Stop Killing Games

tl;dr: Go sign the Stop Killing Games EU-wide petition now!

I love video games. There are games that have quite literally changed the way I view and think about the world. I remember having absolutely profound experiences playing some games that I firmly believe are things one can only experience through the medium of video games.

Back in the day, a single player game was just that, single player. There was no in-game content that was shared with other players. It was… single player. And multiplayer games, due to the way the internet worked always came with a “server” one could run locally. This meant that you could play the multiplayer game locally with your friends, all sitting in a house, together.

Over the years, as game studios tried to monetise games more and more, the trend shifted away from allowing players to host the servers themselves, and instead, you now could only connect to “official” game servers. The usual justifications for this were related to cheating, moderation and abuse. Anyone who has played COD:MW knows that most of those are just marketing speak.

The issue is that with that shift, game companies started shedding the responsibility to provide game server tools when they decided to move on from a game. All of a sudden, games that were still perfectly viable just shut down, often with little to no warning. A recent example: The Crew’s servers were shut down in 2024, stranding thousands of players.

Around 2010, game studios also started requiring continuous internet connections for some single player games. Before this date, games usually required a single online “activation”, after which the game could be played offline. I’m currently playing through Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey (2018), and it’s not uncommon that the game refuses the launch because it cannot connect to the game server¹.

Whenever the game studio shuts down the authentication servers for these games—which again, have absolutely no online component, or at least none that brings value to players—years worth of replayability is lost instantly.

There is a European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) that ends at the end of the month (31 July 2025). It needs a few hundred thousand votes to pass. When this initiative passes, it will enable a meeting with the EU Commission about this topic, and even allow the organisers to present at the European Parliament during a plenary session.

The Stop Killing Games initiative wants to impose a requirement on video game companies to provide adequate tooling so that communities can keep operating their own servers, or at the very least remove the shackles from single player video games so they remain playable, even after the company has decided to stop supporting the game.

If you’re an EU citizen, please go vote now. While the initiative is close to passing the one million votes it requires, many votes often get revoked, so a good safety margin is needed.