The Stop Killing Games campaign led by Ross “AccursedFarm” Scott has come a long way since April 2024. What began as a furious response to Ubisoft shutting down The Crew has turned into a much larger fight over whether publishers should be allowed to render purchased games completely unusable once official support ends. Since then, the initiative has grown into a European petition aimed at securing legal protection for consumers against exactly that practice. Now, after comfortably passing the one-million-signature mark, Scott has taken the issue to the European Parliament, and by the sound of it, the response was far more encouraging than many expected.
During yesterday’s public hearing, the campaign’s organizers had to answer a wide range of questions from Members of the European Parliament, and those questions reportedly showed real interest in the legal, technical, and economic implications of the proposal. In other words, this is no longer just a symbolic fan movement making noise online. It has reached the point where lawmakers are seriously engaging with it as a policy issue. Scott also used interviews and a Twitch livestream to keep the pressure and visibility high, making it clear that this is not some one-day outburst, but a coordinated attempt to push the issue into the public and political spotlight.
Even though the petition has only now properly reached the parliamentary stage, the people behind Stop Killing Games have already described the meeting as a major success. According to Scott and the other representatives, the tone from both the European Parliament and parts of the European Commission was overwhelmingly positive. They even claim that several political groups openly expressed support for the initiative.
What Stop Killing Games Actually Wants
The core goal of the initiative is straightforward: publishers should not be able to make paid-for videogames completely unplayable simply by shutting down official servers. Put more bluntly, if customers buy a game, it should not come with a hidden expiration date. The proposal does not demand that every online title be maintained forever in its original official form. What it asks for is that players be left with some meaningful way to access the game in the future, whether through private servers, offline functionality, or other official preservation methods.
So this is not a demand for eternal live-service support. It is a demand that games not disappear entirely once a publisher decides they are no longer worth maintaining. The campaign also wants more transparency from companies when they communicate the end of a game’s life, and it pushes for technical and legal planning that would help preserve these works over time. To the organizers, that makes this more than just a consumer-rights issue. It is also a cultural preservation issue, because videogames should not be treated as disposable media the moment a server goes dark.
The Hardest Part Starts Now
The campaign team itself admits that major questions still need to be resolved, especially around how any such rules would be applied legally and what kind of burden they might place on developers and publishers. That means the current wave of support and political curiosity does not amount to victory on its own. The next goal is far more concrete: turning verbal support into an official position and, eventually, into actual measures inside the European Union.
Meanwhile, the issue is also starting to gain traction outside Europe. In the United States, a proposal known as the Protect Our Games Act, backed by California politician Chris Ward, has already been introduced, though it still needs revisions. Either way, Stop Killing Games is clearly no longer just an angry reaction to the death of The Crew. It is becoming a broader international movement, and one that will be increasingly difficult for publishers and lawmakers to dismiss.
Source: 3DJuegos
