Accursed Farms
5 HN recommenders · recommended in 6 months, 2019–2024
1:15:54 · 1.1M views · Apr 25, 2019
Ross Scott of Accursed Farms makes a 76-minute argument that selling video games as a service is a form of consumer fraud. He lays out legal arguments that games are goods, covers ownership and programmed obsolescence, and discusses game preservation.
It is the go-to explanation of why games that die when servers shut down harm consumers, and it is repeatedly cited in Stop Killing Games and game-delisting threads.
10 comments from Hacker News
See "Games as a service is fraud": this video If you have an hour, I'd highly recommend giving this a watch. It is really sad to see any form of media die forever at the whim of a corporation. Games are especially prone to this unfortunately
The problem is that for game ROMs specifically, opening them to the public domain devalues potential opportunities for re-releases and remasters. The Nintendo virtual console service and S/NES classic are prominent examples. So it isn't so simple that there is "no harm done" by forcing game ROMs to fall into public domain. That all being said, I still agree with you. I really don't care how much money Nintendo, Microsoft, or Sony wants to make on decades-old games, at a certain point it becomes a cultural artifact. Snow White and other century-old movie properties should be public domain nowadays as well. At this point we're debating about the core values of trademark law though, and I'm not sure you wanted to do that. A similar debate revolves around what the law should say about "dead" games. These are games that, for example, rely on a central server that has been shut down. Many of these games were incredibly popular in their day, and some "radicals" (like myself, lol) argue that game companies should be compelled to release the server source code in an effort to preserve the game. Here's a great overview/rant on this topic: this video
Some more great information in this same space: [LINK] A less legally sound argument for why games as a service shouldn't be allowed: this video Ross is very odd but his opinions on this topic align greatly with my personal sentiment.
You don’t know what you are talking about and you are wasting everyone’s time. Watch this video to understand what we are talking about here: this video
Ross from Accursed Farms has some great videos * about exactly this phenomenon and why it is so detrimental to gaming culture in general. * this video