I almost never do things like this, but I think this is an exception. No, not the most important issue in the world (by a long shot), but it’s one that actually has some meat.

I’m not much of a gamer myself (just don’t have the time right now), though I respect video games as a medium. And I am a preservationist, in that I want as much art and culture to survive as possible, both because you never know what will hit a chord with people and just because it’s part of history (not to mention it’s always possible for unknown treasures to be buried amid the sea of the forgotten: Nosferatu only survived in private hands for decades before being rediscovered, and that’s one of the great classics of the silent-era).

That, and I loathe the soft erosion of ownership that is taking place in the world today.

For these reasons, this issue really gets to me, even though I don’t have much ‘skin in the game’, as they say, and again, it’s pretty far down the list of contemporary issues.

In video games, it is increasingly the practice for them to be what is called ‘dependent on a central server’ or ‘online only’ or ‘games as a service’. What this means is that key components of the game – logic routines, etc. – are stored on a company server, and the game only functions if you connect to that server. And, sooner or later, the company will decide that it isn’t worth the cost of keeping the server running, so they shut it down, rendering the game completely unplayable.

Now, we have to be clear about what this means: you pay a full-price for a game – say, $60. At some point in the future, anywhere from a few months to a few years (depending on the game, how old it is when you bought it, how popular it is, and so on), the company shuts down the server, and that game effectively ceases to exist. No one can ever play it again.

This is not something that can be solved by piracy, or by buying physical copies of the game, because essential aspects of the game’s architecture are not included on the install disk and are never present on the user’s computer at all. You login to the server and the code on your computer links up with key elements of the game code on the server’s end. Without that, the game is unplayable. Not in a ‘glitchy and broken’ sense, but in a ‘will not run at all’ sense.

This is done with multiplayer and single-player games (flippin’ ski-racing games are required to connect to a central server these days).

The only way a game like this can ever be played again is if someone reverse-engineers the missing code. So, someone is able to see where the necessary routines are missing from the software, understand what they are meant to do, and write new code to supply the missing functions.

And on top of that, the code itself is usually encrypted to guard against piracy. So, the computer code has to be first decrypted and then the missing functions reverse-engineered.

The amazing thing is that this does happen sometimes: City of Heroes, for instance, is apparently back up and running years after being shut down. But this is a process that requires high-end, extremely specialized knowledge and years of dedicated work to even attempt. All to be able to play a game that already existed, was sold in stores, and that you paid for.

I hope that this sounds as insane and predatory to you as it does to me.

Well, one of my favorite YouTubers, Ross Scott (to whom I owe most of my knowledge of this) is leading a heroically quixotic charge against the practice.

The short version is that the game The Crew is shutting down in April. Since that’s a pretty popular game, the plan is to mobilize legal action against Ubisoft on consumer right’s grounds. It almost certainly going to be focused on Europe or Australia (he gives a rather disturbing summary of US Consumer law on this matter in the second video), and is a definite long shot, but doesn’t sound hopeless.

I wish him all the best of luck on this. I can’t really help, since I don’t own The Crew (and I’m an American), but I can at least forward the message to my own small audience in the hopes that someone with more readership will also pick it up and so on.

It isn’t just that I agree with him that games shouldn’t be deliberately destroyed so that no one can ever play them again. It’s predatory on the consumers who paid money for a product that is then destroyed, it means that future generations can never experience these games, and in case, these are part of our cultural heritage that are just being dumped into an incinerator every few years. Besides which, games aside, precedents or international pressure on this point may help to protect consumer rights and preservation efforts in other areas, and just shore up the concept of ownership in general.

And, in any case, I just really appreciate how he’s going about this. A lesser YouTuber would have probably jumped right to setting up a fundraiser for a lawsuit. Ross instead held off on any monetary matters (including making sure people knew not to send lawsuit money to his donation page) until he’d done enough research to come up with a viable plan, which resulted in a lawyer telling him that a court case was more or less hopeless in the US. And just the amount of research and due diligence he’s putting into this, looking up court precedents, consulting with lawyers, investigating international consumer rights groups, and so on, all while being extremely upfront about what he thinks the chances of success are (i.e. not good).

(This is one of the reasons I’m bothering with this: because this is a rare case of someone who seems to be looking at an issue frankly and still has a practical-sounding plan to do something about it).

With all that said, here are the two videos he’s put out on the subject, explaining his battle plan (with the second one being much more detailed, as he’d received a lot more information). If you have an audience and you care about the issue of ownership, I’d ask that you pass this on.