My first piece in a while is up at The Everyman, giving a rundown of Ross Scott’s efforts to end the practice of killing games:

In summary, video game companies are destroying the products that they have previously sold to their customers without providing any compensation. One does not have to be a gamer to see that this is a predatory and unjust business practice.

Enter YouTuber Ross Scott, proprietor of the Accursed Farms channel. Ross first achieved moderate fame as the creator of Freeman’s Mind, a comedic play through of the classic game Half-Life, and now mostly produces reviews of odd and obscure video games. For a professional YouTuber, Ross comes across as remarkably genuine, which, along with his deadpan sense of humor, is a large part of his charm. He legitimately seems to be an intelligent and creative guy who speaks on subjects that he is sincerely interested in.

Over the past few years, Ross has been raising the issue of companies that kill their own games with increasing vehemence, to the point of producing a near-two-hour, exhaustively-researched video on why he considers the practice to be fraudulent.

But even beyond the fraud aspect, he argues (and I agree with him) it is an unconscionable practice because it destroys art and culture, and because it robs future generations of the chance to experience these games. For, games, as Ross points out, are unique experiences; you can’t just replace one with another and have it be ‘just as good.’ Moreover, Ross argues, “While it’s debatable if video games are art, they undeniably contain art…When you kill a game, you lose all of that.” Meaning, when you destroy a game, you also destroy the graphics, the art design, the worlds, the soundtracks, the stories (and so on) that make up the game. It all vanishes forever, leaving nothing but whatever screenshots or recordings that the players have managed to contemporaneously capture.

Now, after years of trying to find ways to combat this practice, Ross is leveraging his medium-sized fanbase into an all-out legal assault...

Read the rest here, and go check out stopkillinggames.com for more info.