I in no way mean this to be rude, but I think a big part of why the EU isn't in the same galaxy as the US in the realm of business in general, is in some part, the knee jerk reaction to turn to the government to make products and services better.
Governments cannot make you an alternative, they can only make something that already exists, different (usually worse).
I have zero interest in creating in the gaming space, however, my gut reaction would be to start down the path of how I could create competition to companies that rug pulled their games.
And yes, I get that "just make a competitor" is easier said than done. But at least by going down that road, you end up with more games, better games, and people learning skills throughout the process. And who knows, maybe one is a mega success.
Sure, you can stand there pounding your chest for "democracy," but I contend that those who are building their own things are practicing it far more than those who are demanding others make things for them.
Maybe, I think a bigger reason is that Europe doesn't have near the level of regulatory harmonization that the US has. There are tons of policy areas where member states just do whatever they want, in pretty important areas. Like the US has a single bankruptcy code, and state commercial codes are all pretty close to the UCC, that's not the case in Europe.
The current EU commission president is pushing pretty hard to create more harmonization to make it easier for companies and investors to operate across Europe.
The Nature Index, which shows that data, already only selects the most impactful journals. I wasn't able to find any data that weighs output by citation count.
I'd flip this on its head and say this is why the US isn't in the same Galaxy as the EU when it comes to every metric beyond line on graph go up, gun crime, and military spending.(And thats even if you treat the EU as whole, which well, you shouldn't)
There are already competitors, hundreds if not thousands of excellent indie games are made every year. This doesn't mean we shouldnt regulate actors who are mis-selling products, particularly when that mis-selling is purely for the purpose of extract maximum value from consumers. The barrier to AAA game entry is large enough that the existing firms are essentially a cartel, meanwhile smaller devs already manage to ensure their games can be played forever, but its not in shareholders interests to not rugpull. Which is frankly exactly what the state exists for, to ensure the rights of the general public.
Who? The people controlling all distribution channels - they know. Or are you proposing one should create their own hardware platform / software platform? Payment processing? Advertisement network? Imagine all the skills and good software storefronts and operating systems one could end up doing that!
I mean, yes, you could attempt to take over the largest entertainment market in the world, already dominated by a handful of multi-billion dollar corporations, in the hope that your "mega success" game is so world-shattering that EA, Ubisoft, etc have a Scrooge-ian change of heart and start following your pro-consumer, pro-conservation ideology.
Now, if you want to actually do something that has a chance of having any effect at all, you go for the legislature. Unlike America's entirely feckless regulatory bodies, the EU does occasionally dislodge itself from the corps' backsides to provide a quick, timid reprimand. It's not very much but it's much better than nothing at all.
Although, I have to wonder, do you believe this should apply to every market? Should asbestos be made legal in buildings on the account you could build houses without it? Should we remove all kind of sanitary requirements for food processing, on the account of the fact that some food companies might not let their plants wallow in filth?
> But at least by going down that road, you end up with more games, better games, and people learning skills throughout the process. And who knows, maybe one is a mega success.
Yes, but in that scenario, some really good games would still die. So it would good to make it illegal to kill games in addition to making more games.
> Sure, you can stand there pounding your chest for "democracy," but I contend that those who are building their own things are practicing it far more than those who are demanding others make things for them.
I mean, in the short term, yes, the Stop Killing Games movement is demanding that others do some work for them. But, in the long term, the Stop Killing Games movement is asking for others to do less work.
The only reason why games are being killed are because companies are putting in extra effort to include self-destruct mechanisms in games. If a company doesn’t want to bother disarming these self-destruct mechanisms, then there is a simple solution: don’t create the self-destruct mechanisms to begin with. It’s much easier to create games that don’t have self-destruct mechanisms.
I’m a strong supporter of demanding that companies stop doing bad things and that they put in effort to undo the bad things that they have already done.
> There are no self-destruct mechanisms put into games.
That’s not accurate. I used to play the Android version of EA Tetris [1]. I liked the game so much that I paid to remove ads from it. One day, I opened the game, and the game told me that I wasn’t allowed to play it unless I installed an update for it. I installed the update, and launched the game again. The game then told me that I would not be allowed to play it after a specific date. After that date passed, I tried opening the game again, and it refused to let me play the game.
For more examples of games that contain self-destruct mechanisms, see the Stop Killing Games wiki [2].
Mobile presents even larger problems as games and apps get orphaned by quickly moving APIs which don't have backwards compatability. It's not clear to me what the Stop Killing Games answer to that problem would be.
A form of copy-protection basically. I get the desire for the emotive framing though but I think the EOL implications were simply not considered. I also agree with the idea that at EOL that copy-protection should be removed. There are however a vanishingly small number of games that are built this way so I'm not sure regulation is the best way of approaching it.
But this is an additional and much less effective layer of copy protection compared to the actual copy protection. The game wouldn't be meaningfully easier to pirate without it.
IMO this means it isn't a form of copy protection.
License verification via a server is a pretty common and normal method of copy protection. For example the JetBrains IDE I'm using at work right now does this.
If it didn't work then players would have no issue with the server being taken offline! But that isn't the case so clearly it impacts people.
If you're doing license verification in a way that stops me from playing my legitimately purchased copy & you don't give me a way to continue playing my legitimately purchased copy, it's literally a self-destruct mechanism.
But the discussion wasn't just about license verification - there have been instances of account requirements that weren't tied to license verification, just to social features, yet the game still didn't work without logging in.
It's not "demanding others make things for you". It's demanding they don't remotely disable the thing you already bought.
Imagine you buy a car, then a few years later the company remotely disables it because they're selling a newer model. Without giving you the money back of course. That's what's happening with games. And not just multiplayer: tons of single player games have been killed this way. The whole SKG thing started with The Crew, whose single player campaign (a massive thing with tons of content) got remotely yanked by the publisher.
I don't believe a ton of true single player games have been killed this way. For multiplayer games your car analogy completely fails. The car company doesn't pay the road tax, or gas, or your mechanic.
The reason I picked the last year is to see what the current landscape is. If this is a common practice in need of regulation then I'd expect a large number of current titles present the issue. If it's a 'few' then how many exactly does that imply? If we're talking less than ten then that would be less than 0.05% of games released last year (let alone the number releaded over the last ten).
Someone linked this page which has 440 dead games over the past few decades which is 2.2% of the output of 2025 but obviously includes many more years, mobile, console releases and so on: https://stopkillinggames.wiki.gg/wiki/Dead_game_list
There are several fundamental issues with your approach.
First: unless the average lifetime of a "dead game" is below two months, your focus on games from last year will exclude most dead games. To give an analogy - you're trying to determine how many humans die before twenty years old, and determining this data by looking at babies born in 2025.
Second: the list is unlikely to be complete, especially since many supporters of SKG most likely haven't heard of it. I have seen many people advertising SKG towards their friends or audience, and I've never heard any of them mention this list.
Why is this only targeted at games and not mobile apps, app subscriptions or websites.
This pretty much removes the ability to use _any_ commercial software without a custom license which is just insanity. No using any AWS services in case the pull the rug on you.
You might argue “but you can X and you can Y”, and that’s true, but again why is this only a problem for games?
The short answer is someone cared enough about the specific example in gaming to actually go through all the work to demand change.
The longer answer is that games are one of the only pieces of software your average consumer actually buys these days, and they have a few particularly egregious examples that make it much easier to argue in front of a bunch of politicians without a firm grasp on the digital world, like "Game is completely client side except it checks with a server every 5 minutes to make sure you have a valid license, so when the company goes belly up you're left with a brick"
SKG is basically "right-to-repair" but for games. I do contend that if your phone breaks and the company says "we won't fix it and you aren't allowed to" then the government isn't doing its job. On the same token, if a game that you purchased turns off their servers and says "we won't run it and you aren't allowed to" then the government isn't doing its job.
Now, how I would be able to run it is a very open question and I do agree there are some ways that are more reasonable asks than others. But the present-day status quo of "company says suck eggs and you just have to deal with it" is not an acceptable final state.
SKG is more like if the car company is required to provide a working factory, capable of manufacturing all the car's parts, along with working supply chains for all those things, to the car ownership "community", if they ever want to stop manufacturing that kind of car. They're required to do this for free.
You know, so the "community" can take it over and keep manufacturing parts to keep the car going forever.
Modern multiplayer game infrastructure is extremely complex; you don't just "hand over the server code". It's a massive multimillion dollar project to do anything analogous to that, and this project is mandatory and must be done for free. And no, gamers won't expect to pay any more because of SKG.
> I think a big part of why the EU isn't in the same galaxy as the US in the realm of business in general, is in some part, the knee jerk reaction to turn to the government to make products and services better.
Hilarious take considering the initiative is a brainchild of an American.
The initiative is in the EU because the US doesn't have a way for citizens to force the legislative to make decisions. This is on record, with him plainly stating it. Not an interpretation or anything
> Sure, you can stand there pounding your chest for "democracy," but I contend that those who are building their own things are practicing it far more than those who are demanding others make things for them.
Srsly, this is as big brain as you can get.
Are you seriously unaware that quiet a few of the most selling games were made in the EU?
There are many cases where we know for a fact this isn't true.
Many things that governments now do used to be private. Trains for example. Airbus wouldn't have happened without government. French movie industry and so on.
But I agree that its not as easy as government randomyl getting into every random entertainment market and trying to create competitors for everything.
An interesting question about Stop Killing Games is if this should apply to software more broadly. If a company shuts down should they open source their product so people can continue using it? There isn't as strong an argument for this since most software is structured like a SaaS rather than a one time purchase. But it's considerate when companies do this, e.g. Facebook open sourcing Parse Server was better than outright discontinuing it.
Maybe not open source it. But at least allow it to operate in offline manner where for one time purchases you do not have any license checks that stop it from operating. I do not expect things like cloud sync to continue. But at least I should be able to run it on my local machine.
> If a company shuts down should they open source their product so people can continue using it?
The question is who is now responsible for the software? Who can the government compel to open source it? There is no more legal entity behind the software. Maybe the last employee just takes the source code home on their laptop and that's it.
How is a government forcing a private entity (especially a defunkt one) to release their source code?
When a company shuts down, somebody becomes the new owner of their stuff, including their intellectual property. Most of the time it's whoever the company was in debt to. Now that company can choose to either host the software, or release it.
This just feels like one of those things that can be completely loopholed. There's plenty of reasons why a company might find a specific software not profitable but also not want to open source it, so under this rule they will just host it on the most basic server possible (only concurrently supports like 50 users) and never update it again. Effectively still dead.
Can someone please ELI5? I've heard much about it but still, with all the drama, I still don't get it.
SKG is an initiative that will force game publishers to keep a game online, provided that people have paid for it, and the publisher is not bankrupt? Is that right? What does it have to do with democracy?
No, they do not want to force publishers to keep a game online. The initiative just wants developers to provide a way for users to keep using a game after it has gone EOL by allowing users to run their own servers or by no longer requiring internet access.
See the FAQ[1]:
> Aren't you asking companies to support games forever? Isn't that unrealistic?
> A: No, we are not asking that at all. We are in favor of publishers ending support for a game whenever they choose. What we are asking for is that they implement an end-of-life plan to modify or patch the game so that it can run on customer systems with no further support from the company being necessary. We agree that it is unrealistic to expect companies to support games indefinitely and do not advocate for that in any way. Additionally, there are already real-world examples of publishers ending support for online-only games in a responsible way, such as:
> 'Gran Turismo Sport' published by Sony
> 'Knockout City' published by Velan Studios
> 'Mega Man X DiVE' published by Capcom
> 'Scrolls / Caller's Bane' published by Mojang AB
> 'Duelyst' published by Bandai Namco Entertainment
I'm not sure what the question "What does it have to do with democracy?" is referring to. Some people find that no longer having access to video games they paid for isn't fair so are petitioning their governments for consumer protection against that.
A solution to the problem was developed in the late 90s / early 2000.
Games allowed for personally hosted servers and the ability to connect to them. This is how original Call of Duty, Counter Strike, Quake III, Doom 3, Enemy Territory, and more worked. A person did not have to create a user account with the company that produced the title.
Modern day games require an user account for their services and you are only allowed to connect to their servers without being able to self-host.
Self-hosting was very beneficial during dial up days because the local ISP could run the server to reduce connection latency.
Games like Battlefield Bad Company 2 is a great example of how bad it has become.
Some good responses here already. One angle that's not been mentioned yet is informed consent at the time of purchase.
When "buying" not "renting" there is presently no information for the consumer to make an informed choice about what they are purchasing when it comes to a live service game because no end-of-service date is available at the time of making the purchasing decision.
This is in large part why the end of The Crew was problematic for many people.
Had the service end of life been advertised at the point of purchase the consumer could have knowingly "purchased" a time-limited product, or not, but the decision would have been informed.
All this stuff about end-of-life plans, releasing self-hosted servers, patching out online-only stuff and leaving behind an offline-only game, etc, is great, but it's only one of the possible remedies that SKG have been discussing for the last couple of years.
Another perfectly feasible one is not to dress up a time-limited entitlement to participate in a live service as the same thing as an "own forever" product at the point of purchase.
SKG will prevent game publishers from making online games unplayable. This could be as simple as releasing the server code and adding a setting to allow custom servers.
Basically the official servers can die, as long as unofficial servers can be used instead.
Or more so semi-online games. With some components that should be fully playable offline. There is no reason why these offline components shouldn't continue to operate when servers are shutdown.
What SKG movement want, in short terms, is that game developers/publishers of live service games and online only games be forced, once the games is no longer supported, to provide tools, software, executables to the community to keep the game going. They are using the banner of consumer protection and a public EU initiative to force the EU politicians to debate and come up with a solution.
The drama mostly stems from the fact that the head of the movement is a gamer with no knowledge of either software development or game development, so he has a VERY simplistic view of how a game server-client works and thinks that developers just have a .exe executable running from a raspberry pi that can be uploaded to github and that's it. When people with knowledge call out that there are TONS middleware used to develop a game with their own licenses and that a server nowadays is more than a single machine, he just says: well, this movement is no retroactive so new games will be develop with that in mind and automatically every software vendor will be fine with distributing their code so that everyone can keep playing.
While I support the spirit of the movement, this will ultimately end up with a warning label in a box because real life has more nuances.
I think someone with his perspective might be actually a perfect head of the movement. Most people who play games are not programmers & games are becoming a big part of modern culture.
Why should people playing (and paying !) for games really care what bad technical or business decisions have the publishers done when they see part of their culture being killed to save a buck ?
A lot of other important problems have been resolved in a similar manner without every participant in the movement being a technical expert.
In a three way chat between the movement, politicians and the game industry, you need to know the technical details to rebuke the arguments and support your claims.
Also, the technical decisions are not just about saving a buck but getting the game shipped. If my game is about growing vegetables and I want to let the player drive to the state farm, but I don't want to spend time (and money) building my own physics engine for driving, I grab a solution off the shelve with their license and go back to the core of my game, this same thing is repeat for many other things like authentication, anti-cheat, networking, etc
I’m a game developer - this sums up my feelings perfectly.
A lot of this middleware isn’t necessarily even game middleware - think of a turn based game that might use a custom DB instead of mongo or SQL. You’re effectively banning any non game specific middleware from being used or requiring that every company provide a separate licensing path for game developers.
Advances to round 2/7 to be able to do a powerpoint presentation so that companies will, at best, be forced to put some pointless label as a legal loophole, that consumers will promptly ignore because everyone will have it and it'll be meaningless.
I think Stop Killing Games is more important than just "oh noes, they took my toys away". Looking back, video games have been the gateway to computing in more than one one way. Before home computers people had game consoles (which were cheaper than computers) or arcades. Before iTunes and app stores there was Steam. Before the modern smartphone apps there were Wii channels. Maybe in some cases the games came technically later, but they were the initial contact for the broad masses.
What I'm getting at is that it has usually been through games that practices in general computing have been established. If Stop Killing Games is successful it will have much bigger effects on general computing. And I believe that this is why you keep the same false accusations getting repeated over and over again (e.g. saying that SKG would require publishers to keep supporting a game forever). I know it's said not to attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity, but at some point the pattern becomes too clear not to notice. All of big tech stands to lose eventually if SKG succeeds.
Have you played The Talos Principle 2? Yep, games are toys! It's nothing more than that. What we fail to realise in our industrial society is that toys are a fundamental piece of our culture, they enable learning lots of different skills that wouldn't be possible in the "real world", they foster creativity, problem solving, bonding and cooperation...
Toys are just toys, and yet they are the most important things we have. I honestly think the technological progress catalyzed by games is a byproduct, a huge one, but not central to the industry. We only think technology is the most important thing because we live in a world in which overvalues technical prowess in lieu of culture.
I agree with most of what you said, but describing video games as nothing more than toys does a disservice to the medium.
Yes, video games can be educational and entertaining, just like real world toys, but they can also be artistic and communicate stories. They're the most expressive and engaging storytelling device we have ever invented.
Not all games are all of these things, and there's nothing wrong with games that only focus on entertainment, but those that combine all of these aspects successfully are far more impactful and memorable than any other piece of media.
> Yes, video games can be educational and entertaining, just like real world toys, but they can also be artistic and communicate stories.
Storytelling and art isn't exclusive to video games though. Board games for instance have tons of storytelling and are very rich in art. They are, however nothing more than toys, and they don't need to be. That's my whole point. Being "just a toy" is pejorative only in the industrial, productive society.
I suppose it's a matter of semantics and perspective. The definition of "toy" seems too narrow to me to properly encompass the complexities of board and video games. A ball is a toy, but clearly it's unable to provide the same experience as a board or video game. At a certain point these experiences can be deeply engaging in ways that simpler toys can't provide. Not necessarily better, but certainly different. Maybe it has to do with the amount of play rules, engaged senses, or brain activity... I'm not sure. But at some point a toy stops being a toy to me. :)
Though I do agree with your point. Games/toys are unfairly criticized in our society.
I stand corrected: "an object that is used by an adult for pleasure rather than for serious use". Video games, board games etc... can very well be used for serious use cases, so they don't fit the definition of a toy.
There are a huge number of people who deluded themselves into reflexively protecting the interests of hundred billion+ dollar industries. No malice required for that, they also aren't stupid, propaganda works.
Could be, if you can set up a millions of dollars regulatory apparatus to keep online some really old MMOs for the 100 people worldwide who want to play them, there's really nothing you can't regulate.
This is a common mischaracterization of stop killing games. It does not propose publishers keep games online indefinitely, but to provide the bare minimum to the community to host them if they decide to shut the servers down for good. If the 16-year-old Unturned dev could do it, so can AAA studios
They're pretty up front about the fact that the final result is going to have be some sort of compromise.
Based on the words of the most involved proponents of the movement have said, the absolute least they could be forced into accepting would be "Developers can't sue people hosting reverse engineered servers after the main game has gone offline". Which is trivial to comply with (just don't sue someone), but probably insufficient for living up to the main messaging of the movement (since there's a lot more games that people care about preserving than games people care enough about preserving to completely re-implement servers for).
Slightly more reasonably, there's the pitch of "release your server binaries". As the market stands at the moment, that'd be difficult, because in large studios it's common to have all sorts of licensed software involved in hosting your backend, but it's the kind of thing that's pretty trivially responded to on new projects: companies selling software for game service backends would have to adjust their licenses in response to their customers' legal requirements, but that's far from impossible given all the licensed code that's running on client machines already.
In the best possible world, consumers would get access to the source code of the entire project after the company is done making money on it, but everyone involved seems to think that's a pipe dream.
If only it would actually work that easy for democracy(people's will) to control the actual important things of society that fuck us, like housing, money printing, immigration, tax % and where that money goes to, healthcare, foreign aid, jailing epstein clients, etc.
I'm not sure how I feel about SKG. On one hand: sure, a product you buy should be expected to work for more than a couple of years. This gets fuzzy with modern service subscription models, licensing terms, etc., but in general, planned obsolescence shouldn't exist in digital products any more than in physical ones.
On the other, though, the companies that produce games that stop working are not worth supporting. Their games are often not great to begin with, and rewarding this behavior simply gives them a reason to keep abusing consumers.
There are so many studios that produce games worth playing, and make them accessible without DRM on platforms like GOG and itch.io. A one-time payment can get you many hours of enjoyment for as long as you have a compatible system to run it on. This is getting more difficult on Windows, but thankfully Linux is a solid gaming platform now, and there are many well supported virtualization options for older games.
So my point is: stop supporting scummy companies, and start supporting passionate game developers. There is a practically infinite catalog of great experiences beyond the yearly rehashed EA, Activision, or Ubisoft title.
You don't pre-order, and you wait for reviews. But usually this is a problem of repeat offenders. Fool me once...
Nowadays with shovelware and AI slop, new studios can also release garbage, but you don't have to play on day 1. At some point you start trusting certain studios and publishers, which makes things a bit easier.
Trust is difficult to earn, but easy to lose. The problem is that many people keep trusting consumer-hostile companies even after they screw them over.
...you wait several years for them to not shut down the servers?
In the end, without government intervention, is there any hope that any game beign developed right now will be able to be played in 20 years? I don't think so.
I really need to get pill-pilled so I can keep up with what people are saying these days. From Urban Dictionary:
> 1: being aware of a difficult situation or position and having a fighting "can do" attitude and not giving up, plus accomplishing said thing(s) within the difficult situation. 2: being optimistic, not merely through gut feelings but via having thought about a situation enough to understand how to get through it successfully
> Tom: How'd you get to the top of this business in just a few months of work?
> Jim: Working hard, working correctly, and taking the white pill.
I in no way mean this to be rude, but I think a big part of why the EU isn't in the same galaxy as the US in the realm of business in general, is in some part, the knee jerk reaction to turn to the government to make products and services better.
Governments cannot make you an alternative, they can only make something that already exists, different (usually worse).
I have zero interest in creating in the gaming space, however, my gut reaction would be to start down the path of how I could create competition to companies that rug pulled their games.
And yes, I get that "just make a competitor" is easier said than done. But at least by going down that road, you end up with more games, better games, and people learning skills throughout the process. And who knows, maybe one is a mega success.
Sure, you can stand there pounding your chest for "democracy," but I contend that those who are building their own things are practicing it far more than those who are demanding others make things for them.
Maybe, I think a bigger reason is that Europe doesn't have near the level of regulatory harmonization that the US has. There are tons of policy areas where member states just do whatever they want, in pretty important areas. Like the US has a single bankruptcy code, and state commercial codes are all pretty close to the UCC, that's not the case in Europe.
The current EU commission president is pushing pretty hard to create more harmonization to make it easier for companies and investors to operate across Europe.
I believe states have their own bankruptcy codes?
Having lived/worked in both Europe and the US, the reason is, quite frankly, that they’re lazy (cultural) and not very smart (brain drain).
Their societies prioritize leisure over work. Nearly everyone with any drive moves to the US to earn much more money.
What a depressing outlook, ya'll really be living to work over there dont you. All hail the mighty GDP.
> not very smart (brain drain)
Large EU countries have a higher per capita scientific output than the US
If you weight papers by some measure of impact, e.g. by citation count, this is not true.
The Nature Index, which shows that data, already only selects the most impactful journals. I wasn't able to find any data that weighs output by citation count.
https://www.wipo.int/en/web/global-innovation-index/w/blogs/...
I'd flip this on its head and say this is why the US isn't in the same Galaxy as the EU when it comes to every metric beyond line on graph go up, gun crime, and military spending.(And thats even if you treat the EU as whole, which well, you shouldn't)
There are already competitors, hundreds if not thousands of excellent indie games are made every year. This doesn't mean we shouldnt regulate actors who are mis-selling products, particularly when that mis-selling is purely for the purpose of extract maximum value from consumers. The barrier to AAA game entry is large enough that the existing firms are essentially a cartel, meanwhile smaller devs already manage to ensure their games can be played forever, but its not in shareholders interests to not rugpull. Which is frankly exactly what the state exists for, to ensure the rights of the general public.
> And who knows, maybe one is a mega success.
Who? The people controlling all distribution channels - they know. Or are you proposing one should create their own hardware platform / software platform? Payment processing? Advertisement network? Imagine all the skills and good software storefronts and operating systems one could end up doing that!
Strictly speaking governments can and do create new things, e.g. NASA.
I mean, yes, you could attempt to take over the largest entertainment market in the world, already dominated by a handful of multi-billion dollar corporations, in the hope that your "mega success" game is so world-shattering that EA, Ubisoft, etc have a Scrooge-ian change of heart and start following your pro-consumer, pro-conservation ideology.
Now, if you want to actually do something that has a chance of having any effect at all, you go for the legislature. Unlike America's entirely feckless regulatory bodies, the EU does occasionally dislodge itself from the corps' backsides to provide a quick, timid reprimand. It's not very much but it's much better than nothing at all.
Although, I have to wonder, do you believe this should apply to every market? Should asbestos be made legal in buildings on the account you could build houses without it? Should we remove all kind of sanitary requirements for food processing, on the account of the fact that some food companies might not let their plants wallow in filth?
> But at least by going down that road, you end up with more games, better games, and people learning skills throughout the process. And who knows, maybe one is a mega success.
Yes, but in that scenario, some really good games would still die. So it would good to make it illegal to kill games in addition to making more games.
> Sure, you can stand there pounding your chest for "democracy," but I contend that those who are building their own things are practicing it far more than those who are demanding others make things for them.
I mean, in the short term, yes, the Stop Killing Games movement is demanding that others do some work for them. But, in the long term, the Stop Killing Games movement is asking for others to do less work.
The only reason why games are being killed are because companies are putting in extra effort to include self-destruct mechanisms in games. If a company doesn’t want to bother disarming these self-destruct mechanisms, then there is a simple solution: don’t create the self-destruct mechanisms to begin with. It’s much easier to create games that don’t have self-destruct mechanisms.
I’m a strong supporter of demanding that companies stop doing bad things and that they put in effort to undo the bad things that they have already done.
There are no self-destruct mechanisms put into games. I’m sure you have a point but this attempt at articulating it is confusing.
> There are no self-destruct mechanisms put into games.
That’s not accurate. I used to play the Android version of EA Tetris [1]. I liked the game so much that I paid to remove ads from it. One day, I opened the game, and the game told me that I wasn’t allowed to play it unless I installed an update for it. I installed the update, and launched the game again. The game then told me that I would not be allowed to play it after a specific date. After that date passed, I tried opening the game again, and it refused to let me play the game.
For more examples of games that contain self-destruct mechanisms, see the Stop Killing Games wiki [2].
[1]: <https://tetris.wiki/Tetris_(2011,_Electronic_Arts)>
[2]: <https://stopkillinggames.wiki.gg/wiki/Dead_game_list>
Thanks for the list!
Mobile presents even larger problems as games and apps get orphaned by quickly moving APIs which don't have backwards compatability. It's not clear to me what the Stop Killing Games answer to that problem would be.
What else is a completely unnecessary requirement to sign in to an account to play a single-player game?
A form of copy-protection basically. I get the desire for the emotive framing though but I think the EOL implications were simply not considered. I also agree with the idea that at EOL that copy-protection should be removed. There are however a vanishingly small number of games that are built this way so I'm not sure regulation is the best way of approaching it.
But this is an additional and much less effective layer of copy protection compared to the actual copy protection. The game wouldn't be meaningfully easier to pirate without it.
IMO this means it isn't a form of copy protection.
License verification via a server is a pretty common and normal method of copy protection. For example the JetBrains IDE I'm using at work right now does this.
If it didn't work then players would have no issue with the server being taken offline! But that isn't the case so clearly it impacts people.
If you're doing license verification in a way that stops me from playing my legitimately purchased copy & you don't give me a way to continue playing my legitimately purchased copy, it's literally a self-destruct mechanism.
But the discussion wasn't just about license verification - there have been instances of account requirements that weren't tied to license verification, just to social features, yet the game still didn't work without logging in.
It's not "demanding others make things for you". It's demanding they don't remotely disable the thing you already bought.
Imagine you buy a car, then a few years later the company remotely disables it because they're selling a newer model. Without giving you the money back of course. That's what's happening with games. And not just multiplayer: tons of single player games have been killed this way. The whole SKG thing started with The Crew, whose single player campaign (a massive thing with tons of content) got remotely yanked by the publisher.
I don't believe a ton of true single player games have been killed this way. For multiplayer games your car analogy completely fails. The car company doesn't pay the road tax, or gas, or your mechanic.
There have been a few, and they make fantastic examples to bring up when explaining the concept to people without a broad understanding of the market.
There were about 20,000 games released on Steam last year how many worked that way?
Why would it be acceptable for a single one to do this?
And why do you think that games released last year are a good yardstick when we're talking about games being shut down at the end of their lifetime?
I'm trying to understand the scope of the issue.
The reason I picked the last year is to see what the current landscape is. If this is a common practice in need of regulation then I'd expect a large number of current titles present the issue. If it's a 'few' then how many exactly does that imply? If we're talking less than ten then that would be less than 0.05% of games released last year (let alone the number releaded over the last ten).
Someone linked this page which has 440 dead games over the past few decades which is 2.2% of the output of 2025 but obviously includes many more years, mobile, console releases and so on: https://stopkillinggames.wiki.gg/wiki/Dead_game_list
There are several fundamental issues with your approach.
First: unless the average lifetime of a "dead game" is below two months, your focus on games from last year will exclude most dead games. To give an analogy - you're trying to determine how many humans die before twenty years old, and determining this data by looking at babies born in 2025.
Second: the list is unlikely to be complete, especially since many supporters of SKG most likely haven't heard of it. I have seen many people advertising SKG towards their friends or audience, and I've never heard any of them mention this list.
I’m kind of confused. In your metaphor, what do the road tax, gas or mechanic represent?
Why is this only targeted at games and not mobile apps, app subscriptions or websites.
This pretty much removes the ability to use _any_ commercial software without a custom license which is just insanity. No using any AWS services in case the pull the rug on you.
You might argue “but you can X and you can Y”, and that’s true, but again why is this only a problem for games?
The short answer is someone cared enough about the specific example in gaming to actually go through all the work to demand change.
The longer answer is that games are one of the only pieces of software your average consumer actually buys these days, and they have a few particularly egregious examples that make it much easier to argue in front of a bunch of politicians without a firm grasp on the digital world, like "Game is completely client side except it checks with a server every 5 minutes to make sure you have a valid license, so when the company goes belly up you're left with a brick"
SKG is basically "right-to-repair" but for games. I do contend that if your phone breaks and the company says "we won't fix it and you aren't allowed to" then the government isn't doing its job. On the same token, if a game that you purchased turns off their servers and says "we won't run it and you aren't allowed to" then the government isn't doing its job.
Now, how I would be able to run it is a very open question and I do agree there are some ways that are more reasonable asks than others. But the present-day status quo of "company says suck eggs and you just have to deal with it" is not an acceptable final state.
SKG is more like if the car company is required to provide a working factory, capable of manufacturing all the car's parts, along with working supply chains for all those things, to the car ownership "community", if they ever want to stop manufacturing that kind of car. They're required to do this for free.
You know, so the "community" can take it over and keep manufacturing parts to keep the car going forever.
Modern multiplayer game infrastructure is extremely complex; you don't just "hand over the server code". It's a massive multimillion dollar project to do anything analogous to that, and this project is mandatory and must be done for free. And no, gamers won't expect to pay any more because of SKG.
> I think a big part of why the EU isn't in the same galaxy as the US in the realm of business in general, is in some part, the knee jerk reaction to turn to the government to make products and services better.
Hilarious take considering the initiative is a brainchild of an American.
The initiative is in the EU because the US doesn't have a way for citizens to force the legislative to make decisions. This is on record, with him plainly stating it. Not an interpretation or anything
> Sure, you can stand there pounding your chest for "democracy," but I contend that those who are building their own things are practicing it far more than those who are demanding others make things for them.
Srsly, this is as big brain as you can get. Are you seriously unaware that quiet a few of the most selling games were made in the EU?
> Governments cannot make you an alternative
There are many cases where we know for a fact this isn't true.
Many things that governments now do used to be private. Trains for example. Airbus wouldn't have happened without government. French movie industry and so on.
But I agree that its not as easy as government randomyl getting into every random entertainment market and trying to create competitors for everything.
An interesting question about Stop Killing Games is if this should apply to software more broadly. If a company shuts down should they open source their product so people can continue using it? There isn't as strong an argument for this since most software is structured like a SaaS rather than a one time purchase. But it's considerate when companies do this, e.g. Facebook open sourcing Parse Server was better than outright discontinuing it.
Maybe not open source it. But at least allow it to operate in offline manner where for one time purchases you do not have any license checks that stop it from operating. I do not expect things like cloud sync to continue. But at least I should be able to run it on my local machine.
> If a company shuts down should they open source their product so people can continue using it?
The question is who is now responsible for the software? Who can the government compel to open source it? There is no more legal entity behind the software. Maybe the last employee just takes the source code home on their laptop and that's it.
How is a government forcing a private entity (especially a defunkt one) to release their source code?
When a company shuts down, somebody becomes the new owner of their stuff, including their intellectual property. Most of the time it's whoever the company was in debt to. Now that company can choose to either host the software, or release it.
This just feels like one of those things that can be completely loopholed. There's plenty of reasons why a company might find a specific software not profitable but also not want to open source it, so under this rule they will just host it on the most basic server possible (only concurrently supports like 50 users) and never update it again. Effectively still dead.
Can someone please ELI5? I've heard much about it but still, with all the drama, I still don't get it.
SKG is an initiative that will force game publishers to keep a game online, provided that people have paid for it, and the publisher is not bankrupt? Is that right? What does it have to do with democracy?
No, they do not want to force publishers to keep a game online. The initiative just wants developers to provide a way for users to keep using a game after it has gone EOL by allowing users to run their own servers or by no longer requiring internet access.
See the FAQ[1]:
> Aren't you asking companies to support games forever? Isn't that unrealistic?
> A: No, we are not asking that at all. We are in favor of publishers ending support for a game whenever they choose. What we are asking for is that they implement an end-of-life plan to modify or patch the game so that it can run on customer systems with no further support from the company being necessary. We agree that it is unrealistic to expect companies to support games indefinitely and do not advocate for that in any way. Additionally, there are already real-world examples of publishers ending support for online-only games in a responsible way, such as:
> 'Gran Turismo Sport' published by Sony
> 'Knockout City' published by Velan Studios
> 'Mega Man X DiVE' published by Capcom
> 'Scrolls / Caller's Bane' published by Mojang AB
> 'Duelyst' published by Bandai Namco Entertainment
I'm not sure what the question "What does it have to do with democracy?" is referring to. Some people find that no longer having access to video games they paid for isn't fair so are petitioning their governments for consumer protection against that.
[1] https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq
Thanks, that clears it up. The democracy thing was referring to other comments in this post.
A solution to the problem was developed in the late 90s / early 2000.
Games allowed for personally hosted servers and the ability to connect to them. This is how original Call of Duty, Counter Strike, Quake III, Doom 3, Enemy Territory, and more worked. A person did not have to create a user account with the company that produced the title.
Modern day games require an user account for their services and you are only allowed to connect to their servers without being able to self-host.
Self-hosting was very beneficial during dial up days because the local ISP could run the server to reduce connection latency.
Games like Battlefield Bad Company 2 is a great example of how bad it has become.
Some good responses here already. One angle that's not been mentioned yet is informed consent at the time of purchase.
When "buying" not "renting" there is presently no information for the consumer to make an informed choice about what they are purchasing when it comes to a live service game because no end-of-service date is available at the time of making the purchasing decision.
This is in large part why the end of The Crew was problematic for many people.
Had the service end of life been advertised at the point of purchase the consumer could have knowingly "purchased" a time-limited product, or not, but the decision would have been informed.
All this stuff about end-of-life plans, releasing self-hosted servers, patching out online-only stuff and leaving behind an offline-only game, etc, is great, but it's only one of the possible remedies that SKG have been discussing for the last couple of years.
Another perfectly feasible one is not to dress up a time-limited entitlement to participate in a live service as the same thing as an "own forever" product at the point of purchase.
SKG will prevent game publishers from making online games unplayable. This could be as simple as releasing the server code and adding a setting to allow custom servers.
Basically the official servers can die, as long as unofficial servers can be used instead.
Or more so semi-online games. With some components that should be fully playable offline. There is no reason why these offline components shouldn't continue to operate when servers are shutdown.
What SKG movement want, in short terms, is that game developers/publishers of live service games and online only games be forced, once the games is no longer supported, to provide tools, software, executables to the community to keep the game going. They are using the banner of consumer protection and a public EU initiative to force the EU politicians to debate and come up with a solution.
The drama mostly stems from the fact that the head of the movement is a gamer with no knowledge of either software development or game development, so he has a VERY simplistic view of how a game server-client works and thinks that developers just have a .exe executable running from a raspberry pi that can be uploaded to github and that's it. When people with knowledge call out that there are TONS middleware used to develop a game with their own licenses and that a server nowadays is more than a single machine, he just says: well, this movement is no retroactive so new games will be develop with that in mind and automatically every software vendor will be fine with distributing their code so that everyone can keep playing.
While I support the spirit of the movement, this will ultimately end up with a warning label in a box because real life has more nuances.
I think someone with his perspective might be actually a perfect head of the movement. Most people who play games are not programmers & games are becoming a big part of modern culture.
Why should people playing (and paying !) for games really care what bad technical or business decisions have the publishers done when they see part of their culture being killed to save a buck ?
A lot of other important problems have been resolved in a similar manner without every participant in the movement being a technical expert.
In a three way chat between the movement, politicians and the game industry, you need to know the technical details to rebuke the arguments and support your claims.
Also, the technical decisions are not just about saving a buck but getting the game shipped. If my game is about growing vegetables and I want to let the player drive to the state farm, but I don't want to spend time (and money) building my own physics engine for driving, I grab a solution off the shelve with their license and go back to the core of my game, this same thing is repeat for many other things like authentication, anti-cheat, networking, etc
I’m a game developer - this sums up my feelings perfectly.
A lot of this middleware isn’t necessarily even game middleware - think of a turn based game that might use a custom DB instead of mongo or SQL. You’re effectively banning any non game specific middleware from being used or requiring that every company provide a separate licensing path for game developers.
> What does it have to do with democracy?
is this going to be the next "think of the children" question?
what's the point of mentioning this?
> Is that right?
That's the lie being told to stop stop killing games, so no.
Advances to round 2/7 to be able to do a powerpoint presentation so that companies will, at best, be forced to put some pointless label as a legal loophole, that consumers will promptly ignore because everyone will have it and it'll be meaningless.
I think Stop Killing Games is more important than just "oh noes, they took my toys away". Looking back, video games have been the gateway to computing in more than one one way. Before home computers people had game consoles (which were cheaper than computers) or arcades. Before iTunes and app stores there was Steam. Before the modern smartphone apps there were Wii channels. Maybe in some cases the games came technically later, but they were the initial contact for the broad masses.
What I'm getting at is that it has usually been through games that practices in general computing have been established. If Stop Killing Games is successful it will have much bigger effects on general computing. And I believe that this is why you keep the same false accusations getting repeated over and over again (e.g. saying that SKG would require publishers to keep supporting a game forever). I know it's said not to attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity, but at some point the pattern becomes too clear not to notice. All of big tech stands to lose eventually if SKG succeeds.
Have you played The Talos Principle 2? Yep, games are toys! It's nothing more than that. What we fail to realise in our industrial society is that toys are a fundamental piece of our culture, they enable learning lots of different skills that wouldn't be possible in the "real world", they foster creativity, problem solving, bonding and cooperation...
Toys are just toys, and yet they are the most important things we have. I honestly think the technological progress catalyzed by games is a byproduct, a huge one, but not central to the industry. We only think technology is the most important thing because we live in a world in which overvalues technical prowess in lieu of culture.
I agree with most of what you said, but describing video games as nothing more than toys does a disservice to the medium.
Yes, video games can be educational and entertaining, just like real world toys, but they can also be artistic and communicate stories. They're the most expressive and engaging storytelling device we have ever invented.
Not all games are all of these things, and there's nothing wrong with games that only focus on entertainment, but those that combine all of these aspects successfully are far more impactful and memorable than any other piece of media.
> Yes, video games can be educational and entertaining, just like real world toys, but they can also be artistic and communicate stories.
Storytelling and art isn't exclusive to video games though. Board games for instance have tons of storytelling and are very rich in art. They are, however nothing more than toys, and they don't need to be. That's my whole point. Being "just a toy" is pejorative only in the industrial, productive society.
I suppose it's a matter of semantics and perspective. The definition of "toy" seems too narrow to me to properly encompass the complexities of board and video games. A ball is a toy, but clearly it's unable to provide the same experience as a board or video game. At a certain point these experiences can be deeply engaging in ways that simpler toys can't provide. Not necessarily better, but certainly different. Maybe it has to do with the amount of play rules, engaged senses, or brain activity... I'm not sure. But at some point a toy stops being a toy to me. :)
Though I do agree with your point. Games/toys are unfairly criticized in our society.
I stand corrected: "an object that is used by an adult for pleasure rather than for serious use". Video games, board games etc... can very well be used for serious use cases, so they don't fit the definition of a toy.
There are a huge number of people who deluded themselves into reflexively protecting the interests of hundred billion+ dollar industries. No malice required for that, they also aren't stupid, propaganda works.
Is democracy working?
Don’t want to get my hopes up, but I think this might be.
Could be, if you can set up a millions of dollars regulatory apparatus to keep online some really old MMOs for the 100 people worldwide who want to play them, there's really nothing you can't regulate.
This is a common mischaracterization of stop killing games. It does not propose publishers keep games online indefinitely, but to provide the bare minimum to the community to host them if they decide to shut the servers down for good. If the 16-year-old Unturned dev could do it, so can AAA studios
What is the bare minimum they are seeking? It seems like advocates would give varying answers depending on their technical ability.
They're pretty up front about the fact that the final result is going to have be some sort of compromise.
Based on the words of the most involved proponents of the movement have said, the absolute least they could be forced into accepting would be "Developers can't sue people hosting reverse engineered servers after the main game has gone offline". Which is trivial to comply with (just don't sue someone), but probably insufficient for living up to the main messaging of the movement (since there's a lot more games that people care about preserving than games people care enough about preserving to completely re-implement servers for).
Slightly more reasonably, there's the pitch of "release your server binaries". As the market stands at the moment, that'd be difficult, because in large studios it's common to have all sorts of licensed software involved in hosting your backend, but it's the kind of thing that's pretty trivially responded to on new projects: companies selling software for game service backends would have to adjust their licenses in response to their customers' legal requirements, but that's far from impossible given all the licensed code that's running on client machines already.
In the best possible world, consumers would get access to the source code of the entire project after the company is done making money on it, but everyone involved seems to think that's a pipe dream.
>Is democracy working?
If only it would actually work that easy for democracy(people's will) to control the actual important things of society that fuck us, like housing, money printing, immigration, tax % and where that money goes to, healthcare, foreign aid, jailing epstein clients, etc.
Imagine if democracy actually worked.
As long as people are sufficiently misinformed and politically uneducated, they believe in democracy working. So it's possible yeah!
I'm not sure how I feel about SKG. On one hand: sure, a product you buy should be expected to work for more than a couple of years. This gets fuzzy with modern service subscription models, licensing terms, etc., but in general, planned obsolescence shouldn't exist in digital products any more than in physical ones.
On the other, though, the companies that produce games that stop working are not worth supporting. Their games are often not great to begin with, and rewarding this behavior simply gives them a reason to keep abusing consumers.
There are so many studios that produce games worth playing, and make them accessible without DRM on platforms like GOG and itch.io. A one-time payment can get you many hours of enjoyment for as long as you have a compatible system to run it on. This is getting more difficult on Windows, but thankfully Linux is a solid gaming platform now, and there are many well supported virtualization options for older games.
So my point is: stop supporting scummy companies, and start supporting passionate game developers. There is a practically infinite catalog of great experiences beyond the yearly rehashed EA, Activision, or Ubisoft title.
> On the other, though, the companies that produce games that stop working are not worth supporting.
But how can you make an informed purchasing decision based on something that hasn't happened yet? What about new studios?
You don't pre-order, and you wait for reviews. But usually this is a problem of repeat offenders. Fool me once...
Nowadays with shovelware and AI slop, new studios can also release garbage, but you don't have to play on day 1. At some point you start trusting certain studios and publishers, which makes things a bit easier.
Trust is difficult to earn, but easy to lose. The problem is that many people keep trusting consumer-hostile companies even after they screw them over.
> You don't pre-order, and you wait for reviews.
...you wait several years for them to not shut down the servers?
In the end, without government intervention, is there any hope that any game beign developed right now will be able to be played in 20 years? I don't think so.
Lately it happens that the support is dropped within weeks of release.
- Absolutely insane that this movement may have caused an entire sub to exist now.
- Imagine having a sub r/fuckubisoft and it has even more people than r/ubisoft
- Lots of disgruntled fans have stemmed up from industry practices it seems
Thanks, "Thor".
I would hope that he has either changed his tune (unlikely) or is fuming (likely)
This really is the white pill young people need to not hate democracy and its probably the worst most unlikely one to pass through.
I really need to get pill-pilled so I can keep up with what people are saying these days. From Urban Dictionary:
> 1: being aware of a difficult situation or position and having a fighting "can do" attitude and not giving up, plus accomplishing said thing(s) within the difficult situation. 2: being optimistic, not merely through gut feelings but via having thought about a situation enough to understand how to get through it successfully
> Tom: How'd you get to the top of this business in just a few months of work?
> Jim: Working hard, working correctly, and taking the white pill.
Gamer Rage has always been the worst political hill to die on.