Europe’s games industry turns on Stop Killing Games iniative – lobbyists say it would leave players without protection and make costs “prohibitively expensive”

There should be no major surprise that in a week where the Stop Killing Games movement suddenly hit the news again, it has suddenly faced kickback from the gaming industry. Stop Killing Games is an organized protest taking aim at publishers who see the games they publish as merely rented to purchasers, which can be turned off at will, with very little notice, regardless of how much you may have spent on a game, its in-game monetization, or DLC.

Starting after the furore caused when Ubisoft canned The Crew and made it unplayable, despite plenty of people quite happily playing it (after buying it), Stop Killing Games has grown in intensity and recently announced over one million signatures in the EU alone. It irked plenty of players that Ubisoft seemed more keen (obviously) on pushing people towards the sequel, The Crew 2, than allowing them to continue playing what they already owned and were seemingly quite happy with.

This has seemingly brought it to the attention of Video Games Europe, a lobby group representing major games publishers, as you can see in the graphic below.

The euthanizing of games no longer deemed “commercially viable” continues apace. We reported yesterday about EA’s current hitlist, and you will note from the graphic below that EA is present as a member of Video Games Europe.

There won’t be many surprises on that list, but it is worth highlighting the absence of a couple of studios regarded highly for their more pro-consumer stance, such as CD Projekt and Larian.

Scanning through Video Games Europe’s manifesto, one statement stands out that I will just leave here.

Word soup

It reads, “Adopt our proposals to ensure safe and fair purchases of in-game content, delivering clarity and certainty for players.” – again, it was announced by EA that FIFA 23 would soon be tuned off in a few months time, regardless of how much you might have pumped into the game’s Ultimate Team concept over the course of playing it.

Anyway, anyway, as a lobby group, VGE has now released the following statement. We can pick over it together in a moment.

We appreciate the passion of our community; however, the decision to discontinue online services is multi-faceted, never taken lightly and must be an option for companies when an online experience is no longer commercially viable. We understand that it can be disappointing for players but, when it does happen, the industry ensures that players are given fair notice of the prospective changes in compliance with local consumer protection laws.

Private servers are not always a viable alternative option for players as the protections we put in place to secure players’ data, remove illegal content, and combat unsafe community content would not exist and would leave rights holders liable. In addition, many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only; in effect, these proposals would curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create.

We welcome the opportunity to discuss our position with policy makers and those who have led the European Citizens Initiative in the coming months.

You can check out this video from AccursedFarms below, which goes through the statement in full below and highlights some of the language used but the key thing here perhaps, is that when the game is sold to a player, it is certainly never made clear that you will only be able to play it until it stops being “commercially viable”. While you might know, say from experience, that a FIFA game is going to get turned off eventually, or even expect it, there is no definitive explanation of when that may be. It doesn’t actually matter how many or how few people are still playing the game. Or at least it shouldn’t.

The will of the people

Don’t forget the majority of people who purchase games are not you and me; they are people who may not be as invested in the nuances of the gaming industry. They could be grandma seeing a game on sale in a shop and thinking, “that will make a nice gift for little Billy”, little knowing two months down the line it will be absolutely worthless.

The heavy-handed comments and actions of certain publishers started this movement, and until now, they have largely ignored it, hoping it will go away. Now it seems to be growing, they have deemed it time to get involved, and while “they appreciate the passion of our community,” at least while it is being compliant, it is becoming clearer that something needs to change.

Nobody is honestly suggesting that companies such as EA should be forced to run servers for every FIFA game that has ever been released, even though they have made billions over the years, but there has to be a better way that protects the consumer, and if that costs the companies a little more, that cost, especially in the face of them making so much on these titles, absolutely should not be passed on.

Way back in 2021, EA confirmed it made 1.6 billion (yep!) from Ultimate Team, so if it costs a million or two to benefit the customer, I think we would all cope.

FIFA 23, which is just about to be erased from history, was EA’s most successful game in the series up to that point. The money it generated is staggering. And yet now, it is no longer commercially viable.

Stop Killing Games is not retroactively seeking to hold these publishers to rights for their existing games, but rather looking to forge a fairer solution for all, not just one party, going forward.

Microsoft, another company with which I am not friends, gave literally years of notice about the removal of support from Windows 10 – and even then pushed that date back. A few weeks or months is unacceptable, especially when people will have pumped much more into some of their games than they did their PC’s operating system.

My advice: ignore the will of the masses at your peril. People will be happy if things are just fair.