“Stop Killing Games” versus the Corporate Giant

by ersatz_cats

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Howdy folks! By now, you’ve probably heard about the “Stop Killing Games” voter initiative, aimed at promoting consumer safeguards in the video game industry. If successful, it will compel a review in European Parliament on potential changes to European law, curtailing predatory practices such as the unfair termination of sold services. (If you’re not sure what exactly is meant by that, read on.) While the main initiative is limited to the European Union, as with other consumer protections, the hope is that industry requirements in Europe will compel change in global markets, to the benefit of everyone who’s not a greedy prick.

SOME QUICK BACKSTORY

Like many of you, my first exposure to this campaign was through the following video, and its fallout:

Ironically titled “The end of Stop Killing Games”, it was produced with the expectation that the EU initiative would likely not hit its goal of one million valid signatures before the end of July. The campaign’s organizer, mister nice guy Ross Scott, discarded the gloves to address the movement’s loudest critic at the time, a former game developer(ish) and career nepoclown by the name of… Well, technically the guy’s name is “Jason Hall”, but we won’t be calling him that here, as this website stans the one true Jace Hall.

Instead, this Jason guy goes by his middle name Thor, or alternatively, by the handle “Pirate Software”. The nerve of this guy! Imagine going around licking boots and pushing corporate propaganda while calling yourself “Piiirate Software” lmao! Thor likes to brag about how he once worked at Blizzard, as if that helps his credibility here. “Oh, so this shit is your fault!” He also seems to have honesty issues that far predate these recent events. Anyway, being the staunch opponent of misinformation that I am, I felt compelled to write something helping rebut Thor’s dismissive arguments and lazy misrepresentations, but basically the entire gaming socialsphere was all over it before I could even start.

When the misinformation sat unchallenged, it had a chilling effect on the “Stop Killing Games” campaign’s momentum, especially given Thor’s once-upon-a-time reputation as a game dev with consumer advocacy credibility (lol rip). But Ross’ relatable response provided the perfect antidote. Ironically, Thor’s opposition was so flimsy, and his reaction to being duly corrected so unreasonable, that he seems to have helped the EU initiative meet its goal. The old wisdom is true, that the best way to get a response on the Internet is to say something factually incorrect. Previously thought to be dead in the water, the campaign was reignited by Ross’ correction video, which reached one million signatures within days. (Note that some percentage of signatures will be found to be invalid, and so organizers are seeking as much of a surplus as possible for insurance.) As of the publication of this piece you’re reading here, that total number of signatories is up to 1,422,205:

Thor and short-sighted game devs like him may have been the first roadblock to this campaign, but they were just the Season 1 antagonists. Now that the community at large knows about the initiative, and that its goals are informed and worthwhile, the industry itself has entered the battle to stop consumer reform – and by “the industry itself”, of course I mean big game publishers with lots and lots of money.

WHY CHANGE IS NEEDED

Truthfully, a campaign like this has been a long-time coming, given the direction the industry has been heading. Fogeys like me remember the days when you would buy a game cartridge at a store, and you could plug it into your console, and it would just work. You wouldn’t need Hiroshi Yamauchi’s permission to enter the Contra code or use it with a Game Genie or whatever. You owned it, the same way you own a vinyl record or VHS movie. However, physical media like CDs and cartridges are being phased out in favor of digital downloads, with sometimes even off-the-shelf retail cases containing nothing but a download cipher on a piece of paper. This presents problems, not only for game preservation (a growing concern in the community), but also for the fate of such “purchases” after the download service is no longer offered. Meanwhile, many End-User License Agreements (EULAs – basically, the fine print) have been updated to clarify that, legally, you’re not buying a copy of the game at all – what you’re buying is actually a license to use their product for an indeterminate amount of time, which the publisher can revoke whenever they decide. Ubisoft’s EULA goes so far as to require you to destroy any copies of the game in your possession, should you decide at any point not to honor their EULA, which (per section 9) they also reserve the right to revise at any time without giving you any notice.

Imagine buying a Super Mario World cartridge back in the day, and then being told by Nintendo, “We want you to buy Super Mario World 2, so now you’re required to physically destroy all your copies of Super Mario World 1. Don’t believe us? Check the fine print, buddy!”

And this doesn’t just affect the initial point of sale. Many games today – especially so-called “free to play” ones – rely on in-game microtransactions, using either real money or some nominally abstracted form of in-game currency you acquire using real money. But these purchases are also only as valuable as the platform the publisher chooses to maintain. Imagine buying some $20 skin or something just for the service to be surprise-discontinued, and you get no refund. How is that not robbery? Because some fine print somewhere says it’s not?

It would be one thing if this wild overreach on paper was tempered with reasoned practice. Sure, you could say that digital downloads are better for the environment, and that it’s a good thing developers are able to patch bugs and adjust game balance issues. Lord knows a few NES games could’ve used a patch or two! But in practice, far more sinister practices can be observed. In 2022, after having sold 50 million copies of the original Overwatch, Blizzard permanently discontinued service of the game in a transparent attempt to force players to adopt its sequel, Overwatch 2. This has long been the norm for sports franchises as well, such as FIFA and Madden. And that’s before you get into the topic of “Digital Rights Management” (DRM) measures requiring online connections even for games featuring primarily single-player experiences.

One of the more blatant examples – the one which ignited the “Stop Killing Games” movement – was Ubisoft’s racing game The Crew. In 2024, online service for the game was shut down, rendering all sold copies unplayable. Even the single-player campaign is now inaccessible, due to the game’s online DRM checks failing to verify. Ubisoft even went so far as to explicitly rescind the “licenses” from those who bought the game. Of course, this change was announced concurrent to a new sequel, The Crew Motorfest, which Ubisoft certainly hoped to direct displaced gamers toward purchasing. (Excuse me, “LiCeNsInG”.)

And I believe this is the real lesson here: Ultimately, the industry will never police itself. Sure, not every retired game is cut off forever like Crew. I happen to play a lot of Final Fantasy 5 for “Four Job Fiesta”, and thankfully Square-Enix didn’t attempt to make my deprecated mobile version unplayable when the Pixel Remaster was released. But such practice is a growing trend. Just recently, as the SKG campaign was gaining steam, Electronic Arts announced that servers for 2019 action RPG Anthem will be shut down this upcoming January, adding that to the list of games rendered indefinitely unplayable.

And as mentioned, there are games preservation implications to this practice as well. A game like Concord, though widely derided, is still an important piece in the history of video gaming. Sure, all purchased copies were refunded, but if the studio doesn’t wish to maintain the service commercially, why shouldn’t video game afficionadi be able to experience the game for themselves? SKG organizer Ross Scott likens this to antiquated practices of media destruction:

I’ve compared this before to studios from a century ago burning their own films after they were done showing them to recover the silver content. And now most films of that era are gone forever. That’s very similar to what’s happening to video games today.

My initial thoughts also turned toward the old practice of television stations recording over used reels, resulting in the permanent loss of countless vintage news broadcasts, sports games, and classic episodes of shows like Doctor Who. (Geez, let’s not even speak of the original moon landing footage.) Yes, you could absolutely make the case that this is different, in that the media isn’t literally destroyed. Even in extreme cases where there’s no local copies to potentially reverse-engineer, the game code still exists somewhere – it’s just unavailable to anyone but the rights holders, who are legally allowed to withhold the distribution of their intellectual property. And yet, I’m old enough to remember the 2008 Universal vault fire, which resulted in the loss of many irreplaceable master audio and music tapes – a loss which was largely concealed even from affected artists until a New York Times exposé a decade later. Game publishers like Square-Enix have already had a mystifying habit of losing source code for games like Final Fantasy 8. The cause of media preservation is assisted by simply allowing gamers who purchased copies of the game to retain the ability to run those copies under whatever functionality is practically feasible.

However, while all of this is worth noting, the primary goal of “Stop Killing Games” is not long-term media preservation exactly. SKG is a consumer initiative, hoping to improve commercial law by compelling video game publishers to include an “end-of-life plan” for games developed in the future. If publishers don’t want to run their own servers until the end of time, obviously that’s okay, but they should have a responsibility to the customers who purchased their product, or who paid real money for bonus content, expecting these to have a reasonable lifespan. Such responsibilities can be fulfilled simply by allowing fan communities to operate their own multiplayer servers after official support is discontinued, or by patching out DRM checks for single player games they no longer intend to validate. While some of these solutions can be tricky to implement at the end of a game’s life-cycle, they become much more straight-forward if an “end-of-life” contingency is part of the development expectation during the early planning stages. Such practice would bring a video game purchase more in line with a traditional media sale most users expect.

Naturally, consumer advocacy involves… you know, advocacy, for what ought to be, versus the trends of an unregulated market. But I think reasonable people should agree that the practice of publishers effectively building kill switches into their products, and terminating those purchased goods strictly for fiscal advantage, should be treated as a predatory operation, because it is.

A NEW FOE HAS APPEARED

This brings us to the most important development (pun always intended) from the month of June. Now that “Stop Killing Games” has gained serious traction, it has prompted an official response from an industry lobbying consortium called “Video Games Europe”.

Who exactly does “Video Games Europe” represent, you may ask?

Oh, you know…

Ah yes, famous European games publishers like Activision and Sega. A few of these entries might appear convincing until you look below the surface. The board of “Video Games Poland” is just representatives of Sony, Microsoft, and Bandai Namco. The members of “Video Games Federation Belgium” are also the usual suspects. Same with the “Swiss Interactive Entertainment Association”. At least the “Association for the Nordic Game Industry” has someone from a genuine Danish company alongside reps from Nintendo and Electronic Arts. The good news is, among its list of Sonys and Nintendos and Square-Enices, the board of directors for “SELL” in France does represent some genuine French game publishers; the bad news is, one of them is literally Ubisoft.

In early July, VGE released two official statements countering the “Stop Killing Games” movement. One was just a three-paragraph “We appreciate the passion of our community” deal, which isn’t worth much more than the response Ross already provided. The real meat comes from their five-page mission statement, which can be read here:

https://perfectpacman.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Legal-SKG-VGE-position.pdf

Before I dig in, I should make a couple things clear. First, if you haven’t already figured this out, I and this non-monetized website are not at all affiliated with Bandai Namco, or Square-Enix, or any of the other publishers or owners of games or franchises I discuss here. I’m also not a European citizen. I speak strictly of my own accord, as a concerned gamer in the wilderness. Also, there are reasons to take VGE’s statement a tiny bit charitably. Sure, these are the insatiable swine who sell gambling loot boxes to children. But SKG’s initiative is more like a broad position statement prefacing a negotiation than a narrow advocacy for what a specific final implementation of what its demands will look like. (If you’d like to know why that is, Ross touches on the European initiative process in his main video.) By the same token, the industry response is unsurprisingly a blanket assurance of “Gosh, golly, everything’s fine, we don’t need to be regulated.” And we shouldn’t be shocked by that, as that’s also part of the negotiating process. To some degree, industry reps have valid concerns that should be taken into account. Eventually, lawmakers can weigh salient points from each side, and reconcile identified dilemmas accordingly.

There are also some obvious typos in VGE’s position paper, but you know, this is the video game industry we’re talking about. You could just call that their seal of authenticity.

With that said, I think it’s fair for us to read between the lines, to identify what these publishers’ core concern is, and why of course it’s money it’s always money.

IN OTHER WORDS

The decision to discontinue a video game’s online services is multi-faceted and is never taken lightly and must always be a matter of choice. When it does happen, the industry ensures that players are given fair notice of the prospective changes in compliance with local consumer protection laws.

lol Yeah, I’m sure their decision-making process is “multi-faceted”.

I’d say the phrase “online services” is also doing some lifting, as there are cases where this “service” is literally just a DRM confirmation saying “Yes, you may play your one-player game.” You might also notice a bit of circularity in what they’re saying. “Sure, we terminate games, but we do it in compliance of the law.” Okay, we’re not filing charges. Nobody’s being tarred-and-feathered. That law is literally the thing people want to modify.

Online video games evolve over time after their initial release, providing consumers with regular new content, experiences, patches, and updates. This is highly valued by players and is required to compete in the market. It involves significant, ongoing development expenditure over years, sometimes decades.

None of this has anything to do with anything.

The right to decide how, when, and for how long to make an online video game services available to players is vital in justifying this cost and fostering continued technical innovation.

Again, not relevant. You can run your game for two months or twenty-two years. Y’all can decide the cutoff of a game’s supported life-cycle. We’re concerned about what happens after that.

As rightsholders and economic entities, video games companies must remain free to decide when an online game is no longer commercially viable and to end continued server support for that game.

Are you noticing a theme here?

Imposing a legal obligation to continue server support indefinitely, or to develop online video games in a specific technical manner that will allow permanent use, will raise the costs and risks of developing such games.

Yeah, they’re just misrepresenting what the SKG campaign wants. They want lawmakers to think the community’s position is “Hey, you published this online game, now you have to run your servers for it until the end of time.” In reality, it’s “Let us use what we’ve purchased, even if we have to figure out things like server maintenance for ourselves.”

We’ll see this come up again, but for now, put a pin in that.

It will have a chilling effect on game design, and act as a disincentive to making such games available in Europe.

LMAOOOO Right, giant game publishers will suddenly hate making money.

Every major industry makes this argument every time they might be mildly inconvenienced by consumer protections. Sure, maybe Tommy Tallarico and Curt Schilling enjoy lighting giant piles of money on fire. Somehow, I suspect most publishers will simply adapt to new regulations as they always do.

This “chilling effect on game design” is also good for a chuckle. Players have noticed that newer entries in Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series are designed with arbitrary stoppages which encourage players to spend real money for experience boosters. Ubisoft then turns around and claims this ability to spend money to bypass their discretionary obstruction is actually a feature which, in their words, “makes the player experience more fun”. This is the style of “game design” *cough* money *cough* they’re worried about losing out on.

It is far from a trivial modification or a simple addition to the game development phase.

We’ll get more into this in a bit, but in some cases, it literally is a trivial modification. If there was a malicious exploit in The Crew, one that exposed the publisher to legal liability, they would have no problem patching it out immediately. But somehow, simply removing the online-check from single-player mode is too daunting a task.

All video games, whether digital or physical copies, are licensed. As is the case with virtually all digital works when consumers purchase online games, regardless of the country of sale, what they acquire is a personal license to access and play the copy of the game they have purchased in accordance with the game’s terms of service. The consumer does not acquire ownership of that video game. These clear intellectual property rights underpin the entire market and enable the strong investment that the industry has seen for decades. There is no legal uncertainty about the status quo of video games.

This is another shell game. Yes, in a sense, video games have always been sold with an implicit license. You didn’t literally own a share of Legend of Zelda, you owned a cartridge which contained that intellectual property, and you were permitted to buy, sell, or possibly rent that cartridge, even though in other contexts selling media with an IP would be illegal. Now, the industry wants you to think any other vaguely-license-like rubric they want to enforce is equally anodyne. Again, what’s actually being challenged is the status quo of kill-switching purchased games.

It is not clear what the initiators of the stop killing games petition seek to achieve as a legal change. It appears to be a combination of a requirement to provide online services for as long as a consumer wants them, regardless of price paid, and/or a requirement to provide a very specific form of end-of-life plan where the game is altered to enable private servers to operate. We do not believe these are proportionate demands.

“Gosh, it’s all so confusing and vague! How can we possibly comply with these demands when they themselves don’t even know what they want!?”

Oh I know, the countless words and videos being produced on the subject really are a lot to digest. Thankfully, the core demand can reasonably be distilled into three simple words.

Are you ready for this?

Here it goes:

STOP…

KILLING…

GAMES.

Requiring games to run on private servers would result in the inability for games companies to continue to protect players from illegal or harmful content or conduct, as their moderation and player safety teams would no longer be involved. In particular cheating could become rampant without proper enforcement. Reporting systems designed to allow players to flag problematic content and behaviour to games companies would no longer operate as intended or would have to be disabled entirely. The absence of effective moderation systems would create a less safe environment for consumers and may foster the proliferation of undesirable content while simultaneously frustrating the ability for EU Digital Services Coordinators to act against such content. This not only presents a safety risk for consumers but could also lead to brand reputation issues for the video games company.

This is where the author(s) start attempting to paint a portrait of a nightmarish doomsday which would befall everyone if fans were left to moderate online gaming for themselves. Never mind of course that fan-run servers used to be the norm throughout the life-cycle of online games, and that newer games like Spellbreak have been successfully sustained using that model.

We’ll get to some of these more specific concerns like “brand reputation issues” in a moment. But notice how they tucked in a reference to cheating becoming “rampant”. I guarantee you, player-run servers will be faaar more diligent about cheating than whatever disinterested corporate intern they have skimming through player complaints.

Releasing game code or server binaries to facilitate the creation of private servers operated by players could expose games companies and consumers to bad actors, malware, data breaches, and DDOS attacks.

Let’s be clear, VGE isn’t advocating against this one particular slice of potential Internet jeopardy, at this particular moment in time, strictly because they have the wellbeing of the average websurfer at heart. I’m not a technician, so I can’t directly address concerns over technical safety implementations. But still, in a contest between corporate employees and hobbyists, I will never ever bet against the hobbyists. Good fan-run servers will be as safe as anything can be – and hey, good faith participation from developers can improve the safety of a game’s afterlife. There’s already a degree of Internet-savviness people are expected to operate under – beware phishing emails, check links before you click them, etc. “Only connect to game servers you trust” will become the culturally understood norm.

Allowing players to run private servers would present significant engineering and architectural challenges for many games, due to the way in which such online features are integrated with other proprietary systems and services required for the game. Creating a private-server compatible version would be a prohibitive cost, in some cases years or decades after the game’s initial release when only a small audience remains.

See, this is why you don’t trust corporate propaganda to represent consumer initiatives for you. “Stop Killing Games” is focused on the future development of games released in the EU.

Let’s make a quick comparison.

Let’s say you’re in Seattle, and you’re eager to take a road trip, to whatever destination suits your fancy. It’s about equally distant to Spokane in the east, or to Eugene in Oregon to the south. Sure, the further you go in either direction, the more work it would be to change your mind. But in the planning stages, that’s not an issue. It’s basically the difference between preparing for hot and dry weather, or secondhand highs.

The way VGE presents the situation, they want you to think a game is sitting at a Perkins in Corvallis, close to the finish line in Eugene, and people are demanding “We should turn around right now and head to Spokane instead!” Of course that would be a huge journey! At that point, at least. What would be much more reasonable would be if that decision was made before leaving Seattle in the first place. Perhaps this hypothetical road trip could involve some sort of “end-of-journey” plan, you know, for where you’re gonna stay when you get to your destination. Perhaps it already has such a plan, and that plan sucks and should be replaced with a better one.

Ensuring an online game can work without official server support, requires a significant investment of engineering resources making it a very costly exercise for video games companies. Many of the costs that games companies would incur in implementing an end-of-life plan would have to be incurred towards the end of the commercial life of the game, when it is no longer commercially viable to continue support. Requirements to implement such plans could lead to less risk taking, fewer investment projects in developing new games, and potentially fewer jobs. Ultimately, it could lead to increased costs for consumers and less choice.

lmao Imagine a toddler whining about cleaning the room they spent all day destroying. “Ohhhhhhhhhhh, it’s soooooooooooo much woooooooooooooooork.”

I do want to be clear that I’m not here to belittle the perspective of actual game developers, whose input is valued. They should be paid appropriately for their hard work. But this VGE statement isn’t a statement of developers; it’s an industry lobbyist platform, representing the companies who own the software rights. The metaphorical toddler isn’t whining about having to do the work, they’re whining about having to pay employees to do it, while those employees themselves may or may not be just fine with the modified assignment requirements. (On that note, as this campaign continues to gain momentum, don’t be surprised to see these companies push their hired developers to toe the party line. I’m just saying, judge such statements appropriately.)

With that said, there are still so many fallacies in that one brief passage. Again, they’re misrepresenting the “end-of-life plan” as something that can only be addressed at end-of-life. Somehow, their developers never had any trouble implementing all these DRM checks and kill switches into earlier builds of the game. Put the “significant investment of engineering resources” you already use, and just tell them to employ a different “end-of-life plan” than the one you’re already using.

Let’s even say, for the sake of argument, that it really will be a costly endeavor to develop, from the ground up, a new end-of-life methodology for games which will satisfy the various expectations and demands of both consumers and publishers. Once developed, this foundational framework can be replicated, just like so many of their methodologies are recycled. You won’t have to reinvent the wheel every time you drive the car. But I’m skeptical of this “significant investment of engineering resources” they refer to. As Ross has pointed out, developers use sandbox environments to test online functionality prior to a game’s release. They want you to think the only solution is to build a whole new castle when in reality it’s more akin to having a locksmith change the doors.

And notice also how they try to portray themselves as looking out for consumers, who will have “less choice” if certain practices are prohibited. Yes, the shitty business practice that rips you off may no longer be an “option”. Oh, and everyone cares about jobs. If I wanted to be really cynical, I could argue SKG could result in more jobs, for all that extra work they claim will need doing. But I don’t sincerely believe that. Again, use the resources you’re already using, just less for evil.

Allowing players to run private servers, with online interaction possibilities could result in players using those games in ways that don’t align with the games companies’ brand values, leading to a negative association with the brand, thereby harming its reputation.

Ah, we’re back to those “brand reputation issues”. I’ve got news for you all: The Internet is a wacky place! Exactly what kind of “negative association” with your “brand values” are you expecting to avoid here?

Everywhere you look you’ll find plenty of “brand reputation issues” and “undesirable content”. But that’s how things are right now. That’s just fandom in general. It exists independent of this initiative. People are going to understand “These things over here are official, and those things over there are not.” Like they already do. Especially if your sunset game is given a message, like “Warning! You are choosing to enter a third-party server. Content on this server is not affiliated with GameCorpUnlimited, and may not be suitable for blah blah.”

Mandating games companies to keep their online games operable post-official support would undermine their rights and autonomy in deciding how their intellectual property is utilised.

Here’s where we start to see a sliver of “honesty”, if you want to call it that. This isn’t about all the other stuff they threw in to pad out this position statement. It’s about “We want to sell people games, but we still want to be able to tell the people who bought those games when they can no longer use them and have to buy a new one, which we will also kill whenever we want.”

Such a requirement could lead to community-supported versions of games competing with official versions, potentially jeopardizing the financial investments of the video games companies.

More of that refreshing “honesty”. They don’t want you playing old games, when they have new games to sell you. Back in the day, there wasn’t much they could do to terminate your purchased copies of Smash Bros., so they had to make something bigger and better. But now, they don’t have to offer you something better – they can just erase the game they so proudly sold to you a few years before. Meanwhile, they want you to think an initiative to curb that practice will stifle creativity. Make it make sense!

And this of course is at the heart of the conflict. Gamers appreciate games – the playing of games, the craft of them, the art, the history, the culture, etc. They’re more than happy to cultivate the services they seek, and to do so without recompense. But large video game companies and their stakeholders – the ones ultimately making the decisions – only care about the bottom line. For them, this medium we love is merely their vehicle for profit. Would some “community-supported” platform attempt to monetize their game’s post-life service? Possibly. And anyone attempting that would certainly get shut down for doing so, just like how Nintendo’s always slinging Cease & Desist letters to any fan-made game with an ounce of traction. But aside from such easily rectified opportunism, the only “competition” that would be happening is between the game they already sold you, and the new one they want you to shell out for, which may or may not live up to its predecessor.

This would lead to confusion between trademarks, and the original trademark holder may be held responsible for actions undertaken by a community supported version.

What exactly do you mean by “held responsible”, though? Will clueless parents blame video game publishers because their unsupervised child wandered into a corner of the Internet they shouldn’t have? You know they already do. Do you mean game companies will be held legally responsible for something some fan site does? I’ll take “Things that will never happen” for 100, Alex.

Allowing consumers to create or run modified copies of online games would necessitate games companies to either license additional rights or refrain from enforcing them, effectively leading to a forfeiture of control over these rights.

As I said before, some charity is warranted here. Companies are right to ask how this will affect their legal obligations to defend copyrights and such. It feels a bit misrepresentative, in that most fan content already gets ignored, and that demonstrably hasn’t affected their ability to enforce copyright where applicable. And relevant trademark laws can be modified to say that fan-run servers are an obligated exception and don’t undermine enforcement rights. Ultimately, while this is a fair consideration, it is not a reason to stop the initiative, even if VGE would like to frame it as such.

Games companies often utilize third-party software and services, which may have licensing terms restricting their use to the commercial life of the game or prohibiting sublicensing to players, thereby hindering the modification or patching of games for private servers. In particular this could jeopardize and infringe the copyright of the musical works and lead to legal action from these right holders on the basis of unauthorised exploitation of their works.

Okay? Again, we’re talking about the planning stages. Make it clear in those licensing terms with your musicians and third-party developers that mofos are gonna keep using the software they purchased, and that this may include fan-hosting of multiplayer servers. It’s not like copyrighted music in video games is a new thing. If Bad Religion came to my house and told me “Hey, you’ve gotta quit playing Crazy Taxi cuz it has our songs on it,” I’d tell them straight to their faces “Holy shit, are you really Bad Religion!? Man, this is great! I love your music. But uhhh……….. No.”

Oh, and I’ll let you in on a little secret. As of right this moment, whether Stop Killing Games succeeds or not, game publishers are already rewriting these licensing agreements with the proposed changes in mind. That’s what lawyers do. They don’t sit and wait for reasonably anticipated compliance issues to bite them in the ass. Sure, industry reps will simultaneously get up on the political stage and bellyache about it, “Oh gosh, we can’t change how we do things, this would be an enormous headache and a massive expense!” But I’m telling you, when it comes to these aspects of licensing, they are already on it.

Games depend on third-party services such as platforms on which the game is offered to the consumer. Releasing the code for those services, which would be necessary should a legal requirement allow player communities to run a game, may not be possible as this would potentially be an IP infringement. Furthermore, game company’s servers are increasingly run on the cloud. If cloud servers are discontinued, which sometimes happens, this necessitates either shutting down older titles or creating costly workarounds. The latter may not always be possible.

Again, I’ll leave the implementation specifics to the techy code folks. Somehow, I suspect the hobbyists who are always happily cracking your DRM purely out of love for the game won’t need the entire operating parameters for your cloud service, especially if games are designed in anticipation of such a handoff. Note again the misrepresentation, though. “[T]his necessitates either shutting down older titles or creating costly workarounds.” No, there’s definitely another option, which is the one being advocated for.

All of the above would also affect compliance with PEGI ratings.

Oh, you knew this was coming.

We’re not talking about your great aunt Peggy who always brings the meatloaf casserole. “PEGI” is basically the European version of the game rating system. I won’t pretend to know how the intricacies of game ratings are handled in Europe, but here in the States, I recall seeing many disclaimers to the effect of “This game includes fan-generated content that may not comply with ESRB ratings.” Is that not a thing the European Union already reckons with, right now, in the current status quo? Obviously, this is one more consideration that can be readily addressed, including by trusting parents to decide for themselves the appropriateness of their children’s gaming content. On this note, the most that sincere critics of SKG have been able to muster have been libertarian warnings about empowering the “nanny state”. I suspect even they would hesitate to sign off on any argument of “The SKG initiative should be defeated because gaming content should be more heavily regulated.”

Notwithstanding the applicable licensing structure, all video games offered to players in the EU are subject to European consumer protection laws, which include robust transparency and fairness obligations on games companies and ensure that games companies act reasonably when terminating online support for a game.

Hey, sounds great! Let’s just improve those laws to address an identified oversight – specifically, to better define “act reasonably when terminating online support for a game” – and we’re all set.

I’m not sure if this type of argument is a classically identified fallacy. “We don’t need to change the status quo, because a status quo exists, and we have been compliant with that.” But it does nothing to say why the proposed change, which has been sufficiently justified, would be a bad thing.

European consumer protection laws provide consumers with warranties and redress rights with respect to both the game and the physical medium on which the game is made available, but these laws do not transfer ownership of the game to consumers.

Are they really talking about like retail warranties? For broken discs and such? “Hey, we don’t literally rob consumers at gunpoint, what’s the big deal!?”

Games are licensed to the consumer in accordance with their terms of service. These set out the terms upon which consumers may access and play such games and the situations in which such licensed rights may be terminated. Consumers are informed that their access to online games and associated services may terminate and are informed with sufficient notice in cases where that does happen.

This right here is the crux of the issue. Again, they don’t want to sell you media, which could be considered a permanent sale. They want to sell you a license, an abstraction they can define and thus rescind according to their own definition. Aaaaand…. In the case of physical media sales, I guess the disc that comes with the license, the one featured so prominently in the case you bought, is legally to be considered a bonus giveaway? Like all those old AOL discs?

All of this is justified by “The Terms of Service say so.” Basically, so the argument goes, the EULA fine print you didn’t bother reading clearly explains the entire transaction, and it is thus your responsibility to be an informed consumer. Of course, sometimes these terms of service are locked within the physical media case they won’t allow you to open and inspect prior to purchase, because if they allowed everyone to do that, you might damage or run off with the disc or cartridge which in the really-real world is the actual thing of value being sold. But don’t worry, it’s also on the website somewhere, and it is once again your responsibility to know that.

Let’s be clear: The people who think all of this is perfectly fine and reasonable are corporate bootlickers, and they should be laughed at for being dumbass stooges. It’s okay if you want to believe in some degree of consumer responsibility, but big businesses should also have a responsibility not to deceive, regardless of what technicalities their lawyers think they can hide behind. The solution isn’t to simply make the terms of this laughably contrived “license” sale a bit clearer. This is a predatory practice. Unless something is so-called free to play, or is adequately known to run as a subscription service, people are expecting their purchase to go toward ownership of media. They’re not expecting a rental of a window yet-to-be-determined. You wouldn’t have gone to a Blockbuster that said “We’ll start charging you late fees whenever we feel like. It’ll be a fun surprise!” (At this point, I could almost see Ubisoft saying that, lol.)

Unfortunately, consumer protection laws in the United States are laughably pathetic. It’s basically a dystopian Ferengi hellscape, where any capitalist enterprise can throw nearly anything they want into the terms of service as long as it doesn’t literally violate the constitution, and even then I’d half expect the current Supreme Court to say “Well, I just don’t read the Thirteenth Amendment that way.”

But in Europe, they actually kind of care about these things. The EU has pushed back on unfair practices before, to the benefit of everyone, including those of us stuck living on Ferenginar. To be fair, I would be advocating for this initiative even if I knew for sure it would only benefit European gamers and not myself or my neighbors, because I’m a functional human being who believes the world should be a less shitty place overall. But the fact that this could compel publishers to move toward a less predatory model globally, simply for the sake of having a single paradigm that is globally compliant, gives me added incentive to cheer this movement on.

These bullet points all play into similar themes. Once again, it’s “You already have laws, you don’t need any more.” I won’t claim more than a passing familiarity with European law here. The “Unfair Terms Directive” – Guess what that deals with! – would seem to trace back to the birth of the European Union in 1993. The “Digital Content Directive”, which is a bit more recent, regulates the sale of digital goods and digital services. Basically, EULAs in Europe can only be enforced to the extent they don’t violate “reasonable consumer expectations”. Whattya know! Of course, it didn’t take me long to discover that VGE – or “Interactive Software Federation of Europe”, as it was known at the time – weren’t exactly fans of this legislation at the time it was proposed. Kinda strange for the industry reps themselves to bring all of this up here now. You know, I’m starting to think maybe they can’t be trusted to act reasonably, and need to be regulated.

Speaking of acting “reasonably”, you may have noticed that motif as well. “Players must be given reasonable prior notice”. “EU legislation requires that the service aspects of online video games be provided for a reasonable amount of time”. Aside from the question of who gets to define “reasonable”, this is an attempt to shift the conversation toward “What’s a reasonable timeframe for developers to kill games” and away from “Hey, maybe stop killing games altogether”.

But here’s where we circle back to our pin from earlier. As we’ve seen multiple times now, they’re misrepresenting the campaign as demanding that publishers sustain online service for games indefinitely. I’ve heard it suggested that VGE or this statement’s author don’t quite understand what exactly “Stop Killing Games” is pushing for. But I don’t buy that for one second. If that were the case, the authors wouldn’t have included all that language about added infrastructure and brand conflicts and fan-generated content. They know what the SKG campaign is actually advocating for, and they’re intent on challenging that position, but they’re also happy to misrepresent it. Lying for money is what they do.

So keep your “reasonable amount of time”. And allow people who bought your game to continue playing it after you’ve decided your direct involvement is no longer financially justified.

It is important to separate the legal proposals being made by the petitioners – for specific end-of-life requirements for commercial video games – from the question of the preservation of games as creative and cultural works.

Video Games Europe and their member companies are committed to, and actively support, serious professional efforts to preserve video games and recognise the industry’s creative contributions under circumstances that do not jeopardize game companies’ rights under copyright law.

The statement ends with some nice language about the importance of game preservation. Again, SKG is more about consumer rights than preservation, although it can benefit efforts toward the latter as well. But there’s a funny balance going on here. It benefits the industry for video games to be thought of as an aspect of culture, akin to more traditional forms of art like literature and cinema (which itself was a novel medium a hundred or so years ago). But big publishers also don’t want to lean too far in that direction, because that could imply a preservation imperative which maybe they should not be left to control for themselves. So in this statement, you get references to “museum exhibitions” and “video games libraries” – things that promote that cultural footprint – followed by an assertion of autonomy. Basically, “Make no mistake, this medium still belongs to us, and we will continue squeezing it for every dollar we can”:

However, the industry’s innovation and economic activity depends on strong copyright protection for the software and other creative works that are its lifeblood, and preservation efforts should not be confused with uses that could conflict with the normal exploitation of the work by the right holder or unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the author.

ON LIKE DONKEY KONG

This fight is far from over. The above statements could be considered the industry’s opening salvo. At a recent shareholder meeting, Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot responded to the “Stop Killing Games” campaign by once again misrepresenting it as a demand that online service for games somehow be maintained eternally (as officially translated from the original French):

You provide a service, but nothing is written in stone and at some point the service may be discontinued. Nothing is eternal. And we are doing our best to make sure that things go well for all players and buyers, because obviously support for all games cannot last forever.

Meanwhile, SKG organizer Ross Scott was the subject of an anonymous “Transparency Complaint”, alleging that his volunteer work promoting the EU initiative violates the law. That’s right, if you can’t discredit the message, then attack the messenger!

You can read the complaint for yourself here:

https://perfectpacman.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Legal-SKG-Anonymous-complaint.pdf

The complaint accuses SKG organizers of “Systematic Concealment of Major Contribution”. Basically, anyone organizing an ECI (European Citizens’ Initiative) must disclose sponsors donating over €500. The campaign did not disclose any such contribution from Ross (who is also not an EU citizen), ipso facto, cheater cheater pumpkin eater!

There’s just one teensy, tiny problem with that…

Ross didn’t donate anything!

Well, anything except his time and effort. And guess what! Campaign volunteers “are not considered sponsors” and don’t need to be reported:

Let’s go ahead and read that out loud, for the folks in the back:

Individuals providing non-financial support, such as volunteering, are not considered sponsors under the ECI Regulation and do not need to be reported.

Obviously, the complaint author would prefer we use the previous definition relating to “non-economically quantifiable support”, which might have been compelling if “volunteering” wasn’t explicitly defined differently. It would also be ironic for the author to push Ross’ work as “non-economically quantifiable”, given their hilariously desperate valuation of Ross’ time, based on various public statements he’s made. So their argument goes, if Ross worked at least 12 hours a day, for at least 15 weeks, that’s at least 1,260 hours worked. If you multiply that by a “market rate” for “campaign/management advocacy services” of at least €50 an hour – a figure that smells suspiciously like it was pulled out of someone’s rectal cavity – then Ross has effectively “””donated””” at least €63,000 worth of work to the campaign. And all of this is sold as a “conservative” estimate, with a much higher figure of €147,000 also being suggested.

Gosh, I guess this means that by writing about the campaign for this blog, I’m also illegally “””donating””” my time! Let’s see, we can just say I spent 12 hours writing, and another 4 hours reviewing media. (Technically way more than that, but at some point I was less researching SKG and more laughing at Thor’s unfolding dumbassery, lol.) And since my time is worth approximately €5,000,000 per minute, that totals an undisclosed campaign contribution of almost five billion euros! Holy smokes! Talk about corruption!!

The conspicuously overlooked technicality that everything that was done was perfectly legal withstanding, the flimsy appearance of a valid allegation would seem to be the author’s foot in the door to push a narrative that this is all a shadowy funded plot by foreign investors. But even then, they have to lie and throw in words like “financial” and “professional” to make the narrative stick:

The concealment prevents informed citizen participation by misrepresenting the initiative as having no financial backing while substantially depending on foreign professional contributions.

“Wow! So really, the upstart initiative organized by unpaid volunteers is the big powerful bully, and the massive industry with paid lobbyists are really the little guy!”

Now let’s be clear. We don’t know who filed this complaint, because it was anonymous. It could’ve been some idiot from the Internet, doing what idiots do. Based on our prior adventures, I tried copy-pasting the whole text into a Notepad, to see if I could spot a residual “EGG FARME” or something that might clue us into authorship, but sadly, I found nothing. However, I’m gonna go ahead and tell you all it was definitely certainly no doubt for sure someone from the industry, because hey, it probably was. And the writing seems a bit more knowledgeable and endeavored (if I may misuse a word) than a simple lark. Someone wants SKG to fail. Hey, if “Video Games Europe” didn’t want me to think this was from them, they shouldn’t have publicly lied about the initiative like they did in their position statement.

The industry will attack initiative organizers. They’ll try to falsely smear the movement as “Gamergate 2”. But thankfully, “Stop Killing Games” has people on their side. The YouTube gaming community has largely rallied around the campaign. Better yet, actual politicians have gone on record supporting SKG. Last year, the initiative was publicly endorsed by parliamentarian Markéta Gregorová, who represents the Czech Pirate Party:

Man, European politics sounds way more exciting than our sorry-ass red/blue horseshit in the U.S.

More recently, Nicolae Ștefănuță, a European Parliament Vice President from Romania, publicly promoted the initiative as well:

I stand with the people who started this citizen initiative. I signed and will continue to help them. A game, once sold, belongs to the customer, not the company.

Gamers can see where publishers want to direct the industry. Many years ago, Microsoft Office and Adobe products switched to subscription models, and game publishers would love nothing more than for consumers of video game software to acquiesce to the “live service” practice as well. Meanwhile, pernicious “game design” warped around continual monetary extraction will only get worse. It’s also no coincidence that physical media is going away, as the traditional sales system is being phased out in favor of models focusing on “sustained revenue”. Meanwhile, with a looming consortium of freely revocable “licenses”, the obsolescence is being planned out in the open.

I know, I’m prone to facetious hyperbole from time to time, but I really don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that struggles like this, today, are battles for the soul of the medium itself. Video gaming will look different in twenty years, just as it looks different today than in 2005, or 1985. The paths we take now will determine whether we arrive to an epic gaming utopia, a miserable pay-to-win wasteland, or somewhere in between. Dare I say it, the lifeblood of video games as an art form hangs in the balance. I may be an old fart who’s happy to replay my outdated Final Fantasies and Mega Mans and Dragon Quests from my childhood for as long as my fingers allow. But the generations of gamers coming up should have the opportunity to truly love their games as well.

If you have any remaining questions about “Stop Killing Games” and its goals, check out their official FAQ:

https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq

And if you are a resident and citizen of the European Union, please do consider adding your name to the initiative. As I publish this, they have about one more week to collect signatures. Even if we assume over one million of the existing signatures are valid, the more the numbers get boosted, the more politicians will be inclined to take our concerns seriously.

https://www.stopkillinggames.com/eci

Aside from that, stay tuned. The battle has just begun. And as always, thank you all for reading!