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PayPalThe team running the Stop Killing Games movement have given a status update on the Stop Destroying Videogames EU petition vote count, and it's good news for everyone involved.
Shared in a post on Reddit the final verified vote count is 1,294,188 out of an original total of 1,448,270. This puts it well above the required 1 million point for the EU to get moving on it. In the post they shared an image breakdown of votes per country, showing Germany coming in first with 233,180 votes and a strong showing in second from France with 145,289 votes.
The full post text:
Hello,
Another announcement. Things are moving quite fast right now, and we’ve decided to share the final count with you ahead of schedule. Originally, this wasn’t possible due to certain background limitations, and our plan was to wait until shortly before our next meeting with the EU Commission.
At that point, we intended to reveal everything through a video, alongside a redesigned website, a restructured Discord, and several other updates that—ironically—I still can’t talk about just yet. We didn’t want to present our case unprepared, unintentionally leak information to lobby groups, or worst of all burn out our team.
Most of you already understand this, but it still needs to be said: please be patient with the team. We do this because we believe in it, and because we believe what we’re doing is right. None of us are paid for this. We all have jobs, families, and responsibilities, and for some, the past weeks have been rough. Keep that in mind. You’re not talking to some abstract institution like the EU, you’re talking to real people. Yes even the mods are real! In fact, you’re talking to someone who’s about to play Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 in about 30 minutes just to decompress after a stressful week.
Tomorrow, we’ll also be sharing this information on our newly rebuilt or, in some cases, entirely new-media channels. Ross has kindly agreed to lend his voice and face to help with that rollout.
The handover is planned for mid to late February.
Cheers
Moritz Katzner for SKG
See more on the Stop Killing Games website.
Just recently we had EA shut down Anthem, so that was another game that people paid for they can no longer play. Amazon are also shutting down New World: Aeternum fully too and tinyBuild also recently announced Pandemic Express - Zombie Escape is shuttering, and I expect they won't be the last this year. Too many games get lost because developers have no way for players to continue when they entirely rely on proprietary servers.
This is something the managing director of GOG touched on recently when speaking to Eurogamer but they're another that seems to once again be slightly missing the point. It's not a request to have developers and publishers be forced to support games forever - it's about giving players who spent money on these games to simply have a way to continue playing them.
Hopefully something will come out of all of this but it's often complicated due to the way games are designed. Ideally, a game that has a forced online connection should have some sort of fallback plan to have dedicated servers release for players on shut down. We already have tons of games that have dedicated servers for players, it has been a thing for a long time. Features like micro-transactions and DLC definitely make it more complicated, as they would need to update their games to rip them out or make them all free. It all takes extra time. I'm not a game developer though, so what do I know? But something would be good to see in future.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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soulsource 24 hours ago
Nowadays online multiplayer games with dedicated servers and in-game store are usually designed around a cloud platform. Not because it couldn't be done otherwise, but because it's cheaper to develop around a ready-made cloud API than developing the server-side software yourself. Those cloud-APIs tend to end up everywhere in the game though, simply because once one has them as a dependency, it's just too convenient to use them whenever they are suitable.For instance, if you have an in-game-store run by a cloud platform, it is just natural to also have the player inventory managed by the cloud platform, because then the server can just modify the inventory when the player uses the store. When the publisher stops paying for the cloud platform though, the players' inventory management becomes unavailable, and has to be coded again, from scratch. The same is true for all other features handled by the cloud provider (matchmaking, score-tracking, etc.).
Implementing all those things so the game works without the cloud provider is probably doable within a couple of man-weeks, but it's not nothing, and publishers need an incentive to pay for it.
(That's why I, as a gamedev, support Stop Killing Games - it offers us developers leverage that we can use to convince publishers to pay for features like an offline-mode or direct-IP support.)
mr-victory 23 hours ago
Quoting: mr-victory@soulsource how much difference is there between a cloud platform and, say, a Linux PC? Besides the scale of the cloud. Is it possible to reuse the software designed for a cloud and run it on a conventional x86_64 Linux device with perhaps minimal changes to the game client so it can locate the custom server? Same for Arm64 Linux, I don't know which one is more popular on cloudNot much of a difference in principle.
And if we are talking solo-play only (which would be the minimal requirement the initiative aims for), no "scale" is needed really.
Only a "mock"-server of sorts that allows a single individual to play somehow.
Such mock-servers (at least in a limited capacity) are already a reality in all major MMOs, as they are a necessity of development (you wouldn't want every single dev to have to connect to some online instance for testing their latest change).
Last edited by TheSHEEEP on 26 Jan 2026 at 2:32 pm UTC
I absolutely hate the idea of buying racing games anymore because I know they will inevitably be delisted. Why should I spend $60 to $120 on a game to have "all the bells and whistles" when the developer plans to stop selling it before the decade is even out?
I find it very difficult to justify rewarding this type of anti-consumer behavior. I would much rather a game use indefinite licensing deals, or even feature fictional cars and original music, than for "limited licensing" to be used as a justification for killing a product. Ultimately, licensing is just a secondary excuse for the primary driver: greed.
Quoting: CreepioI still play Dirt 3. It runs perfectly on the Steam Deck and provides loads of fun even to this day. I cannot say the same for many modern racing titles. I waited years for Forza Horizon 4 to reach a reasonable price, but by the time I was ready to buy it, it had already been pulled from the store. What is the point of waiting for a game to be affordable only for it to be killed at the six-year mark?It's absolutely not the same. FH4 still works well as of today, including online features such as pvp races and eliminator game mode. The only exception is that they killed the festival playlists, effectively making some of the achievements impossible to unlock, which is a bummer. Anyway, delisting a game from the store because the licences expired is absolutely not the same as making the game not launch after the servers are shut down.
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