"Stop Killing Games": Petition to switch off games threatens to fail

Debora Pape

30.6.2025

Translation: machine translated

If an online game becomes unprofitable or requires too much support, publishers switch off the servers. The game then disappears into digital nirvana. The EU petition "Stop Killing Games" wants to prevent this.

Do you think it's a shame that many games are no longer playable after the servers are shut down? YouTuber Ross Scott thought so too, which is why he launched the initiative «Stop Killing Games». It organises petitions to bring the topic to the parliaments of the EU and the UK. If you have EU citizenship, you can get involved until the end of July

If enough signatures - at least one million - are collected, the EU Parliament will have to deal with the shutdown of games. The initiators hope that a law will be passed that obliges publishers to keep their games playable even after support ends. However, the petition is currently in danger of failing.

Games should be preserved as a cultural asset

The «Stop Killing Games» campaign was triggered by Ubisoft's decision to take the servers of the online racing game «The Crew» offline ten years after its launch. The game was still available to buy until the shutdown was announced three months earlier.

This action caused widespread controversy in the gaming community. The question was: What do you get for the purchase price: just a time-limited licence or an unlimited right to use the game? How long should access to a game be guaranteed after you have bought it?

It's clear that publishers have no interest in running the servers for online games that are barely used for ever. Today, however, many single-player games also require a permanent connection to the server. These can also no longer be played if the server is switched off.

In this way, games disappear from the public eye forever. Things were different when games were only sold on physical data carriers and did not require a server connection. As a result, there were thousands of installations of a game on numerous computers. Today, access to games can be regulated centrally.

Scott therefore sees the shutdown of game servers as an infringement of consumer rights. Furthermore, according to the campaign «, video games are unique creative works». Removing them should be seen as a cultural loss to society, comparable to destroying all copies of a book.

Conserving instead of switching off

One reason for the server shutdown - in addition to the operating costs - is the discontinued support for a game. If games are no longer developed further, sooner or later they will stop working. The easiest way to avoid support requests is to take the servers offline.

The campaign explicitly does not demand that publishers must support their games forever or provide servers for them. Rather, the petition is intended to show ways in which games can be operated on private servers or downloaded from archives and played after their lifespan has expired, for example with the developers' blessing.

One positive example is the publisher Good Old Games, which includes older games without digital rights management in a «Preservation Programme» and promises to adapt them to new hardware. This allows the developer to outsource the support problem.

The space game «Freespace 2», which was released in 1999, is also still available: The US version of the source code has been freely available since 2002. It may only not be used for commercial purposes. This means that fans can not only continue to play the game, but also have the opportunity to optimise it for new hardware and new content.

Debora Pape

Editor

Debora.Pape@galaxus.de

Feels just as comfortable in front of a gaming PC as she does in a hammock in the garden. Likes the Roman Empire, container ships and science fiction books. Focuses mostly on unearthing news stories about IT and smart products.

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