Stop Killing Games has been fighting the good fight since 2024 in answer to publishers like Ubisoft shutting down The Crew and other online-only games and cutting access to them. In 2025, the European Citizens’ Initiative launched by the group was blasted by several major publishers as such a move would be “prohibitively expensive.” Now, the initiative has flown past its goal and cleared almost 1.3m verified signatures.
A new post on the subreddit r/StopKillingGames by director general Moritz Katzner (hat tip to GamesRadar) has revealed “things are moving quite fast right now.” The plan was to “reveal everything through a video” and with a new website and reworked Discord, but the team has ultimately decided to drop the final count early. After removing signatures that weren’t valid (something that worried many supporters), the initiative still cleared almost 1.3m valid ones, which is well past the 1m goal set.
Germany leads the pack with 233,180 signatures, with France (145,299), Poland (143,826), and Spain (121,616) also showing high levels of support. The announcement arrived along with a video by Stop Killing Games creator Ross Scott (aka Accursed Farms):
“We have cleared the requirement, and the next phase will be officially submitting them to the EU Commission in Brussels, probably some time late February.” He also added, much like in the previously shared Reddit post, that more news is coming soon as momentum is maintained.
As a reminder, this initiative doesn’t seek to obtain ownership, intellectual rights, or monetisation rights after the games stop being supported, and it’s not a direct shot against the entirely different problem of game preservation either. Instead, Stop Killing Games’ main goal is 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.”
A good recent example of a major game being turned off by the publisher and essentially “disappearing” is that of Anthem, BioWare’s failed looter shooter. On the opposite side, we have the much-maligned Avengers video game that released in 2020 to middling reviews. After its (surprisingly lengthy) post-launch support was done, the game was dropped by the publisher and stopped being sold due to the core licence expiring, but it’s remained in a fully playable state regardless thanks to its peer-to-peer online system.
