Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you have probably heard of Stop Killing Games, either due to someone you follow supporting it, or, more likely, due to the recent Pirate Software drama (which I don’t get into, there are plenty of people who already went over that).
However, just in case you haven’t heard of it or aren’t familiar with the details, Stop Killing Games is a movement largely focused on two things; online DRM, and the end of service for live service games.
Stop Killing Games in a nutshell
When the online DRM servers go down or official service ends for a live service game, said games are kaput. In the case of DRM, there are ways to circumvent it and render the game playable again (though said ways are questionably legal at best), but for live service games, without the server software, it is impossible to keep playing it. In some cases, a dedicated player base may end up reverse engineering the server software and bringing the game back to life, as was the case with Sonic Runners and Need For Speed: World. However, few games are as lucky to have a dedicated player base willing to put in the work to revive the game while risking legal action from the original developers. (in the case of the aforementioned two games, Sega and Electronic Arts respectively have mostly been hands off about it, but there’s no guarantee that won’t change, and other companies such as Nintendo are more than willing to drop the hammer on any such projects)
Well, Stop Killing Games wants to end this: its two main demands are as follows:
- When online DRM servers go down, the game should be updated with DRM which works offline, or have its DRM removed.
- At the end of official service, live service games must be updated such that either they remain playable in single-player (similar to Sonic Runners), or the community can continue running the servers (similar to NFS: World).
All in all, I stand in full support of Stop Killing Games, and I ask you to check the official site and see ways in which you can help.
However, it is not enough…
And why is that? Because video games are not the only thing affected by such practices.
In 2021, Spotify released the Car Thing – pretty much a car radio which could only stream from Spotify. In December 2024, official support for it ended, rendering it completely unusable for its purpose of streaming from Spotify. What could owners do with it after that? Well, according to Spotify’s own support page: “dispose of or recycle [your] Car Thing in accordance with applicable laws and regulations”. Translation in plain English: “your Car Thing is now a paper weight and you should just throw it out”.
More recently, Belkin also announced end of support for Wemo smart home devices. A handful of them will continue working trough Apple’s smart home platform, but most will not. As far as Belkin is concerned, you should just throw out your old Wemo devices and buy new ones.
And for another tech giant: Samsung also announced last year they would end support for their older Galaxy Watches running Tizen, with support having gradually been phased out since, the shutoff ending later this year. After that, Tizen smart watches will be left with only minimal functionality.
Oh, and one last example: Google Stadia. The service allowed “purchasing” games specifically for Stadia, said games being unplayable elsewhere. But when the service shut down in 2023, all games purchased for Stadia were no longer accessible. Players would not get to take their purchase elsewhere to continue playing the game after Stadia’s closure, and some games even became lost media as they were only ever released for Stadia and did not get ports to other platforms following its closure. So much for “purchase”.
And the list goes on and on. Companies sell hardware which depends on online services, then when said services get shut down or stop supporting the hardware you own, you’re told to just throw it out and buy a new one.
Sound familiar? If you’re a video gamer, it should: it’s how EA and 2K have been running their sports games: new one comes out this year, so last year’s is updated to show you ads for the new one, then left to rot. Same with the endless stream of hero shooters, MOBAs, or battle royale’s.
In conclusion
Stop Killing Games is great, but we need it expanded to not just games, because it is NOT just games that are affected by this. Games just happen to be what we’re most aware of at the moment, but it is a widespread problem and it needs to be tackled everywhere. It’s OK for companies to end official support when it no longer makes financial sense for them, but it is NOT OK for them to tell you to just bin your purchase because they can’t be bothered to let the community continue support for those who bought said game or piece of hardware.