Disgraceful degradation | This Week in Business
This Week in Business is our weekly recap column, a collection of stats and quotes from recent stories presented with a dash of opinion (sometimes more than a dash) and intended to shed light on various trends. Check every Friday for a new entry.
This week, we reported on the UK government's response to a petition from Stop Killing Games, a grassroots campaign organized by YouTuber Ross Scott that's trying to get publishers to, well, stop killing games.
Specifically, the campaign wants to make sure that games like The Crew, which Ubisoft effectively snuffed from existence when it shut down the online servers in March, are preserved not just for the customers who paid money for them but for future generations as well.
And while nobody's asking companies to continue supporting online games forever at their own expense, Stop Killing Games would like to see publishers required to do more than they are currently. Or at the very least, force them to clearly commit to supporting a game through a specific date when they sell it, and include that expiration date on the packaging and other marketing materials. (This was the same course of action we advocated for when we addressed the topic in this space in January.)
The UK petition – which is still available to be signed – is focused less on the expiration date and more on publishers basically not being jerks about it when they drop support for a game.
QUOTE | "Require publishers to leave videogames (and related game assets / features) they have sold to customers in a reasonably working state when support ends, so that no further intervention whatsoever is necessary for the game to function, as a statutory consumer right." – What the Stop Killing Games petition asks for.
The government has already responded, and its response is not terribly encouraging. It starts off by saying there's no law saying companies have to support older versions of software, and adds that running servers for old games with declining user
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