The Stop Killing Games initiative is now more than 90% of the way to its goal of reaching a million signatures, but the petition's organizers warn that there's still a lot more work to be done.
Stop Killing Games is essentially an international consumer rights campaign kickstarted by Ubisoft's shutdown of The Crew - rendering the open-world racing game unplayable to anyone who bought a copy - and aims to contact lawmakers in various countries to stop publishers from deactivating online-only games. "This initiative calls to require publishers that sell or license videogames to consumers in the European Union (or related features and assets sold for videogames they operate) to leave said videogames in a functional (playable) state," the initiative's description reads.
The movement then sought a million signatures from EU citizens to get the initiative properly in front of the European Commission, which could (hopefully and potentially) lead to some legislation requiring video game companies to either keep their games online or make them playable in an offline state. And, now, after a year, it's almost reached the one million milestone it needs.
At the time of writing, over 950,000 have signed the "Stop Destroying Games" page, calling to "prevent the remote disabling of videogames by the publishers, before providing reasonable means to continue functioning of said videogames without the involvement from the side of the publisher." It has until July 31 to reach its ultimate goal.
The thing is, the EU will have to verify all of the signatories, and that'll inevitably invalidate a lot of those signatures, meaning a million names might not be enough. The Stop Killing Games social media page recently told folks it needs "at least 1.2-1.3 million, and ever more buffer to account for invalid signatures!"
"Existing laws and consumer agencies are ill-prepared to protect customers against this practice," the initiative explains, before citing several EU laws to support its cause. "The ability for a company to destroy an item it has already sold to the customer long after the fact is not something that normally occurs in other industries. With license agreements required to simply run the game, many existing consumer protections are circumvented. This practice challenges the concept of ownership itself, where the customer is left with nothing after 'buying' a game."
There has never been quite so much attention paid to game preservation and ownership before, which is lovely to see as a physical games collector. However, if you don't live in the EU, a similar movement is also happening in the UK. One particular petition asking the government to update "consumer law to prohibit publishers from disabling video games" has reached over 120,000 signatures, so that'll also be debated in parliament after a disappointing response from the government months ago.
Check out our new games of 2025 guide if you don't want to miss a beat.
