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PayPalStop 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.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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tfk 3 days ago
One of the requirements is that al least seven countries reach a tresshold. And I can't see that anymore.
pb 3 days ago
And yes, we reached the thresholds in almost all countries! :-)
Last edited by pb on 4 Jul 2025 at 11:14 am UTC
woox2k a day ago
It should be illegal that if you buy something, that it requires the cloud to be functional.If this initiative goes through and actually gets some results then i really hope it's just a first step towards gaining back the ownership on things we buy, not just games.
Caldathras 12 hours ago
I can accept that author and/or publisher own the IP rights. If this initiative leads to regulating the publishing industry so that it can no longer treat a digital license as if it is merely a one-time subscription, then I feel it will have accomplished something good.
I use the eBook as an example, but really, this should absolutely apply to anything with a digital license -- games, books, music, videos/movies, etc.
I don't live in the EU but, like replaceable batteries and the "right to repair", this has my full support.
I use the eBook as an example, but really, this should absolutely apply to anything with a digital license -- games, books, music, videos/movies, etc.
The underlying issue here is that the free market and competition as USA shaped it promotes vertical integration. So eventually a single corporation gets to control the whole supply chain, or at least the profitable layers. In digital but also outside. You buy a book on Amazon, you can only access that IP you bought there (the license is amazon license). That is what competition laws push for.
To make a system where you "own" some IP access regardless of who gives you this access, you need to make a legislation that forbids vertical integration. So if you buy "Lord Of The Rings" on Amazon, you own it also on Bookshop or Kobo. Or a physical bookshop too (in that case you would pay the print costs not the intellectual property that you already own). License market separated from license access market. The owenrship of the book is one market, how you consume the book another market. But for this to work it requires to separate ownership of the license from the servive of providing you the content (which now would not be free but become a monthly fee service I guess). But again, who will store the ownership of the license for you? The state? Another service? Well, if I were the lawmaker, I would say that is the quintessential use case for blockchains, which could very well be state regulated and then p2p operated. But ofc this is the only use case for blockchains that nobody care about since it solves actual issues and it's not speculative in nature.
Anyway, even if today it would be very doable (and very welcomed since it would mean the end of exclusives as a business practice in gaming as in video, and the possibility to get your IP wherever you want), it would require a massive education and mobilization campaign of the consumers in EU and possibly it would mean that EU and USA part ways all together since it's completely incompatible with how people think in other side of the Atlantic. It will never happen.
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