This week, Ars hosted a live discussion with Ross Scott about the Stop Killing Games movement and its ongoing efforts to ensure that games remain playable even after the original publisher shuts down the online servers undergirding them.
Scott talked with Ars Technica Senior Gaming Editor Kyle Orland, saying said he felt the situation around long-term game access was already “intolerable a decade and a half ago” and that he “kept hoping someone else would kick this off, [someone] more experienced or knowledgeable, but it felt like nothing was happening.” Scott said he felt making the effort to organize a movement against the practice was like “[drawing] the short straw on this, essentially.”
During the conversation, Scott noted how the standard practice of shutting down game access for any reason, at any time, with minimal notice, would seem ludicrous in other areas of life:
Let’s say… the plan was to shut down [a game] in five years if it didn’t do well. That needs to be communicated then, if you want to go down that road, because this manner of things doesn’t really apply to other goods and services. Compared to, let’s say you got… a warranty for a product, and it doesn’t tell you a year or two; it just tells you, ‘Well, we’ll tell you when it expires.’ Or an insurance policy: ‘Yeah, we’ll tell you when your insurance policy expires.’ Like that would trip up other laws than that.
