One of the most common reasons a game becomes unplayable is because it can only be played online and its servers have been shut down by publishers. In 2023 alone we saw nearly a dozen games like Battlefield, Call of Duty: Warzone, Knockout City, Spellbreak, Gundam Evolution, and more meet the same grim fate as the lights went off for good.
There are two tragedies when games go dark. First off, the work of all those programmers, artists, writers, animators, modelers, and everyone else who labored on a game, maybe for years, is gone forever. Killing a game is also anti-consumer because, y’know… people bought that game. They paid for a product, the same way they’d buy a book, a movie, or a song, and they should be able to use that product for as long as they like. Troublingly, there’s no legal recourse when a game you paid for gets shut down.
But there are people trying to get laws passed to protect both the games and the people who buy them. For a more enjoyable explanation of the effort from someone more interesting than me, please direct your eyes to the video below:
Watch On
You’ll probably recognize Ross Scott’s voice immediately—he’s the creator and narrator of YouTube webseries Freeman’s Mind—and he’s one of the organizers behind Stop Killing Games. Scott compares the practice of publishers shutting down games to movie studios during the silent film era “burning their own films after they were done showing them to recover the silver content,” pointing out that “now most films of that era are gone forever.” Game preservation is a concern, definitely, but so is protecting consumers.
One way to combat the killing of games is to propose a new law, an effort that is currently underway in the European Union. The process is called the “European Citizens Initiative,” and if it’s signed by 1 million citizens in the EU it has a chance to become an actual law. If passed, the law would require “publishers that sell or license videogames to consumers in the European Union (or related features and assets sold for videogames they operate) to leave said videogames in a functional (playable) state,” even in the event that the servers are shut down or the studio closes.
“An increasing number of publishers are selling videogames that are required to connect through the internet to the game publisher, or ‘phone home’ to function,” the petition reads. “While this is not a problem in itself, when support ends for these types of games, very often publishers simply sever the connection necessary for the game to function, proceed to destroy all working copies of the game, and implement extensive measures to prevent the customer from repairing the game in any way.”
Understanding that developers and publishers can’t support games forever, the initiative would expect “the publisher to provide resources for the said videogame once they discontinue it while leaving it in a reasonably functional (playable) state.” That means giving players the tools to host the game on their own servers, for example, and removing the requirement for games to connect to the publisher’s (defunct) servers in order to be played. This is what the developer behind Knockout City did when it pulled the plug on the game’s official servers.
Not only does this initiative apply to games that are sold, but includes free to play games that have microtransactions for assets (like skins) or other paid-for features. The thought is, if you purchase an item in a free game, you should have the right to continue to use it indefinitely—which means keeping that free game playable in some form.
It’s important to note that even a million signatures doesn’t mean an automatic win, just that it’ll go forward to the European Union as a proposal to become a law. A million signatures is a pretty tall order—though as far as I can tell, the initiative has been signed by about 45,000 people after a single day online, which is a great start. The initiative will also remain open for a full year, so there’s plenty of time to acquire the rest of the signatures. You can view the full initiative here, and learn more at StopKillingGames.com.