We just hit the 1 million mark on the Stop Killing Games EU initiative! 🥳

https://www.stopkillinggames.com/

It is embarrassing so many "intelligent" people support this. This is what will happen:

1. Companies will have shit versions of games just for the EU. Or they will just not sell them in the EU.

2. The price of games will go up.

3. Shell companies will be created for the sole purpose of the lifetime of the planned support.

This initiative proposes that a $50 purchase ingratiates the users to a lifetime of support options from a vendor.

If this goes through I will do everything I can to avoid selling any software to the EU. This is the height of entitlement.

@retoor https://youtu.be/yXtpQVfswk4

you may want to see this

@YourMom person that doesn't play games says what?

@YourMom it’s embarrassing that people get the wrong impression of what this initiative is about and what it will lead to, over and over again.
We have an FAQ section which covers your concerns, if you'd take the time to read it instead of making wrong assumptions and insult those who have the audacity to demand consumer rights.

@YourMom No other industry is allowed to sell a product then arbitrarily take it away from the user without warning or compensation.

If you want to sell a service that you can unplug at any point, you must properly market it as a service and warn people that they are gambling that their money wasn't just put into something you plan to unplug in 16 months.

On top of the consumer protection angle, there is a lot to be said about the negative cultural impact of games and other types of media just disappearing into the ether at the whims of people that can only see one quarter in front of them.

It's high time the games and software industries be treated like every other industry.

@SidTheITGuy meh. The Crew could have very easily been made offline only. Instead they killed it to force people to upgrade to the next game. That's not "idealism" thats the problem, that's greed.

@Lensflare every time I have looked at the FAQ it gets dumber and dumber. I looked at this over a year ago and it was a strong nope. Then if it moves forward it will be in the hands of lawmakers. Who have even less grounding in development issues.

The real answer is to stop buying games from shitty companies.

Another problem with this is the reddit crowd loves this. Huge red flag. The dialog in the reddit topics shows everyone who supports this saying: "buck up and be a real dev."

Here is some of the naive shit it says:

"Q: Won't this bankrupt video game companies?

A: It is extremely unlikely. The costs associated with implementing this requirement can be very small, if not trivial. Furthermore, it often takes a company with large resources at its disposal to even construct games of this nature in the first place. Small developers with constrained budgets are less likely to be contributing to this problem."

Like recreating a backend is a small weekend project.

The best part is the mmo part. Saying it shouldn't be hard to keep that in a playable state. When 100% of the game logic will reside in servers to prevent cheating. Completely server authority.

This guy brought up a lot of interesting concerns as an indie game dev:

https://reddit.com/r/gamedev/...

Yet most of his major concerns is drowned out.

@YourMom yes, recreating the backend is a huge task. Good thing we are not demanding that. They have the backend, hand it over to the community so that we can host it ourselves. Or don‘t implement an unnecessary dependency on a backend in the first place. Whatever makes the most sense for the particular case.

@atheist this is indeed one of the major points. Companies have a direct incentive to let their games die because they can make a successor game and let their previous game die.
Now the customers has two options:

Accept that you burnt your money and can‘t play your game anymore.

or…

Buy their successor game.

It’s insulting that this is legal.

@Lensflare so now you want a company to hand over its IP? That is not what they asking for in the petition is it? If the backend is using GPL (which is legal to do if you don't distribute) then they may not be able to hand over software without re licensing their own code. There may also be licensing for middleware that would prevent this as well.

If game companies even get a whiff that they have to relinquish IP then expect a backlash from the gaming industry like we have never seen before.

@YourMom there are people who reverse engineer whole MMOs and make private servers for them and you think the original devs can‘t provide the servers to the community to host it themselves?
Really?

@YourMom middle ware and 3rd party licensed stuff is a problem, yes.
But not an unsolvable one.

Companies won‘t be necessarily required to hand out the source code. Binaries could be enough.

And that also doesn’t mean that they need to give away their IP. Why would a privately hosted server would imply that? It doesn’t.

You can host games of Unreal Tournament 2003, that doesn’t mean that you own their IP.

@YourMom companies can choose whatever method that they want. Main thing is they don‘t make the game impossible to play anymore.
That‘s not too much to ask.

@Lensflare the problem is end of life costs for something that is no longer profitable. This could sink an indie dev. The FAQ doesn't seem overly concerned with this. Like it could happen, but they are fine with that.

But my big issues is this: How much entertainment is a $50 price tag worth? Companies are going to have to provide guarantees now?

One game that I saw criticized over this provided servers for 10 YEARS without a fee. People were up in arms over this. Really? If you didn't recoup the entertainment value in 10 years then there isn't a product on the market that will.

@YourMom you as the customer decide what you are willing to pay for your entertainment.
But once you decided to pay that price, the company has the obligation to provide you with the ability to be able to use that entertainment.

At the very least if they really really can‘t promise to not kill the game at some point, they will need to make this very clear to the customer. Which is only fair and should have been the practice already, but it isn’t.

But it will be much more lucrative to just not kill their games.
For most games, this is not a problem at all.

And for those games where it is a problem, well, again, the customers have the right to know it.

@Lensflare binaries are still disclosure. Reverse engineering will happen. But it depends if they used software/libraries internally that even allow distribution.

There are licensing issues that may not be apparent. Look at Morrowind. It has licensing of "something" in its code or assets (unsure) that made it against the terms to use those assets in another game. So Bethesda actively dissuaded the Morroblivion project by preventing mods from being uploaded to the Nexus. This was 2 single player games that should affect nobody if both games are on your PC. Yet Bethesda fought the modder community over this:

https://morroblivion.com/forums/...

The Nexus complied at Bethesdas request.

Now I have to imagine if there are licensing issues like that for game assets then there are bound to be more licensing issues with both the client software and the back end software.

@YourMom if it was any other industry, this whole discussion would be ridiculous.

Imagine you tell the customer that the movie bluray that he bought will just become unplayable in 5 days.

And then the company that sold it makes excuses that they show coca cola in the movie that they needed to have a license for and that license will run out in 5 days.

Well thats their fucking problem! Everybody will say that the company needs to find a way to solve this. The customer has payed and has the fucking right wo watch that movie.
End of the discussion.

But when it comes to games, we argue about that bullshit as if this is something that the customer needs to solve.

@atheist when u force companies to preserve games, they're gonna come up with new pricing models. At which point, you'll suffer more.

@Lensflare what company only had a game available for 5 days? Most provide at least 2 years or more? Dependent on profitability. If I haven't recouped my entertainment value in that time then that is on me as a consumer.

@SidTheITGuy we don’t force companies to preserve games. We forbid companies to make it impossible for us to preserve them.

@YourMom if you buy a movie that was released 2 years ago and will die in 5 days, you as the customer have only 5 days to watch it and you wasted your money.

I mean they sell games until the last day when they die.

How much of notice time will compensate for your invest?

@SidTheITGuy I could see all online games going to a SaaS model exclusively. Gone would be the games that are $50 and you can use the servers until they shut them down.

@YourMom if it means they will go saas, so be it. We will see how the market will react. IMO other companies will emerge to fill the void and they will play fair at least. Win win for everybody.

@Lensflare I saw that happen with a game (I was not playing ever) and they did a planned shutdown. They said servers will go down in 6 months. They offered refunds to people within a certain time frame. I would buy a game from a company that acts that way. I wish I could remember the name of the game. But in the end people still bitched and moaned about it. Yet they did everything right.

So I am looking at games that are closing down due to market/money issues. Most of them are actually doing a fair sunset plan including refunds within certain time frames. Even Ubisoft is doing this it seems. I thought I had heard they were one of the worst offenders?

What game companies haven't done this?

I get the sentiment behind this and can empathize, but the government has no business telling me or any other developer what they can and can't do with the software they develop. You don't like companies killing games? Then stop giving them money. Simple as.

@SidTheITGuy nerds on the internet will do most of the work. Look at Pokemon ROMs. Look at World of Warcraft classic. Hell, look at Good Old Games quite literally named for the work they do to keep old games alive. Look at Steam and the work they've done to make old and new games compatible with Linux.

Tell me you don't know shit about this industry without telling me you don't know shit about this industry.

Nerds gonna nerd.

So I looked into the catalyst for this movement. It was "The Crew". In late 2024 Ubisoft announced they were shutting down "The Crew" server in March of 2025. So around 3 months period to use the product. If you bought the game "recently" (not sure how that was defined) they refunded the game. The Crew came out in 2014 so the majority of the user base had the game for a few years. This is a 10 year span. There were even rumors some Playstation customers got refunds from much longer than "recently".

In 2018 they came out with "The Crew 2". This is a full 6 years before they turned off the "The Crew". So people had anywhere from 6 years to 3 months to transition depending upon how you look at it. If you were playing The Crew in 2018 you had to know its days were numbered. I would have expected them to shut down the game soon after they launched the sequel. But they didn't. They waited 6 years.

So now there is a lawsuit over The Crew. Wild.

I think "The Crew" lawsuit will fail:

https://scribd.com/document/...

They show the license included a 30 day notice period to discontinue services. They gave upwards of minimum 60 to 90 day notice. So they did what they promised to do.

@YourMom take any other industry.

Can a company sell you a movie, then destroy it and give you a refund?

Can they do it with a car? With your washing machine? No. And you as a customer would be pissed if they could.

But it‘s ok for games?

We don’t want refunds, we want to keep what we bought.

@Lensflare Sony has licensed movies to customers. Then, because Sony does periodic bulk licensing from different studios, will sometimes not renew those. This effectively cuts off the Sony customers from digital products they have bought. I don't generally buy digital movies. I go for the dvd which gives me more control. I know Amazon does bulk licensing, but I am not sure they do the same thing as Sony.

But I cannot fault Ubisoft discontinuing a service after 10 years. Especially when they provided a suitable replacement 6 years earlier. I would have expected a totally shit company to do the 30 days notice once The Crew 2 was released. They didn't. They waited 6 years. That is whole point of asking of how much entertainment value you can reasonably expect from a $50 purchase.

Not being able to play a video game is not the same as not being able to wash your clothes. One is arguably disposable, and the other has additional costs and lifestyle implications.

What would not be acceptable would be a software service to say maintain your smart home being discontinued without a suitable replacement.

I just cannot get behind video games being even remotely in the same category.

@Lensflare also another issue with car games. Licenses to the likeness of car models from car manufacturers are not perpetual to video game makers. They are limited in duration. So, if the projected sales of the game fall below the cost of renewing those licenses then they lose money to keep a game available for sale. I do not know if those licenses factor in to continuing to allow the game to be played. There may have been financial incentive to turn off the service. It would interesting to see what those licenses look like for game dev studios. If there are other provisions other than sales that might be another explanation for disabling the service in addition to ceasing sales.

If executed properly, sounds good to me.

It's a shame what happens to those games, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... .

Even worse when that happens to the single player games.

It's truly incredible how IP is enshrined as like a fundamental moral good rather than a practical law to encourage creators to monetize their creation. Every justification for IP laws that has ever been presented is void when the IP is no longer in use, but it's like this magical exception that, unlike literally every other law, requires no justification.

@retoor your mum sounds like my dad

@retoor how am I doing on what I promised I would do? We bumped the visibility on this rant to the top.

@alexanderwang I think EU complains how shit UK food is. Why do you think Gordon Ramsey is so angry all the time? He grew up in England.

@YourMom this initiative is NOT about forcing companies to keep running their services forever, this is one of the main points that is on the frontpage written in big letters.

And your argument about games is that it‘s ok because games are not as important as washing machines? Are you serious?
Is stealing less of a crime if what is stolen is not as important?
The kind of mental gymnastics that people have to perform to come up with arguments against this…

@Lensflare

I'm not against this initiative, but from your first sentence, I can definitely say that that's a bunch of horse-shit. Companies have explicitly told you that you're buying a license not the ownership rights.

And people still peddled the culture and enabled companies to make profit off of it.

@SidTheITGuy companies might technically have something, somewhere saying that it's a license rather than a product, but those games are clearly marketed as products and they make sure that the customer has the impression that it’s a product.

And of course it's clear why they do that. If it was marketed as a license, less people would buy it.

@Lensflare the company the spurred this action into hyperdrive didn't steal anything from anyone. They went out of their way to make the shutdown of a service as painless as possible. They didn't deceptively market as the lawsuit claims and they didn't violate the terms they set for the service. Go read the motion I posted a link to.

The expectations of the customers in this case ARE unreasonable.

I have literally 0 opinions on this. What will happen with the games with strong steam integration? Who will be responsible for keeping it alive as that's literally using a 3rd party service?

@blindXfish the initiative is just a way to force the people (politicians?) to look at this issue so that it leads to laws being made to solve the problems.
The details will be in the specific laws.

@blindXfish also keep in mind that it won’t be retroactive. It will apply to new games made in the future.

@blindXfish also also, "responsible for keeping it alive" is not the correct way of thinking about it.
The companies only need to make it possible for the customers to keep the games alive on their own.
So, if it requires a server, either patch out the requirement or hand over the server so that we can host it ourselves (or just run it locally for single player)

@Lensflare makes it clear, It seems like a fair request and I'm looking forward to seeing what will be the result of the initiative

Speaking of:

'Anthem' will be shutting down the servers on 2026-01-12.

https://gbatemp.net/threads/... .

Although haven't played it, myself.