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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.
Yeah it's an interesting problem. Modern copyright law seems pretty obviously problematic for software and needs an update, but IP is always tricky and the system we have works well enough, I guess.
In general I think it would be great for game companies to have to release the code open source if they're going to stop supporting something, even an old version of a game. WoW Classic is a great example, how there was obviously a huge amount of players that still wanted to play it but weren't able to due to Blizzard's decisions. And now it's mostly dying with the Turtle WoW lawsuit. Tragic.
Yep.
I think the regular threat of release to the 'public domain' or open-sourcing, as you say, would be a positive incentive for companies to maintain games and eventually 'allow' the community to gain some ownership of them if the community wishes to maintain their game past its intended lifespan.
They should be able to figure out a price point which balances out all these concerns if there's some hard limits in the law.
Personally, I think that if you are going to withhold access to a given product entirely, making it unavailable for purchase or even rental to the 'general public,' that's akin to waiving the protections against others copying and distributing said IP. But I might even go a step further and say some information is 'inherently' of value to the public and thus should be kept accessible on general principle, so I generally support the Sci-hub mission.
In general I think our IP laws dramatically stifle competition in the creative realms, which as a consumer absolutely sucks! We could have so many awesome spinoffs of LOTR or Star Wars by now if our laws were sane.
'Fan fiction' could just become the norm a decade after a story gets told. Which would be a great change.
I dream of an era where the "canon" for a given series isn't dictated by the primary IP holder, but instead can be forked off by people where-ever they want, and fans can just form organic consensuses as to what particular canon is 'best,' and pick and choose precisely which parts of it they want to incorporate into their particular experience.
I would absolutely prefer the version of Star Wars where the Darth Jar-Jar theory was true and he turned out to be the evil behind Snoke in the new trilogy. Let me have my canon, and you can have... whatever The Rise of Skywalker was.
Force these massive companies to compete on something resembling quality, rather than Neener neener I own the IP, you have to go through me if you want more content.
There's something nice about having one canon, like how it can be more fun to play Minecraft in Survival Mode than Creative Mode.
But not everyone feels this way (like how some people only play Creative Mode), mainstream canons (especially today) are generally mediocre at best (even according to the mainstream audience), and IP has so many other downsides. People who want this can resort to subscribing to some curation group who picks one canon for every popular media.
I agree one canon is better. I’ve got no idea if JarJar should be reworked but I do think it would be nice if Disney realized some of the stuff they created was stupid with Star Wars and just remake some of the episodes. Episodes 7,8,9 need to be completely redone. The IP for Star Wars has lost a lot of value because they were so bad. They should just remake those films maybe borrowing from fanfiction. Perhaps even admit you messed up and run some crazy promotion like the new episode 7 is free in theatres. How much would it really costs to remake them like 1.5-2.5 b which is significantly less than the initially paid for the IP.
GOT probably needs a reboot either just the last seasons or the final 2. Paramount paid $110 B for GOT. A reboot is tops 3% to do it again but correctly and GOT is likely still WBD highest value IP. Probably more like 1% of purchase price. Some of the issues with GOT was just being a rushed finish, but the WhiteWalkers and John as the Prince who was promised was just poor storytelling. It was the dumb hivemind trope that Independence Day used to beat a super powerful enemy. The real WhiteWalker story has never been told. Not even sure of Martin figured out that story.
The thing with great IP and the stories people really love is it’s not about fantastic graphics and special effects. It’s the storytelling where you need very real talent figuring it out.
I think the real cost, the real problem, is the reputational hit from admitting they fucked up, alongside the shame, blame, and perhaps even legal responsability, it puts on the creators (producers, directors and writers, mostly) of the publically disgraced movies and the chilling effect it would have on future works.
Imagine how it would go! It's hardly a new phenomenon, bad movies get made all the time at all budget levels, but admitting it means throwing people under the bus. It means telling, quite directly, to the dozens of fans of episodes 7-9 as they are that they have objectively bad taste, talk about spitting on someone's soul. For any producer, director or writer who is about to work on a Disney movie, they'll have seen how Disney failed to stand behind their works. Are they going to imply the movie I worked years on is shit if it doesn't make them enough money? For the public, they'll have seen how Disney swore, for years, to the tune of billions of dollars that episode 7, 8 and 9 were the sequels we always wanted to the Star Wars saga.
No, I don't think we're gonna get a redo. If that bad all women Ghostbusters movie was never officially disgraced by Sony, Disney's not going to do it with Star Wars. At least that Ghostbusters movie could be pushed into a corner never to be talked about again, while SW killed off or bastardized beloved characters. It's best for them to maintain the fiction that they were perfectly good movies that simply for whatever reason, didn't resonate enough with audiences. The best they could do to correct it is a split timeline, JJ Abrams' Star Trek-style, that they then splice over the bad one, and I have a hard time imagining them pulling it off in a way that doesn't feel like a massive ass pull; at least Star Trek had a history of time travel and diverging timelines.
That’s not how movie financing works. If you’ve ever read about the politics and mechanics of the industry, it goes something like this (I’m oversimplifying a bit and some details may be a little inaccurate from what I remember):
A lot of rich people (and even ordinary people without their knowledge) finance movies.
In IB, there exists a specialty financing department called something like “TMT-DCM” which stands for “Telecom, Media & Technology,” Debt Capital Markets (DCM). A common goal of IB is to raise money for companies projects (this is a fairly standard function called “capital sourcing”).
Some movies are absolutely financed by rich people. The story of the dude that defrauded Malaysia and then used the money to party and fund 'The Wolf of Wall St' is pretty well known. But the reality is that this isn't that common. Rich people don’t have cash just sitting around. They’re rich because they own companies that are worth a lot of money.
Anyway, IB’s are commonly tasked with raising money for movies. I don't know who’s active today (and TBF it’s been about 15 years since I read about this), but Bank of America, Wells Fargo and JP Morgan were very active back in the middle of the 2000’s. The thing is IB’s don't really have money themselves, so they reach out to rich people and institutions (e.g. pension funds, insurance companies, endowments, foundations, also sometimes hedge funds, etc.) to invest. More normal people unknowingly have exposure to this than you might think.
This is where people go wrong in their thinking. Individual movies are very risky. So then why would people invest in a single movie? Well they actually don't, and this is where the magic happens. What happens is you go in and create a portfolio (which is substantially less risky than an individual film). The these deals are setup is that, say, 10 future movies were coming out for a studio in the next 18 months, and their total budget was estimated to be $600 million, with a mix consisting of few $100 million movies and several $30 million movies. The producers and the studio will then reach out to an IB. The bank will then say, "If the studio sources $100 million, we can get the other $500 million.” Alright. Deal.
The IB then creates an ABS (which is essentially a financial package that will contain all the money that these movies make over the course of their entire lives. That includes everything, box office, DVD’s, cable broadcasts, TV broadcasts, foreign broadcasts, airplane broadcast, you name it, they do it, or 'other' licensing like when a clip of a movie is featured in a commercial for a toothpaste advertisement. The ABS will have a lifespan of, say 10 years for instance, and will have a minimum return of 8% a year and a maximum of, 15% a year, which is all based on several inside and outside estimates of how the movies should perform. The IB then turns around and markets this security to rich people and institution's to invest. They give $X (up to $500 million) and get a percentage of the total return pool.
So then your movies start coming out. The ABS starts getting a chunk of the profits, and the terms for 'revenue' and 'profit' are very strictly defined. The debt agreements for these ABS’s can run like 300 pages long, with everything laid out in excruciating detail. The split will be something like 20% of the profit which goes to the studio / producer and 80% going back to the ABS. When the ABS hits its maximum return for a given year, the excess profit then goes back to the studio which is to incentivize them to keep distributing the films.
So the idea is that out of 10 movies, maybe 3 bomb, 5 do ‘alright’' (e.g. are profitable but not exactly raking in dough), and 2 are huge blockbusters. But the point here is that the 7 that do 'alright' or great more than pay for the ones that bombed with money left over.
Then after a while, say 5 years or so, all the movies come out and now we have a better picture of how all 10 did, and we can figure out how the investment did. But, there’s still 5 years left on the ABS. Usually there are call or put clauses in the contracts that allow either the investors to be made whole by forcing the studio to put back the ABS at a predetermined return (that’s the “put” and it’s used if the movies failed to perform) or the studio may have a “call” (which allows the studio to buy back the ABS at a predetermined price if the movies way overperform). But it’s also common that people just ride the ABS and collect the checks up to maturity and at the point of maturity, normally the residuals are auctioned and everyone gets a cut of the final distribution.
Incidentally, this scenario is how Netflix funds all of its content. The debt that Netflix issues is “backed” by the streaming rights and liquidation value of all its IP (movies / TV/ etc.). The only real difference is that instead of having a bunch of little boxes containing let’s just say 10 movies each, Netflix itself is just one giant box that holds everything. But the structure is more or less the same.
I don’t know how much any of this has changed in the years up to today, but this is how it used to work in the early 2000’s.
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