Stop Killing Games / The Backlog Conundrum

Stop Killing Games

How big would you say your current video game backlog is? For me personally, I can tell you mine dates back to the PS1 at minimum. Now what if I told you that there’s a chance that your backlog was shrinking without you even knowing it? That you finally sit down to play that game you’ve put off for years and suddenly it’s just gone? You bought the game, had it in your library for years and suddenly the platform or publisher just deletes your fully purchased game from your library with no warning, and worse, no refund.

Welcome to MojoPlays and all we want to do is play our games whenever we want but for some reason we’re not allowed to and are instead being told that we never truly owned them in the first place.

A study recently found that roughly 87% of games developed before 2010 have either been deleted, are out of print or simply unplayable in any way. While there is a large community of gamers who obsessively collect games, me included, if you ever wanted to play some of these games again, much like I do, you’re basically out of luck. Retro gaming is an incredibly expensive hobby with many titles becoming rarer and in demand with every passing year, driving up costs for something that is also very difficult to play. Retro consoles degrade over time and repairing or replacing them can often be just as expensive as the game you wanted to play. There will soon be entire generations who will never be able to play many of the classic games of the 90s and 2000s simply because they no longer exist.

With the rise of and push for digital gaming, the threat that games can instantly disappear is greater than ever. Platforms like Steam, Xbox Live, PSN, and Nintendo E-Shop have titles taken offline almost daily with no notification and countless hours of work by dedicated teams simply erased forever. The shutdown of the E-Shop for the Nintendo 3DS as well the Wii and Wii U led to the erasure of roughly 2000 games that will never be playable again and will likely never find a way to come back. Microsoft also recently shut down the Xbox 360 Marketplace, which essentially laid the groundwork for digital console libraries in the mid-2000s, and another 200 games have been turned to digital dust if you didn’t already own the games in some capacity. Sony also attempted to shut down the PS3 storefront but after substantial backlash relented on the decision, but even a cursory glance at the games available in the shop, it’s clear that what remains is a shadow of what used to be available.

There was a time when backwards compatibility solved some of the issues of games becoming unplayable. The PS2 could play PS1 games, the Xbox 360 could play most Xbox games and the PS3 originally could play PS2 and PS1 games before that was worked out of the console. However, once the PS4 was released, backwards compatibility with previous generations was gone. If you wanted to play any of the games you purchased digitally on PS3 or even any of the games for the previous generations, you better hope you held onto your PS3 and your login info. Sony has at least taken some steps towards making their older titles available on PS4 and PS5, but the offerings pale in comparison to what is being left in the past and making some titles only playable through streaming is an idiotic decision in an age where steady online services still don’t exist.

Microsoft made a huge splash announcing a big push for backwards compatibility with the Xbox One and greatly expanded gamer’s libraries by making many titles dating all the way back to the OG Xbox playable again. However, this too was ultimately short-lived and after a time, Microsoft and Xbox halted the program and stopped adding titles to their backwards compatibility catalog, once again locking hundreds if not more titles to outdated and retro hardware.

Ideally, as we moved forward with more powerful hardware, theoretically, it should be easier than ever to play our older games, especially with so many of them already being converted digitally, and yet these multimillion and oftentimes billion-dollar companies are either completely ignorant on how to bring their legacy titles to modern hardware or more likely, they just don’t care to. This is despite the fact that dedicated homebrew programmers and gamers can make these games playable or build emulators to keep these titles alive, and with both Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo’s seemingly endless resources are incapable of doing the same. Instead, gamers are bombarded with endless remakes, remasters and re-releases in order to play games they’ve already likely bought numerous times. Admittedly this is at least a concession to keep some of these games playable and offer some much-needed quality of life improvements, but it still stings to know you likely already had purchased these games at full price only a few years ago and are now expected to do it again, likely for an even more ridiculous price hike. Nintendo is especially guilty of this practice, re-releasing their older titles and charging premium prices for what is essentially the most basic emulator version of their own games. How many times can we all rebuy Super Mario Bros?

Video games are art, plain and simple and therefore should have the same protections as other pieces of artwork. Hundreds and oftentimes thousands of developers, programmers, artists and more pour their lives into these titles to bring them to life, but instead of being regarded in the same space as film, or other artistic creations, video games are looked down upon as nothing more than a hobby or childish pastime. Whether it’s politicians or Nanny Karens who are looking to police the internet or score brownie points for something they clearly have no understanding of to push blame for any violent atrocity that occurs in the world or shielding themselves from criticism of gaming by claiming it’s to “protect the children”, video games have always been an easy target for many of the world’s problems. Whether they’re your cup of tea or not, numerous adult themed video games were recently delisted from Steam and other platforms in a coordinated attack and given the group Collective Shout’s track record, it's unlikely they will stop with the NSFW games. Games have every right to exist just like any other form of entertainment, as long as their content is within reason, and should be afforded the right to exist just like any other artform. This has led to major and rightful concerns about censorship and how much control outside companies can have over our ability to not only play games but decide what we’re allowed to buy.

Another major issue with games disappearing comes down to licensing agreements. Whether it be music used within the game or simply the IP the game was developed for, games will often be pulled from shelves and digital storefronts because either an IPs license expired, or the publisher simply didn’t want to continue paying for it. Thousands of devs' hard work and dedication simply gone because someone decided the IP cost wasn’t worth it anymore. The Transformers Cybertron games, the numerous Spider-Man titles of the 360 and PS3 era and countless others are now only playable on those respective consoles and that’s IF you can even find copies of the game that don’t put you in debt. For whatever reason, video games, despite being quite literally one of the most profitable forms of entertainment in the world, aren't viewed as the artform they are in the same way that film, music and literature are. While there are near limitless efforts to preserve music, film and books, re-releasing these titles in updated formats with numerous updates to make them available to future generations, video games consistently rely on its own audience to preserve their legacy while their own creators abandon them.

Recently there has been a push by gamers to not only preserve these games that are slowly being lost to time and older hardware, but even modern titles that are barely even a decade old. The movement simply titled “Stop Killing Games” aims to hold publishers and developers responsible for keeping their games alive and playable, in particular games that have a dominant online component. The most recent example of this occurrence is Ubisoft with their open world racing game “The Crew” in which the entire game was delisted even for players who had purchased the game, all the DLC and logged hundreds of playtime hours into the game, was taken completely offline with Ubisoft scoffing at the idea they owed the players anything for their dedication and investment. Citing a bunch of legal jargon within their user agreements essentially stating that the player doesn’t own the rights to the game they purchased. This will happen again later this year when EA and Bioware’s disaster “Anthem” will be taken offline, making the game unplayable for the dozens of people still interested in playing that title. Most recently, Rock Band announced that the entire game is being delisted along with all its DLC due to expiring music license agreements. A game designed entirely around music is being delisted and will be unplayable because the licenses for the music are expiring.

The argument isn’t that these games should stay online forever, but that the studios should develop an offline mode, so the game remains playable after the servers have shut down, ostensibly preserving the game and the player’s investment for future generations. Naturally, this proposal hasn’t gone down well with these industry types, offering completely non-answers as to why this isn’t a viable option that essentially boils down to nothing more than “We don’t wanna”. The “Stop Killing Games” initiative has since achieved its signature goal and will now head to the government for review, which will in all likelihood bring out all the highly paid law offices to fight on the behalf of these publishers to continue to steal both players’ time and money. You will own nothing, and you will be happy.

Corporate greed is nothing new, but within the gaming industry it seems especially egregious. Gamers are seen as money printing machines who are constantly bombarded with ways to separate us from our hard-earned money all in the pursuit of the mythical “whales” that spend the big bucks on battle passes or cosmetics that are released. Publishers are all too happy to take your money for these games that continue to release in disastrously unplayable states, refuse to fix them or offer refunds and then blame the gamers for their expectations for a functioning product and then just delete that game from existence once it stops being profitable, no matter the fan outcry.

However, there is yet another threat on the horizon that has the potential to be even more dangerous for gaming than many of these others I’ve already listed: the age of patenting. Recently, Nintendo has been especially aggressive and egregious in its lawsuit against Pokemon competitor Palworld, patenting all manner of game mechanics in an attempt to destroy their competition, all of which are things they didn’t even create themselves. From summoning creatures from balls to even claiming to own the ability to use creatures to fly around the game world, there seems to be no limit to Nintendo’s underhanded tactics to crush Palworld and developer Pocketpair. And yet even with all this clear legal bs, their most recent patent that never should have been granted is by far their most damning and dangerous due to the precedent it sets for the industry.

For whatever reason, most likely uninformed or ignorant staff at the patent offices, Nintendo was recently granted a patent on summoning creatures to fight for you in all forms of video game media. That’s right, Nintendo now claims to completely own the summon ability of video games. This is a game mechanic that has been around for literal decades now, first appearing in Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei back in 1987 and has since become one of the most widely utilized game mechanics in RPGs. But now, Nintendo claims that this is their game mechanic and ONLY their game mechanic. This sets a new and terrifying direction the industry could be heading.

We’ve already seen this tactic used before, most recently with WB Games patenting the “Nemesis System” from Monolith Studios, famously used in their Middle Earth games, which WB then recently shut down completely, preventing anyone from even using the “Nemesis System” or anything like it ever again. What Nintendo has done is essentially creatively bankrupt the game industry. Gaming is designed and built on iteration. Even Nintendo’s precious Pokemon franchise is an amalgamation of countless game mechanics pioneered by other creators and developers. This move is the death of creativity within gaming as these greedy corporations that are consistently bleeding money from their broken game launches and financial disasters will begin looking at these game mechanics as easy money, something they can license out to other developers and simply collect a paycheck.

This could also spell disaster for the indie and AA gaming space as these would-be startup creators would be unlikely to afford the exorbitant license fees charged by these enormous publishers. Gaming has always been a collaborative ecosystem. First person shooters, turn based RPGs, Soulslikes, all these game mechanics laid the groundwork for some of the best and more critically acclaimed video games of all time, but now these once iterative game mechanics could end up being the death of the creative ideas that helped build the industry into what it is today. Nintendo and other studios who follow suit will effectively kill all creativity in the pursuit of profit and completely stifle any innovation while claiming it's all to protect their IPs.

Gaming is at its most vulnerable right now and given the trajectory that it continues to be heading, it's unlikely things are going to get any better. Thankfully however, gamers are pushing back against all these awful practices by voting with their wallets and numerous petitions pushing back against the seeming global agenda constantly targeting video games. These are dark times for our favorite hobby and pastime. Games can be taken away from paying customers at a moment's notice, we are being charged more for inferior products and now even something as mundane as the game mechanics themselves are threatened. I love video games. I always have. I just want to be able to play the games I’ve paid for and be able to show my kids the games I grew up playing without having to worry about whether they’re either still playable or if they even still exist. Video games need better protections from people who actually play and understand them, and until that happens, our past will continue to be erased right in front of our eyes.

What do you think? Is there any way gaming can be saved from itself? What games have been deleted or are almost impossible to play these days that you miss? Let us know in the comments.