This is a campaign that leads into the actual European Union initiative that started in 2024 which as their site mentions, is an “attempt to challenge the legality of publishers destroying video games they sold to customers”. This petition is valid only for those who reside in the EU; the number of signatories had been languishing far below the half-way mark (and didn’t seem it was going to hit it’s goal by July 31st) just 3-months ago until drama surrounding a content creator on Twitch/YouTube (Pirate Software) began doubling down on his calling the movement a “bad precedent” where he took an anti-stop killing games stance (effectively taking the side of the AAA gaming industry with their anti-consumer business model).
The movement needed to reach a million validated signatures before July 31, 2025 in order for it to be taken up by the EU Commission (a starting point for discussion as to existing consumer laws and the enacting of new ones). After massive coverage of this Pirate Software drama by other creators on various platforms, the Stop Killing Games movement gained steamed (and has reached over 1.3 million signatures as of this post).
Pirate Software whose real name is Jason Thor Hall (and usually goes by his middle name Thor), is the son of a former cinematic director at Blizzard Entertainment, Joey Ray Hall. Jason Hall himself worked at Blizzard Entertainment (QA and security); never in a designer or senior developer role though as far as what I could gather. He also later worked for Amazon Games and in the infosec industry before creating his own Pirate Software studio. He also began doing content creation streaming on Twitch where he gained a huge following. Ever since this drama has unfolded, he has lost some of that following while also being called a a “nepo-baby” (though I sort of don’t really subscribe to that depiction because he wasn’t that high up the chain in Blizzard compared to his father).
Hall’s take on this movement however highlights the issue in the gaming industry; a person with a huge chip on their shoulder and the inability to own up to being wrong (instead, doubling down on their stance of “knowing more than the rest of everyone else”). Blizzard’s “rock star designer” culture was filled with senior designers and devs who fit this same profile. This is such a toxic mindset in the game industry which is why things are the way they are now with games (not helped by the executive bean counters that do not care about games and their systems being actually fun for players; the primary design objective for over a decade now is how to monetize those systems).
The industry has also moved towards this whole “gaming as a service” model where even traditionally single player titles, require an online connection to continue playing the game. In the past, an online connection was required to “phone home” as part of the validation process. In recent years, the core game logic resides on game servers similar to MMO’s. Live services games are promoted as ones that are constantly updated (with not just the usual bug fixes, but also new or revised content). An outcome of this is that over time, the game that you originally thought you had purchased (which as most EULA/Terms of Service now specify that you only license to access), can change drastically or eventually no longer be accessible once the developer and/or publisher decide is no longer worth servicing/being kept in operation. The end result is the service termination/sunsetting of a game.
Besides my earlier annoying rants about Blizzard, this blog has covered these topics in bits and pieces based on the games that I had been interested in playing over those years. This industry wide practice of publishing then closing online only titles is why I eventually pulled back on putting any more time/money into this hobby. And as part of the my previous “winding down” of gaming as a hobby, I didn’t really post anything last year about this movement (whereas it is highly relevant to my personal belief in game preservation); many things under the TERA Offline and Service Termination categories here is relevant to this movement and directly contradicts many of the arguments the game industry has made in rebuttal to “Stop Killing Games”.
If you strip out the majority of the systems that are extraneous to the core game (systems like the cash shop, the backend systems for account management, the load balancing for the world environment and/or instances as just a few examples), you end up with a much leaner server side environment; one that can be made far more easily configurable for running offline). A good example is the 1.2 server emulation for ArcheAge (I’ll be writing about this in the near future since I only recently set this up).
A movement like this in the U.S. isn’t going to happen (settled law plus capital markets that side with these companies being able to exploit everything in the name of “infinite growth” at all costs in order to satisfy Wall Street). However, this is very much a big deal should change be invoked in the EU because it will impact how digital goods and rights are perceived globally. This is something many companies across multiple industries do not want their customers to be knowledgable about. More computer software nowadays is similarly licensed with their online subscription business models. Or look at the smart home industry where that piece of hardware could end up being dead because the company that runs that online backend has decided to shut it down once it is no longer profitable.
The whole “You Own Nothing and Be Happy” meme is cancerous. It’s one reason (out of many) that I’ve been taking control of what platforms I continue using or spending money on (or being on them). I’m certain the “de-platforming” movement will gain steam as these companies and their respective industries double down on their business models (because again, the “chip on the shoulder” influence is rather high in the ranks which is why this business model is so ubiquitous now).
History has shown that consumers eventually end up revolting on their own. It’s those small movements like the ones moving to newer/easier Linux distros or seeing how well SteamOS handles gaming compared to Windows 11. Similarly, there are more becoming privacy conscious and moving to browsers other than Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge as examples. These are all personal choices of course (but education and knowledge can help the uninformed to become informed and to at least think about these issues in both a macro and micro level). This is one reason why I’m pulling this blog out of retirement for the time being since topics like this are important enough to be discussed.
