I saw this video a while back; it’s about video game publishers arguing successfully to the U.S. Copyright Office that a slight easing on the restrictions around game preservation would negatively (from their perspective) impact the video game market in general.

Some have characterized that as an overblown fear of piracy (or a “free online arcade“), or disrespect for games as an art form or game development as a skill to be taught by example.

I’m going to take the corpos at their word for now, though, because that’s bad enough.

 

There was also the Alice: Asylum debacle, about a year and a half ago now, in which American McGee (creator of American McGee’s Alice and Alice: Madness Returns) wanted to make a third game in the series, but the intellectual property rights were held by Electronic Arts. McGee offered to either make it for EA to publish or pay EA for the use of the IP (that McGee created), but EA spouted some gobbledygook about how neither of those fit in its strategy or something.

And you could look at EA’s recent output, dominated as it is by expansion packs for The Sims 4, and wonder about their sudden distaste for sequels. Or you could try guessing at how taking a wad of money in exchange for letting McGee release another Alice game had any downside for EA whatsoever, or how they could claim that controlling the IP was so “important” to them (a word they used) when the only reason the first game is still (legally) available on PC at all is that it’s old enough to have come out physically on disk and thus can turn up on the used-games market.¹

And you could theorize that it had something to do with corporate control or egotism – the idea didn’t come from EA’s boardroom and therefore had to be shat on – and, not knowing the personalities involved, you might well be right.

There’s another explanation, though, that ties these two cases together:

Artificial scarcity.

You see, every old game that’s kept accessible to present-day gamers and every new game that meets a niche demand might lure a few people away from Thinly Disguised Fantasy Football Gambling 26 or Undercooked and Bland Microtransaction Platform with Licensed IP or whatever “game” boardroom denizens think will get them the most money for the least effort while – and this is important – leaving the end user unsatisfied in a way that leaves them likely to buy the same, barely reheated product all over again next year, which “earns” the suits and their investors even more money for the same low effort…

 

To anyone reading this who’s muttering something like there ought to be a law: there is, at least in America, and you won’t like it. Artificial scarcity is enshrined in Supreme Court precedent.

It started when Congress set some farm production quotas in an attempt to fix the price of wheat. One farmer got caught growing “extra” wheat to feed his own animals and tried to argue that, since what he did was neither interstate nor commerce, the Interstate Commerce Clause didn’t give Congress the right to regulate it.

Cue gobbledygook.

If the farmer hadn’t grown his own wheat, the court decided, he would have had to buy animal feed on the open market; thus, his not engaging in commerce was an act of commerce, and it was interstate because he wasn’t buying anything from suppliers in other states. No, seriously:

Home-grown wheat in this sense competes with wheat in commerce. The stimulation of commerce is a use of the regulatory function quite as definitely as prohibitions or restrictions thereon.

You could look at that and say, hey, that’s fucked up,² And you could also say, hey, that sort of ruling explains a lot about how ridiculously expansive the government’s power is (anything that isn’t covered by the Interstate Commerce Clause can be covered by a similarly broad reading of the General Welfare Clause).

But that’s another, bigger pile of shit. The specifics of the case were that artificial scarcity to hike up prices is totally fine, you guys and that business interests have a legal right to your market demand…

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1. It might be possible to get it on Xbox, if you have the Xbox version of its sequel and can trust this store listing.

2. Imagine if, say, Getty Images or Shutterstock could sue anyone who took a photo of anything, because photographing their own dog reduced their demand for stock images of similar-breed dogs. Actually, don’t imagine that; I don’t want to give any copyright landlords ideas.