Stop Killing Games

I'm going to assume the average Ricochetti spends zero time --- or, if possible, less --- on video games. Even so, I suggest you take note of the Stop Killing Games petition. I expect it to be important.

If you have a digital anything, the cost to copy it is almost zero. If I lend out a physical book, I lose my copy for the period of the loan. If I copy a file, I can give you the copy and not lose mine. Yeah, we all know this already, but it's important to remind yourself of it from time to time because that ease of copying drives a whole lot of what happens next.

Start with piracy. Not the fun, high seas kind. Suppose I want a game and don't want to pay for it. I get a friend to copy it for me. He can still play it and I can play it now, too. Everyone wins, except the game company which goes out of business because their wildly popular game somehow has no sales. So the game company does something about that; it starts including Digital Rights Management (DRM) in the games. The DRM prevents you from easily copying things. Keeping in mind I'm skipping over a lot of nuance, let's move to always online games.

One way to secure a game is to make it only playable when it's connected to your server. It's a lot harder to copy software when an essential part of it isn't on your home computer. While there are other reasons to keep a game always connected, preventing piracy is a big one.

Say you're a game company that cottoned to the idea of an always-online game twenty years ago. You sold plenty of copies for $60 each, and invested that cash in building sequels. Your fans play the new games and everyone's happy, right? Jump forward to the present. The only people who play that old game anymore are the hardcore fans who never moved on. They bought it at full price, once. They're still on your server. Still sucking up electricity, still requiring moderators and IT support, and so on and so forth. They're not providing any income anymore. You have --- and we'll get to the legalities in a moment --- taken a one-time payment for an obligation in perpetuity.

Eventually, the pain that comes from offending a few die-hard players is going to be less than the pain of continuing support, and those servers will fall. The players, who paid sixty bucks for the promise of a game, won't be able to play that game anymore. If it only happens once, it'd be a tragedy (work with me here) and then we'd move on. But it's happening again and again as more games from that era get shut down.

Hence, the Stop Killing Games petition. This is something in the E.U. I can't give you the specifics because my mind starts to wander whenever anyone says "E.U." I gather it's an attempt to stop companies from axing the older games. Not to force companies to keep their servers up, but rather to open-source the server code so that dedicated fans can build and maintain their own servers. That runs into complications, too. The details are unimportant. The movement exists, there's a certain groundswell of gamers signing, and we should at least notice.

They're trying in part to renegotiate the way we purchase software. That's the important bit, so I'll say it again. The way we purchase software is inherently unstable, and they're trying to change it. Half the world is software these days; that's why this is worth paying attention to.

Because software is so easy to copy, you never actually purchase programs. You purchase a license to use the program. That's what it says in the EULA. You know, the thing that you get annoyed with because it demands that you scroll all the way to the bottom to at least pretend that you've read it. In general, it says that you don't actually own the code, that you can't resell the software, that you can't reverse engineer it, and incidentally that they reserve the right to alter the agreement or deny you the use of their software at any time.

Wait, run that last bit by me again? Yeah, I've seen those clauses in EULAs. The End User License Agreement is a contract you agree to in order to use their software. It's presented as-is, without any chance to negotiate it. If you don't agree to the terms, you don't get to use their game. You can go to the next seller, who has a very similar EULA, and reject their terms too. All the hazard is on the side of the consumer. Aside from the hazard of piracy.

Mind you, we've been getting by with this for the past several decades. The company reserves the right to play hardball, but for most ordinary use, they're just trying to sell you a game like they'd sell you a chair. If I buy a chair, it's a one-and-done thing; I give them cash, they give me an object, and we part ways. We'd all like to treat software like that, except they can't ignore the risk of piracy. Hence the EULAs, hence the DRMs, hence the always-online games. The system is stable enough as long as everyone pretends that it is. But we haven't really figured out a workable, fair way of selling software.

Half the world is software. Amazon being able to reach into your Kindle and extract books they no longer want in their catalog; that's another aspect of the same problem. Cloud storage, security updates, software-as-a-service, the apps on your phone, and the tabs on your browser are all built on the legal infrastructure of software licenses. All of that is going to settle into a more stable arrangement sooner or later, one way or another.

How? To what arrangement? I don't know. I'm not a technocrat, I'm a conservative. I find the question interesting and will be content to watch it resolve from the sidelines. Like two great tectonic plates rubbing against one another, the pressure will build until the earth shifts. Whether by Congress, court, or custom, that earthquake will redefine the way we purchase digital stuff. These gamers wanting to play their old games are harbingers of one of the great struggles to come.