In the past two weeks, conversation about the Stop Killing Games initiative has taken over the internet, after spokesperson and organizer Ross Scott posted a video to his YouTube channel titled The end of Stop Killing Games. After founding the initiative last year in response to Ubisoft’s always-online racer The Crew shutting down, Scott said it appeared that the organization’s goals were likely to fail.
Scott laid that failure, in part, at the feet of fellow YouTuber and Twitch streamer Jason “Thor” Hall, whose channel is called PirateSoftware, accusing Thor of misrepresenting the campaign and the feasibility of its goals. Since the release of Scott’s video, the initiative has received a groundswell of support and attention, as streamers and YouTubers like Cr1TiKaL, Asmongold, and Jacksepticeye have made videos in support of the movement.
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But, Uh, What Is It?
On a basic level, Stop Killing Games is a movement opposing publishers making games unplayable at the end of their life cycle. As more and more games require an internet connection to play, more and more games are rendered unplayable once the company decides that it no longer wants to support them. This effectively destroys the game and leaves customers, who purchased it with real money, with nothing to show for it.
Though companies occasionally offer refunds in exceptional situations (as in the case of Sony’s 2024 mega-flop Concord) it is far more common for a game that consumers have paid for to simply disappear. As Cr1TiKal put it in his video on the movement, the corporate ethos is that “you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy.”
In a FAQ on its official website, Stop Killing Games speaks to how one-sided the relationship between consumers and sellers has become:
“An increasing number of videogames are designed to rely on a server the publisher controls for the game to function. This acts as a lifeline to the game. When the publisher decides to turn this off, it is essentially cutting off life support to the game, making it completely inoperable for all customers.”
The campaign is seeking to make it illegal to publish games that players can buy and then lose access to at an unspecified later date. It has been noted that video games exist in a gray area in the law, as traditionally, if you purchased a good, like a book, you knew that it was yours to keep forever, and if you purchased a service, like a trip to a theme park, you knew that you had access to it for the specified amount of time it was available. But modern video games fit neither criterion. The player doesn’t own the product forever, but they also don’t enter into the contract with knowledge of how long they’ll have access to the service. In that way, SKG argues that video game companies are robbing their customers every time they sunset a game without making the game available in some way for players to maintain after the publisher has finished monetizing it.
What Is Stop Killing Games’ Mission?
Stop Killing Games’ overarching goal is to push for changes to the law that would require companies to plan for how they will return games to the players once they stop supporting them. Though this is likely impossible in countries like the United States, where petitions have no real legal power, Stop Killing Games hopes that changing the law in one country will have knock-on effects for others. It cites Australia’s decision to force Steam to allow refunds, which resulted in Steam allowing refunds for users around the world.
To that end, Stop Killing Games has multiple petitions in place, including a petition to the UK government and a complaint to the French government about The Crew. The most successful is petitioning the EU, through its European Citizens’ Initiative, to:
- Require video games sold to remain in a working state when support ends.
- Require no connections to the publisher after support ends.
- Not interfere with any business practices while a game is still being supported.
The petition was stagnating around 400,000 signatures before the current wave of interest kicked off, but has since rocketed to 1,247,742 at the time of writing. The petition’s goal was one million, but Scott is urging residents of the EU to continue signing to make up for bad signatures — either from trolls or well-meaning supporters who don’t live in the EU.
Scott suggested that Hall’s videos on the initiative being the most widely seen information available may have led to the movement’s stagnation (though Thor disputes this). Thor criticized Stop Killing Games for being impractical and vague. Thor also claimed that the initiative would require multiplayer games to get single-player modes. Scott disputes both points in his The end of Stop Killing Games video.
Stop Killing Games has also been met with an official response from Video Games Europe, an industry body that represents everyone from Ubisoft to Nintendo, which argues against the initiative’s aims and states that discontinuing online services “must be an option for companies when an online experience is no longer commercially viable” because “private servers are not always a viable alternative option for players as the protections we put in place to secure players’ data, remove illegal content, and combat unsafe community content would not exist and would leave rights holders liable. In addition, many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only; in effect, these proposals would curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create.” Scott has refuted these claims.
Regardless of whether Stop Killing Games achieves its stated goal, the outlook for the initiative is much better than it was two weeks ago. Ironically, the video in which Stop Killing Games was ready to admit defeat ended up giving it a second chance. If you’re a citizen of an EU nation and would like to support Stop Killing Games’ work, you can find a link to the European Citizens’ Initiative petition here.
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