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Notes -
Let's talk about software revocation: when a seller limits or disables their software after release, like an online game shuts down, particularly when customers aren't refunded.
Examples
Egregious example: Microsoft plans to remotely disable Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac. To be clear, this software was a one-time purchase and works completely offline, Microsoft even explicitly stated at one point it would continue to function. I can't even play devil's advocate.
Another example that I personally believe is stupid: when music from games is removed because the songs are licensed for a fixed duration (e.g. GTA4). Because, why include songs with these licensing requirements, when there are plenty of great songs without them? (And I don't think the removed songs from the GTA4 list are especially popular, I don't recognize any of them and only a couple artists.) Many games are simply delisted when the licenses expire; alternatively the licensed songs could be gated only for new users. At least these gamers weren't explicitly told the music would last forever (I assume), they just assumed.
Less egregious cases: when online-only games shut down. It's expensive to keep servers running; if the seller is an individual or small company they may obviously not have the funds. Providing users self-hostable servers can also be expensive: the server code should be changed for consumer hardware and documented, and the client code should be changed with UX and functionality for custom servers, or gamers will have trouble running it. Sometimes, the seller legally can't release server binaries, for IP reasons I don't really understand (the client code has third-party libraries, why is the server code different?). The most justified cases (albeit rare): the game is free-to-play with only temporary (e.g. seasonal) micro transactions, so there's nothing to refund.
The archtypal example: The Crew. A paid game released (by Ubisoft) in 2014 and permanently shut down in 2024 (without refunds). Online was a big part of the core gameplay, but the game had an offline mode which included a single-player campaign. Regardless, when Ubisoft shut down the game, they disabled the online mode and stopped players from re-downloading it. This shutdown spawned Stop Killing Games and lots of discussion about software revocation. Fortunately, the community has created a mod that re-enables the game and emulates its server (The Crew Unlimited).
Reactions
Stop Killing games campaign/NGO (mentioned above). Most known for collecting 1 million EU signatures so the EU Commission must eventually discuss their initiative, they also collected enough UK signatures for a UK parliament debate, and lobby in the US. Their voice has reached mainstream audiences (more or less: the world is so complicated there's not really one mainstream, but besides millions of signatures, they also got endorsed by celebrities including PewDiePie and Notch), but they haven't (physically) accomplished much, yet...
California's Protect our Games act. Passed the state assembly (not yet law). It requires publishers to post a notice 60 days before shutting down their game, and provide some offline functionality or refunds, although it doesn't apply to subscription games (and may have other exceptions). Backed by Stop Killing Games.
French consumer group sues Ubisoft over shutdown of online game 'The Crew': "UFC-Que Choisir alleges that Ubisoft misled consumers about the permanence of their purchase and imposed abusive contractual clauses stripping players of ownership rights". An earlier lawsuit in the US was dismissed. Backed by Stop Killing Games.
Cory Doctorow has (of course) written about this. I still support his crusade against enshittification, centralization, and unreasonable DRM (regardless of underlying goals), but I admit my general opinion of him has lowered, as this recent article has subtle xenophobia.
A road paved with good intentions
Of course consumers shouldn't lose access to things they've bought. You wouldn't remotely shutdown a car, or remotely disable its heating, or make previously-free heating a paid upgrade...(In fairness, the first two were mandated by governments, and the third was walked back.) Back on topic, surely at least egregious cases like Microsoft's are unjustified, so why shouldn't we prevent them via regulation?
It's not so simple:
Generally speaking: regulation doesn't intrinsically prevent anything, it's just a strongly-worded suggestion to the government and population. Moreover, all regulations have drawbacks: they cost money to enforce, discourage businesses, and hurt good-intentioned violators. Selective enforcement leads to the worse of both, where good-intentioned individuals and small businesses are targeted (sometimes frivolously but it still hurts them) while big businesses are ignored; an example I think is copyright, with false DMCA claims hurting individuals while big AI companies train on everything.
Consider the regulation "a software seller cannot disable any offline feature in their client without refunding buyers". Sounds reasonable, right? But what if an indie game developer pushes a balance chance that nerfs an OP character by removing their special ability? What if they remove a poorly-implemented game mode almost nobody was playing? Both of these also sound reasonable, but both can be considered disabling offline features. Even if no indie is successfully sued for such a frivolous reason, a failed lawsuit (motivated by the law) would harm them; even if there's no real lawsuit, the potential may discourage them.
My proposal
For now, media pushback and patches seem to be working for the most egregious cases. The Crew is playable via mod, more games are explicitly stating they won't remove licensed songs, I predict Microsoft will walk back revoking Office and am confident otherwise there will be a widely-available patch.
For the future, I support removing regulations on buyers circumventing end-of-life software, rather than adding regulations on sellers. At least after software becomes "end-of-life" (but preferably in general), there should be no restrictions on hacking the local version, only trying to hack the server. This won't stop determined sellers who put the entire game on the server and don't stream important gameplay logic (effectively recreating Stadia for only their game); but it's an improvement, and that streaming would make their game accessible to gamers with low-end PCs.
This is a peeve of mine. I fully understand the legal and practical idea that a 'license', in terms of IP, is revocable pursuant to its own terms, and thus enforcing that revocation is... fine.
But in the era of physical media, if you bought a CD, there was no mechanism for deleting the songs off of it once you had it. In theory they could send a cop to your house to confiscate it, but that was never worth it. They just priced everything into the purchase.
Same with Vidya. I can boot up any of my old gamecube games and the licensed music will still play, since the GC isn't natively online.
Silly, silly me, I figured that the addition of always-on internet connectivity would mean you could have infinite musical variety on in-game radios thanks to seamless integration of streaming services.
But once again we manage to land in this weird place where the licensed music built into the game goes away after a while, and its all but impossible to import your own music or just hook a streaming account in and have an unlimited supply of music directly in the game. Unless you're capable enough with mods, that is.
Not that anyone can currently stop you from playing music yourself while gaming, but what really is the point of using the medium of Vidya if you're gimping the advantages it has over more static forms of entertainment. And of course, I'm also old fashioned enough to think that I should be able to boot up the game and have a functionally identical experience to the one I had the first time around, and I'll get cranky if things were changed arbitrarily.
I'm admittedly an Intellectual property skeptic, in that I think the current legal setup is far enough from optimal because of stuff like this, where it always gets leveraged to a clearly anti-consumer end and doesn't generate any noticeable benefit, other than upholding the current IP regime. I'm sure 99% of the time nobody really notices because a game that is 10+ years old has to be TRUE classic for people to keep playing it that long.
The last factor here is that it also prevents much cross-collaboration of game assets. The issue with music can apply to literally ANY OTHER artistic element of the game. In game models, textures, hell even textual elements could be licensed in such a way that they have to get pulled out down the line, leaving you with an entirely nonfunctional game.
So the larger regime probably makes it less feasible for certain games to get made due to the need to produce all the assets in-house if they want to maintain IP control over the longer term. Vidya are one of the only media this would apply to because of its integration of so many different types of assets into a singular product.
“I had a dream once the RIAA kicked my door down and arrested me for singing too loudly in the shower.”
Does anyone else here remember EA’s “Spore” DRM controversy at launch, that only authorized a licensed user something like 3 installations per purchase? It was an attempt they made trying to kill the secondary market for video games and went about as well as one would expect. I don’t think they’ve tried to make that move sense.
It’s also why I’ve always preferred physical media. I don’t use Audible, I don’t have Spotify and TBF I don’t even like Steam all that much, but it’s the closest I’ll come to walking over to that side of the aisle. I wonder what kind of territory we’re going to wade into when synthetic biology and widespread nanotech really take off and you’ve got corporations scrambling to patent peoples genes. Plenty of room for dystopian futures to take root.
Its why I continue to maintain a physical, offline music collection even though it feels increasingly pointless. I've still got a bunch of my old CDs in a box in my closet as a last resort.
I pay 8 bucks and I can stream 95% of the music I want anywhere I am, which is a fair deal. The problem is they've trained me to expect betrayal and removal of songs I enjoy for reasons beyond their control, so archives/backups feel like a necessary step. Music files are small, storage is cheap.
I AM certainly willing to pay to see live performances, the value add there is clear, but digitization of everything has made me very unwilling to hand over money for an ephemeral digital file that I'm technically not allowed to copy.
There was a similar controversy years ago, around the time when cloud storage first took off. People were very skeptical of putting all their files onto someone else’s servers, hoping that it would still be there, hoping it would still be secure. A handful of people thought it was idiotic and said you’d never get them onboard with it and that you should stick to local storage. The counter-response was, “What if there’s a fire in your house? What if you get robbed?” These are all risk factors, and I’m not against cloud storage at all, but I prefer the vectors I have direct access and control over rather than the ones I don’t. It’s also why I don’t use ebook readers for general purpose consumption. If I’m at work and I have some downtime, sure. But generally I don’t like the thought of losing my place because my alarm clock drained the battery which caused my book to die.
Amazingly, Dropbox has never betrayed me over the course of 15 years. But the only reason I tolerated it in the first place is because it syncs with a local folder on my own computer so it was added convenience with no additional risk.
Then Microsoft tries to force that same crap on me and I get mad because they're trying to dictate what I keep on my computer.
Depends on what you consider a betrayal, I guess. A year or two ago, they added a new setting that (if memory serves) allowed them to train models on your data, and turned it on by default. I considered that a massive betrayal and moved to a self-hosted Nextcloud instance after that. I might move to Proton Drive once they have a Linux client.
I do recall that but... I'm not TOO mad about letting my data get hoovered up to help summon the Silicon demon.
I actually WANT the machine God to have a piece of my personal data in there. I tailor my behavior online to make it easy for the thing to figure out my preferences.
For me, it was the underhanded way they did it. If they introduced a setting and it's off by default, fine whatever. If they turned it on by default but gave copious notice, that's not great but I might have been ok with it. It was the fact that the setting was both on by default and they snuck it in (I found out from a hacker news comment thread) which I found so unacceptable.
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I used to have Dropbox but dropped them after the change in their privacy policy. I’ve used MEGA for over a decade now and never looked back. I still prefer things locally and disk duplicators have never made the task easier than they have today, but the cost of physical storage is actually more expensive than cloud subscriptions, ironically. The increase in content quality has matched the rate of storage expansion such that it’s less economical than it used to be. I don’t like the trend in that direction but realistically what can you do? Either bite the bullet and accept the out of pocket cost or take it to the cloud. I’ve tried the synchronization thing too, MEGA also has the same thing but I can never optimize it for how I want things to synchronize and just forego it entirely.
Its me, the bullet muncher.
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