Industry lobbyists ridicule "false premise" that "consumers 'own' digital games" amid Stop Killing Games fight

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The Stop Killing Games fight has recently entered a new arena with a piece of legislation in California called AB-1921, or the "Protect Our Games Act." This bill, which will soon go before state lawmakers for a vote, would require publishers to ensure that their games remain playable past the end of official support or, barring that, offer a refund to players when those games shut down. One of the industry's biggest trade bodies says this bill shouldn't go through in part because it's based on the "false" idea that you own your digital games.

"AB 1921 is fundamentally flawed," according to the Entertainment Software Association, a group representing many of the biggest publishers in the US. The ESA says this in a letter urging California lawmakers to vote no on the bill, which was republished on Reddit by the organizers of Stop Killing Games – who, naturally, support the bill.

"The bill is based on a false premise: that consumers 'own' digital games with permanent access," the ESA continues. "That is not how software works – games are licensed, not sold as unrestricted property."

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Technically, that is true, at least according to the EULAs that most of us blindly agree to when we start up a new game. But there's always been some question as to just how legally binding those EULAs actually are, and it's taken until the Stop Killing Games movement for the assertion that you don't own digital games to be tested in the eyes of the law.

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California lawmakers already have weighed in on the notion that this whole digital license thing is deceptive by forcing online stores to tell customers in no uncertain terms that they're buying a license, not a game. The ESA counts that as a point in favor of its argument, saying that "California already recognized digital games as a license when they passed AB 2426 (Irwin) which ensures that customers understand they are acquiring licensed digital content."

It'll be for lawmakers to decide how that argument holds up, but personally, I don't feel that having a state step in to end a deceptive sales practice is necessarily a point in favor of that practice.

If you've followed the Stop Killing Games movement at all, you'll likely be familiar with the rest of the arguments here. The ESA says that its members can't be expected to maintain infrastructure and licenses for online games forever, and they certainly don't care for the idea of offering refunds in cases where they can't offer a patched version of a dead game to offline players.

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For their part, Stop Killing Games organizers argue that "AB 1921 is narrow. It applies to paid games going forward and gives companies options: preserve ordinary use, patch the game, or refund the purchaser. The industry wants people to think this is a demand for eternal server support, with endless costs and complications. It isn't. It's much simpler: If a company sells people a paid game, it should not be able to destroy the game's ordinary use later without notice or remedy."

"An aggressive copyright troll" spent years abusing DMCAs to turn a bizarre Japanese PC game into lost media, until "they f***ed with" preservation-focused historians with a legal team.

Dustin BaileyStaff Writer

Dustin Bailey joined the GamesRadar team as a Staff Writer in May 2022, and is currently based in Missouri. He's been covering games (with occasional dalliances in the worlds of anime and pro wrestling) since 2015, first as a freelancer, then as a news writer at PCGamesN for nearly five years. His love for games was sparked somewhere between Metal Gear Solid 2 and Knights of the Old Republic, and these days you can usually find him splitting his entertainment time between retro gaming, the latest big action-adventure title, or a long haul in American Truck Simulator.

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