Why I support Stop Killing Games

I signed the Stop Killing Games initiative because I think publishers should have to plan for what happens when an online game is shut down. That does not mean running official servers forever. It means leaving the game in a state where the people who bought it still have some way to play it.

What the initiative asks for

Stop Killing Games is a European Citizens' Initiative registered in 2024. It asks the European Commission to consider rules that would stop publishers from remotely disabling games without providing a reasonable way for them to keep working.

The initiative is deliberately about the result, not one required technical solution. A publisher might release a server binary, add LAN support, remove an authentication dependency, or document enough of the protocol for people to host their own server. Different games would need different answers.

Why The Crew became the example

Ubisoft stopped selling The Crew in December 2023 and shut its servers down in March 2024. Because the game depended on those servers, people who had paid for it could no longer play it. There was no offline mode or official self-hosting option.

That is the part I object to. I do not expect a publisher to keep paying for a service with too few players. I do expect the shutdown of a sold product to be considered while that product is being designed.

The technical objection

The strongest objection I have heard is that this would force developers to rebuild complex online games around an offline mode. I agree that this would be unreasonable in some cases. A multiplayer game with most of its logic on the server cannot be turned into a single-player game with a small patch.

But an offline mode is not the only way to preserve a game. Self-hosting is a better fit for many multiplayer games. It still takes work, especially if preservation was never considered in the original architecture, but that is an argument for planning earlier rather than for doing nothing.

There would also have to be sensible rules for games that contain licensed software, personal data, or code that cannot legally be released. Those are details for actual legislation. The citizens' initiative is a request for the European Commission to begin that process, not a finished law.

Why I signed

I buy plenty of games through services such as Steam, and I know that the legal agreement is usually a licence rather than ownership of a physical copy. Still, the shop page says “buy”, shows a price, and gives no end date. It is reasonable for a customer to expect more than access that can disappear whenever the publisher decides to switch a server off.

Preservation will not keep every game active or popular. It only leaves the door open for the people who still care about one. I think that is worth asking publishers to account for.

Read the initiative or visit Stop Killing Games.