In case you don’t know–and people not knowing is going to be part of this!–for the past year or so a petition has been floating around asking the European Union to step in and consider forcing video game publishers and studios to ‘Stop Killing Games’.
While some of the language involved has been questionable–the words “consumer movement” are a huge red flag when it comes to video games, and the subject line is pretty dramatic–what’s actually being asked is fairly reasonable! The petition, which is seeking to have the EU consider roughly the same common sense enforcement that led Apple to adopt USB-C, ultimately wants every multiplayer game to ship with the ability for fans to take over running its servers if a company decides to cease official support.
A good idea, and one that we can all get behind. Which a lot of folks already have; despite slowing through 2024 the petition recently passed the threshold for consideration by the EU, bringing it back into the news cycle. But for the past couple weeks, almost every time I’ve seen this petition mentioned, and especially on places like social media, it’s been through the weirdest lenses. It feels like it’s been almost impossible for anyone to simply cover this normally, because from the get-go it’s been linked with YouTuber drama, something I would usually rather gnaw my own arm off before engaging with.
For example: I landed on the front page of Reddit yesterday and was greeted very close to the top by this:
Believe it or not, that’s about ‘Stop Killing Games’. You wouldn’t know it unless you were on top of YouTuber drama though, because ‘Pirate Software’ spoke out against the petition, and was then rounded upon by other channels, and then other people tried to lay blame for the campaign stalling through 2024, and I simply cannot bring myself to type any more about this. Instead, I’m going to let my former colleague Ethan Gach summarise:
The resurgence began with a new video from Accursed Farms two weeks ago titled, “The end of Stop Killing Games.” In it, Scott laid out why he thought the initiative has run out of steam and was failing, laying no small part of the blame at the feet of fellow YouTuber Jason “Thor” Hall, a former Blizzard developer more commonly known by his indie studio pseudonym Pirate Software. Scott accused Hall of leveraging the latter’s big viewership to misinterpret and spread falsehoods about the “Stop Killing Games” initiative, in part by casting it as naïve and unworkable in the modern gaming landscape where always-online and server-centric releases are flopping all the time.
Exhausting. I did see some straight-faced news stories about the petition’s success, but almost every time that news was accompanied by a response from publisher groups that was as predictable and self-serving as you’d expect, providing quotes and explanations that often had nothing to do with what was actually being proposed. For the most part, this campaign has lived and died on social media and video platforms.
In one way, this was to be expected. The movement was begun and led by a prominent YouTuber, Ross Scott, so some degree of that platform’s culture was always bound to bleed into the fabric. But the extent to which it’s dominated the whole movement has been utterly fascinating to me. Whatever I think about drama (something YouTube culture is built on to an extent), it clearly hasn’t had a negative effect; the petition now has over 300,000 more signatures than it needs, which should hopefully account for whatever percentage of the first one million will be wiped out for being ineligible (you have to live in the EU for this to count, for example, and you can bet a lot of Americans clicked “sign” anyway).
It’s weird, then, but also extremely interesting! This is a real thing, aiming for a positive outcome through genuine, legislative means, a process you would normally expect to see driven by lobbyists and opportunistic politicians and any media outlet they’d want to get in front of. To see it instead live and breathe on YouTube, becoming something driven entirely by the people it will most directly benefit, is extremely cool. It’s rare to see a positive democratic outcome in 2025, so (provided this actually leads somewhere) let’s cherish them when and where we can, even if people had to feast on some drama to get there.
