The Stop Killing Games movement inspired by Ubisoft's shruggy shutdown of 2014 racer The Crew has hit a few potholes since its 2024 inception, including a bunch of European publishers' loud opposition toward it, and the EU itself ruling against its plea for better consumer protection against live-service game death. Proponents should also prepare for their humble campaign taking a full-on trip off a cliff, suggests Flux Digital Policy video games policy expert Dr. Ceila Pontin, since what it wants might be a legal impossibility.
Pontin posits during a recent interview with The Game Business, "Are consumer rights being violated? Well, they already exist to be violated." She says things like terms of service already provide "a framework" for how publishers and consumers should respond to scenarios of sudden live-service death, and it's unlikely that Stop Killing Games campaigners will be able to squeeze anything else out of the many legal, technological, and video game industry standards working against them.
"I understand people's passions behind it," Pontin says about Stop Killing Games, "and that they want to continue playing a game that they have particularly loved, or enjoyed, and invested time in. And I can see exactly why that is important to an awful lot of people." But it takes more than conviction to overturn the many reasons IP holders are allowed to end access to a game you paid for, but they really own.
Pontin describes "a mismatch between what the public might be calling for and what is possible, not necessarily just technologically – although there are some barriers there – but also when it comes to how existing legislation works."
She assures that video game policymakers are "seriously, and, I think, fairly intensely" discussing Stop Killing Games' demands, but Pontin also emphasizes how legally complicated achieving them would be.
Video games are a "cloud miasma of all these interconnecting, different tiny bits of copyright," says Pontin, spanning concept, art, voice over, and all the other meaningful details that combine to make one playable game.
So "if you are talking about handing over a game to the fans," Pontin continues, "that's not really a very straightforward way of thinking about it in certain aspects of the law, right?"
Stop Killing Games cites consumer protection law as a reason for being, writing on its website, "If you purchase a good, it shouldn't self-destruct" – but Pontin says, "That's not how it works in other areas of regulation. And I think it's hard for people who have never come across this idea before to really, immediately get that."
Ultimately, "There might be some ideal solution being touted by some of the really engaged players in this space," Pontin reiterates, "but that might not actually work out."
