As major companies try their best to turn the video game industry into their own serfdoms where they set both the conditions and the prices of culture, one country in South America is leading the charge in the fight for consumer protections.
That is Brazil, whose legislators have recently proposed a new law that would safeguard gamers from the adverse effects of publishers’ decisions and unilateral, sudden terminations of their beloved video games.
According to Gaming Amigos, this new law, proposed by federal deputies Jandira Feghali and Márcio Filho, is specifically meant to protect “consumers who buy electronic games” and strong-arm publishers into meeting “certain obligations” whenever servers or games are to go offline.
Feghali explained on X that she was “inspired by the Stop Killing Games movement,” which is currently doing all it can to get new legislation passed in the European Union via the parliament, following the EU Commission’s refusal to introduce a new law to protect gamers’ consumer rights.
“Millions of people around the world have mobilized to fight for the right to continue playing the games they bought and to stay connected with the communities they built,” Feghali said, pointing out how video games are integral to the culture of Brazil. “Memory, digital sovereignty, and cultural and technological aspects all pass through the universe of video games as well,” she said (machine translated).
Filho, who cooperates with Feghali on this legislation, described this proposal as “a definitive milestone in the protection of gamers.”
“It safeguards their economic, cultural, and social rights, ensuring that unilateral decisions by big techs do not harm BR players,” he said. Hopefully that won’t just apply to Brazilian gamers and will be the starting point of a new, global fight for protecting gamers in the same way consumers are protected in other cultural institutions.
To drive Brazil’s fight for protecting gamers’ rights is also the wonderful news that a single Xbox player managed to beat Microsoft in court after the latter refused to reinstate his hacked account. Microsoft allegedly instructed him to repurchase all the video games he had owned on the compromised profile after telling him it could not be recovered and had to be terminated.
Microsoft apparently brought a 300-page PDF as its defense, but the player managed to argue their case and win a $400 payout, with the company instructed to reinstate the account with all the video games it had at the point of termination. If Microsoft fails to comply, it will allegedly be the target of a criminal case.
Both of these events happening basically within the same 24 hours tell me that Brazil is fighting the good fight now when it matters most. Major corporations are envisioning an all-digital future where they get to dictate culture, and if we let them achieve that position of dominance, dethroning them will be a distant dream.
Therefore, props to at least one country that is trying its best to protect a fundamental cornerstone of modern culture.
