Stop Killing Games consumer movement hits some major milestones

Stop Killing Games has seen a massive surge recently and it has hit some vital milestones.

What is it? A consumer movement, pushed initially by YouTuber Accursed Farms, that aims to stop game developers and publishers just removing video games they've sold. A big part of it comes from what Ubisoft did with The Crew, shutting it down completely so no one could access it, even if you had only purchased it a few months prior.

It has a noble cause but has struggled a bit until very recently, where the campaign has just absolutely exploded.

In the UK, the newer petition has flown past the 100K signatures (126,066 at time of writing) needed for it to be considered for a debate in Parliament. That doesn't mean it will happen, just that it now needs to be considered by the UK government to potentially have it mentioned. A good step though, with signatures still flowing in until July 14th, showing there's demand for change.

On the EU side, things are also going well there now too. Against the needed 1 million signatures, it's now hit 977,864 (at time of writing). According to the official Accursed Farms X account, they've had reports of "non-citizens spoofing signatures on the EU initiative" so it may be a little inflated.

I do miss the days where you could easily host an online game with developers just providing server builds. We do still have a fair amount of games that do that, but along with the rise of micro-transactions, some bigger publishers really want that complete control over it. Still, for a game that's no longer being sold, it would make sense then to release it.

Even better - open source. Yeah, I had to get that in here. More developers and publishers just should open source their much older games to let them live on. It's such a waste of all the time and effort put into it and such a loss for gaming history each time these games just vanish because a publisher moves onto something else.