the protections we put in place to secure players’ data, remove illegal content, and combat unsafe community content would not exist and would leave rights holders liable. In addition, many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only; in effect, these proposals would curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create.”
Angling their argument around player safety has a high level of success, with the European Commission taking user privacy and platform security very seriously. This is something that the EC would have to account for, should they proceed to legislate new end-of-life provisions for video games, ensuring that publishers would not be considered a platform holder responsible for moderation and security once a game’s service has been deactivated.
At the same time, arguing in the full statement that publishers are the only ones able to ensure that online games are safe and that hackers aren’t able to run rampant is a nonsense. You just have to look at the state of online multiplayer in older Call of Duty games to see the such support is relatively minimal – heck, they just released Call of Duty WW2 into Game Pass and then pulled the game from PC Game Pass once it was found that it enables a RCE hack exploit.
What can be agreed is that this should not be treated as a trivial matter, but it’s also far from an impossible hurdle for developers to overcome. Following the public backlash to The Crew’s server shutdown which triggered the SKG movement, Ubisoft pledged to update both The Crew 2 and The Crew Motorsport to ensure that they have offline modes, ready for whenever it is that the online servers are shutdown. While multiplayer is a key component in these games, they can also be played as purely single player experiences.
There’s further examples, such as Gran Turismo Sport having online-only progression at launch, but Polyphony switching this to local progression for single player for the server shutdown. Velan Studios made Knockout City private servers available to the public, and more.
Of course, Video Games Europe also pulled out their ace, which is that you don’t own your games, so there:
“All video games, whether digital or physical copies, are licensed. As is the case with virtually all digital works when consumers purchase online games, regardless of the country of sale, what they acquire is a personal license to access and play the copy of the game they have purchased in accordance with the game’s terms of service. The consumer does not acquire ownership of that video game. These clear intellectual property rights underpin the entire market and enable the strong investment that the industry has seen for decades. There is no legal uncertainty about the status quo of video games.”
This is true to varying degrees depending on local laws, and EULAs and terms of service are a bit of a grey area that is rarely tested in court. In the EU, the New Digital Content Directive stated that EULAs are only enforceable to the extent that they do not breach reasonable consumer expectations. I’d say that the ability to play a game that you paid for indefinitely is a reasonable consumer expectation, wouldn’t you?
Hopefully SKG can bring some serious debate and meaningful, good-faith consideration of this matter by EU lawmakers.
Source: Video Games Europe
