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Maybe, I think a bigger reason is that Europe doesn't have near the level of regulatory harmonization that the US has. There are tons of policy areas where member states just do whatever they want, in pretty important areas. Like the US has a single bankruptcy code, and state commercial codes are all pretty close to the UCC, that's not the case in Europe.

The current EU commission president is pushing pretty hard to create more harmonization to make it easier for companies and investors to operate across Europe.

I'd flip this on its head and say this is why the US isn't in the same Galaxy as the EU when it comes to every metric beyond line on graph go up, gun crime, and military spending.(And thats even if you treat the EU as whole, which well, you shouldn't)

There are already competitors, hundreds if not thousands of excellent indie games are made every year. This doesn't mean we shouldnt regulate actors who are mis-selling products, particularly when that mis-selling is purely for the purpose of extract maximum value from consumers. The barrier to AAA game entry is large enough that the existing firms are essentially a cartel, meanwhile smaller devs already manage to ensure their games can be played forever, but its not in shareholders interests to not rugpull. Which is frankly exactly what the state exists for, to ensure the rights of the general public.

Strictly speaking governments can and do create new things, e.g. NASA.

> And who knows, maybe one is a mega success.

Who? The people controlling all distribution channels - they know. Or are you proposing one should create their own hardware platform / software platform? Payment processing? Advertisement network? Imagine all the skills and good software storefronts and operating systems one could end up doing that!

> But at least by going down that road, you end up with more games, better games, and people learning skills throughout the process. And who knows, maybe one is a mega success.

Yes, but in that scenario, some really good games would still die. So it would good to make it illegal to kill games in addition to making more games.

> Sure, you can stand there pounding your chest for "democracy," but I contend that those who are building their own things are practicing it far more than those who are demanding others make things for them.

I mean, in the short term, yes, the Stop Killing Games movement is demanding that others do some work for them. But, in the long term, the Stop Killing Games movement is asking for others to do less work.

The only reason why games are being killed are because companies are putting in extra effort to include self-destruct mechanisms in games. If a company doesn’t want to bother disarming these self-destruct mechanisms, then there is a simple solution: don’t create the self-destruct mechanisms to begin with. It’s much easier to create games that don’t have self-destruct mechanisms.

I’m a strong supporter of demanding that companies stop doing bad things and that they put in effort to undo the bad things that they have already done.

There are no self-destruct mechanisms put into games. I’m sure you have a point but this attempt at articulating it is confusing.

What else is a completely unnecessary requirement to sign in to an account to play a single-player game?

A form of copy-protection basically. I get the desire for the emotive framing though but I think the EOL implications were simply not considered. I also agree with the idea that at EOL that copy-protection should be removed. There are however a vanishingly small number of games that are built this way so I'm not sure regulation is the best way of approaching it.

But this is an additional and much less effective layer of copy protection compared to the actual copy protection. The game wouldn't be meaningfully easier to pirate without it.

IMO this means it isn't a form of copy protection.

License verification via a server is a pretty common and normal method of copy protection. For example the JetBrains IDE I'm using at work right now does this.

If it didn't work then players would have no issue with the server being taken offline! But that isn't the case so clearly it impacts people.

If you're doing license verification in a way that stops me from playing my legitimately purchased copy & you don't give me a way to continue playing my legitimately purchased copy, it's literally a self-destruct mechanism.

But the discussion wasn't just about license verification - there have been instances of account requirements that weren't tied to license verification, just to social features, yet the game still didn't work without logging in.

I can see your perspective and relate to the strong emotions you’re showing but you’re not actually engaging with what I’m saying.

> There are no self-destruct mechanisms put into games.

That’s not accurate. I used to play the Android version of EA Tetris [1]. I liked the game so much that I paid to remove ads from it. One day, I opened the game, and the game told me that I wasn’t allowed to play it unless I installed an update for it. I installed the update, and launched the game again. The game then told me that I would not be allowed to play it after a specific date. After that date passed, I tried opening the game again, and it refused to let me play the game.

For more examples of games that contain self-destruct mechanisms, see the Stop Killing Games wiki [2].

[1]: <https://tetris.wiki/Tetris_(2011,_Electronic_Arts)>

[2]: <https://stopkillinggames.wiki.gg/wiki/Dead_game_list>

Thanks for the list!

Mobile presents even larger problems as games and apps get orphaned by quickly moving APIs which don't have backwards compatability. It's not clear to me what the Stop Killing Games answer to that problem would be.

I mean, yes, you could attempt to take over the largest entertainment market in the world, already dominated by a handful of multi-billion dollar corporations, in the hope that your "mega success" game is so world-shattering that EA, Ubisoft, etc have a Scrooge-ian change of heart and start following your pro-consumer, pro-conservation ideology.

Now, if you want to actually do something that has a chance of having any effect at all, you go for the legislature. Unlike America's entirely feckless regulatory bodies, the EU does occasionally dislodge itself from the corps' backsides to provide a quick, timid reprimand. It's not very much but it's much better than nothing at all.

Although, I have to wonder, do you believe this should apply to every market? Should asbestos be made legal in buildings on the account you could build houses without it? Should we remove all kind of sanitary requirements for food processing, on the account of the fact that some food companies might not let their plants wallow in filth?

It's not "demanding others make things for you". It's demanding they don't remotely disable the thing you already bought.

Imagine you buy a car, then a few years later the company remotely disables it because they're selling a newer model. Without giving you the money back of course. That's what's happening with games. And not just multiplayer: tons of single player games have been killed this way. The whole SKG thing started with The Crew, whose single player campaign (a massive thing with tons of content) got remotely yanked by the publisher.

Why is this only targeted at games and not mobile apps, app subscriptions or websites.

This pretty much removes the ability to use _any_ commercial software without a custom license which is just insanity. No using any AWS services in case the pull the rug on you.

You might argue “but you can X and you can Y”, and that’s true, but again why is this only a problem for games?

The short answer is someone cared enough about the specific example in gaming to actually go through all the work to demand change.

The longer answer is that games are one of the only pieces of software your average consumer actually buys these days, and they have a few particularly egregious examples that make it much easier to argue in front of a bunch of politicians without a firm grasp on the digital world, like "Game is completely client side except it checks with a server every 5 minutes to make sure you have a valid license, so when the company goes belly up you're left with a brick"

SKG is basically "right-to-repair" but for games. I do contend that if your phone breaks and the company says "we won't fix it and you aren't allowed to" then the government isn't doing its job. On the same token, if a game that you purchased turns off their servers and says "we won't run it and you aren't allowed to" then the government isn't doing its job.

Now, how I would be able to run it is a very open question and I do agree there are some ways that are more reasonable asks than others. But the present-day status quo of "company says suck eggs and you just have to deal with it" is not an acceptable final state.

I don't believe a ton of true single player games have been killed this way. For multiplayer games your car analogy completely fails. The car company doesn't pay the road tax, or gas, or your mechanic.

There have been a few, and they make fantastic examples to bring up when explaining the concept to people without a broad understanding of the market.

There were about 20,000 games released on Steam last year how many worked that way?

Why would it be acceptable for a single one to do this?

And why do you think that games released last year are a good yardstick when we're talking about games being shut down at the end of their lifetime?

I'm trying to understand the scope of the issue.

The reason I picked the last year is to see what the current landscape is. If this is a common practice in need of regulation then I'd expect a large number of current titles present the issue. If it's a 'few' then how many exactly does that imply? If we're talking less than ten then that would be less than 0.05% of games released last year (let alone the number releaded over the last ten).

Someone linked this page which has 440 dead games over the past few decades which is 2.2% of the output of 2025 but obviously includes many more years, mobile, console releases and so on: https://stopkillinggames.wiki.gg/wiki/Dead_game_list

There are several fundamental issues with your approach.

First: unless the average lifetime of a "dead game" is below two months, your focus on games from last year will exclude most dead games. To give an analogy - you're trying to determine how many humans die before twenty years old, and determining this data by looking at babies born in 2025.

Second: the list is unlikely to be complete, especially since many supporters of SKG most likely haven't heard of it. I have seen many people advertising SKG towards their friends or audience, and I've never heard any of them mention this list.

Sure but this is back of the envelope and surely a question any legislators will be interested in. If you have better data I’m all for seeing it.

For the record I’m not using the number of dead games from the last year just the number of released games in the last year as a point of comparison. If I used a wider period and considered more platforms than Steam that would include more games and make the percentage significantly smaller. So the bias is actually in favour of SKG with this ballpark.

I’m kind of confused. In your metaphor, what do the road tax, gas or mechanic represent?

SKG is more like if the car company is required to provide a working factory, capable of manufacturing all the car's parts, along with working supply chains for all those things, to the car ownership "community", if they ever want to stop manufacturing that kind of car. They're required to do this for free.

You know, so the "community" can take it over and keep manufacturing parts to keep the car going forever.

Modern multiplayer game infrastructure is extremely complex; you don't just "hand over the server code". It's a massive multimillion dollar project to do anything analogous to that, and this project is mandatory and must be done for free. And no, gamers won't expect to pay any more because of SKG.

> Governments cannot make you an alternative

There are many cases where we know for a fact this isn't true.

Many things that governments now do used to be private. Trains for example. Airbus wouldn't have happened without government. French movie industry and so on.

But I agree that its not as easy as government randomyl getting into every random entertainment market and trying to create competitors for everything.

> I think a big part of why the EU isn't in the same galaxy as the US in the realm of business in general, is in some part, the knee jerk reaction to turn to the government to make products and services better.

Hilarious take considering the initiative is a brainchild of an American.

The initiative is in the EU because the US doesn't have a way for citizens to force the legislative to make decisions. This is on record, with him plainly stating it. Not an interpretation or anything

> Sure, you can stand there pounding your chest for "democracy," but I contend that those who are building their own things are practicing it far more than those who are demanding others make things for them.

Srsly, this is as big brain as you can get. Are you seriously unaware that quiet a few of the most selling games were made in the EU?

Typical US view of the world. Do not criticise, create an alternative. We see how well that fares in gaming space. You need a lot of good and diverse talent and lot of money to market your game. Good luck.

Government is there to protect you.