I’ve been playing a few games lately, and finished Avowed over a month ago. But I haven’t made much progress on writing a review- I don’t have an excuse other than sometimes writing is hard.
But I do have a little inspiration to capture some thoughts on a gaming related topic. I’ve ran across a few posts about the reality of digital licensing lately, including one by Wilhelm over on The Ancient Gaming Noob. This discussion has become more relevant in recent years as the percentage of games being purchased in purely digital form has increased.
What does our purchase of digital media actually entitle us to? Pretty much nothing in the current system, which seems a bit one-sided. Clearly digital licensing doesn’t impart ‘ownership’ in the traditional sense, but shouldn’t it give us something we can count on?
The current situation
We’ve all clicked through game licensing agreements many, many times. I’ve even read through them in some detail on a few occasions. Basically, we are ‘entitled’ to give the game company our money for a completely revocable license to play their game. That license has no guaranteed duration: that means you could pay your $70 and the company could yank the license before you even start playing- and you’d be entitled to absolutely nothing.
Game publishers almost never exercise their power to yoink their games away too precipitously as doing so would likely generate a lot of negative press. And for many single player games you can continue playing your downloaded content even if the developer stops supporting/selling the title. But even this respite for licensees (players like us) is limited as more and more games have ‘phone home’ licensing checks that vendors can disable if they like.
As the earlier paragraph says- the licenses we all agree to for our games actually don’t grant us any privileges to play the game at all for any particular duration. The power all lies with the publisher and they will exercise that power if it suits them for financial or other reasons.
Ideas for possible improvements
It seems to me at least that the whole software licensing system is incredibly unbalanced. Shouldn’t the licensee i.e.: Us be entitled to something for our money? Perhaps not perpetual ownership and the ability to leave our games to our descendants forever and ever, but… something?
I think that laws putting at least some kind of obligation on the publishers are required. If someone buys their product that person should be entitled to at least play the game (I’m focusing on games here- software licensing in general is equally unfair) long enough to ‘finish’ it. Yes, this gets complicated with online-only or online-mostly games, but bear with me.
I would suggest that the vendor of a game should be required to render the game ‘playable’, exclusive of bugs or the like, for a period of time after purchase. Failing to meet that requirement should entitle the purchaser to a pro-rated refund. For example, a player might be entitled to a 50% refund if the publisher renders the game unplayable six months after their purchase if the minimum playability period of time is one year.
This does nothing to guarantee long term preservation of games. It also requires legal definition of a bunch of things like what is a reasonable period of play time after purchase, and mechanisms for publishers to determine what gamers paid for their products as that may not be retail prices. And of course it doesn’t address online or mostly online games: but it would be a start.
Me, me, me!
Digital purchases make sense for me and have very few downsides. I have at various points had well over 100 physical media games cluttering my shelves. My usual way of playing these games involves playing them through to completion (or boredom/frustration) then setting them aside, never to be played again. I do not resell or trade my games.
The way I handle games renders the physical media into essentially nothing more than garbage once I complete the content. Having a purely digital copy of a game causes me no difficulty- I have never had such a game rendered unplayable before getting my value out of the title. This makes the whole worry about digital media rights almost entirely theoretical for me.
I can certainly understand and empathize with the concerns, though. I would be pretty upset if I bought a game with online license checks that suddenly stopped working when I was barely even started playing it. And there should be some kind of obligation on the part of the vendor in the process.
At a minimum a vendor should be financially penalized (discouraged) from selling a game today and cancelling access to it tomorrow. There should be at least a bare minimum of a requirement on their part to deliver value and inform the purchasers of impending access removal. A financial incentive (penalty) should exist for vendors to continue providing access to a game for months or years after sales cease. No player should be stuck without any opportunity to experience their purchase.