If 1 million people sign a petition, a ban on rendering multiplayer games unplayable has a chance to become law in Europe

One of the most common reasons a game becomes unplayable is because it can only be played online and its servers have been shut down by publishers. In 2023 alone we saw nearly a dozen games like Battlefield, Call of Duty: Warzone, Knockout City, Spellbreak, Gundam Evolution, and more meet the same grim fate as the lights went off for good. 

There are two tragedies when games go dark. First off, the work of all those programmers, artists, writers, animators, modelers, and everyone else who labored on a game, maybe for years, is gone forever. Killing a game is also anti-consumer because, y'know… people bought that game. They paid for a product, the same way they'd buy a book, a movie, or a song, and they should be able to use that product for as long as they like. Troublingly, there's no legal recourse when a game you paid for gets shut down.

But there are people trying to get laws passed to protect both the games and the people who buy them. For a more enjoyable explanation of the effort from someone more interesting than me, please direct your eyes to the video below:

You'll probably recognize Ross Scott's voice immediately—he's the creator and narrator of YouTube webseries Freeman's Mind—and he's one of the organizers behind Stop Killing Games. Scott compares the practice of publishers shutting down games to movie studios during the silent film era «burning their own films after they were done showing them to recover the silver content,» pointing out that «now most films of that era are gone forever.» Game preservation is a concern, definitely, but so is protecting consumers.

One way to combat the killing of games is to propose a new law, an effort that is currently underway in the European Union. The process is called the «European Citizens Initiative,» and if it's signed by 1 million citizens in the EU it has a chance to become an actual law. If passed, the law would require «publishers that sell or license videogames to consumers in the European Union (or