I looked at my Steam library this morning. It’s sitting at somewhere around 400 games. A solid chunk of my disposable income from the last decade is tied up in that list. But here’s the thing that keeps me up at night—and I know I’m not the only one—if Valve’s authentication servers went dark tomorrow, or if Ubisoft decided my license for a five-year-old game was no longer “economically viable” to maintain, that library becomes a list of broken shortcuts.
It’s not hypothetical anymore.
We watched it happen with The Crew. We watched it happen with dozens of MMOs and live-service shooters that barely lasted six months. But something shifted recently. The verification numbers for the “Stop Killing Games” initiative finally came through, and honestly? I didn’t think we’d actually pull it off.
1.3 million verified signatures.
That is a massive, undeniable number. It clears the threshold for the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) by a comfortable margin. For the first time, the suits in Brussels are legally required to sit down and listen to a very specific, very technical demand: stop destroying software we paid for.
The “Service” Lie We Stopped Believing
For years, the industry has hidden behind the EULA. You know the one. The wall of text nobody reads that basically says, “You own nothing, you are renting a license, and we can revoke it whenever we feel like it.”
I’ve worked in backend development. I know how this stuff is built. The argument from publishers has always been that modern games are too “complex” to run without their central infrastructure. They talk about server-side physics, matchmaking logic, and secure economy databases as if they are mystical components that can never be decoupled from the mothership.
That is, to put it politely, absolute garbage.
Most of the time, the “server” component for a co-op shooter or a racing game is a binary that runs on a Linux box. That’s it. It’s software. It’s not magic. The reason they don’t give it to us when they shut the game down isn’t technical feasibility. It’s control. If they let you run your own private server for Battlefield 3, you might not buy the battle pass for the new one.
The success of this petition proves that gamers finally woke up to the technical reality: Planned obsolescence in software is a choice, not a necessity.
What We Are Actually Asking For
Let’s be clear about what this initiative—and the resulting EU hearings—are actually targeting. Nobody is demanding that developers support a game forever. I don’t expect a studio to pay AWS bills for a game that has three active players. That’s unreasonable.
The demand is simple: End-of-life plans.
When you turn off the lights, leave the keys under the mat. If a publisher decides a game is no longer profitable, they should be legally obligated to patch out the “phone home” requirement or release the server binaries so the community can host it themselves.
I remember tinkering with private servers for World of Warcraft back in the day. It was messy, legally gray, and difficult. But it preserved a version of the game that Blizzard had long since patched out. We shouldn’t have to reverse-engineer network packets to keep a game alive. It should be standard practice to release a Docker container of the server backend when official support ends.
The “It’s Too Hard” Excuse
I can hear the developers screaming already. “But our backend relies on proprietary third-party middleware! We can’t just distribute that!”
Okay. Fair point. But that’s a problem of your own making.
If this legislation goes through—and with 1.3 million signatures, the pressure is real—studios will have to change how they build games from day one. They’ll have to negotiate contracts with middleware providers that allow for end-of-life distribution. They’ll have to architect their code so the core game logic isn’t inextricably tangled with a proprietary login server.
Is it more work? Yes. Does it cost money? Maybe a little upfront. But does it stop them from deleting art and culture just to boost next quarter’s sales? Absolutely.
Why the Industry is Terrified
I’ve been reading some of the industry newsletters lately, and the tone has shifted from dismissal to genuine anxiety. They know the EU doesn’t mess around with digital rights. Look at what they did with USB-C on iPhones. When the EU legislates standards, the ripple effect hits the US, Asia, everywhere. Apple didn’t make a special USB-C iPhone just for France; they changed the whole product line.
If the EU mandates that games sold to European consumers must have a functional end-of-life state, publishers can’t easily fork their codebase. They’ll have to apply that standard globally.
This kills the FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) business model.
Live service games thrive on the anxiety that “you had to be there.” If you know the game will be playable forever on community servers, that urgency drops. Publishers hate that. They want you on the treadmill, grinding for the limited-time skin, terrified that if you stop playing, you lose everything.
But frankly? I don’t care about their business model if it relies on destroying the product I bought.
The Road Ahead in 2026
So, where do we stand right now? The signatures are verified. The bureaucracy is moving. We aren’t going to see a law passed next week. The EU machine is slow, methodical, and prone to lobbying.
We’re going to see a massive lobbying effort from the big publishers. They’ll send suits to Brussels to argue that this stifles innovation, or that it’s a security risk (which is laughable), or that it will make games more expensive.
Don’t believe it.
I’ve seen indie devs implement offline modes in weekends. I’ve seen modders resurrect dead MMOs with zero budget and no source code. The idea that Ubisoft or EA can’t do this is a lie. They just don’t want to.
This verified count is our biggest weapon. It proves this isn’t just a niche Reddit complaint. It’s a consumer rights issue on the scale of Right to Repair. We bought the goods. We should get to keep them.
If you’re a developer reading this: start planning your exit strategy now. Don’t build a kill switch into your art. Because if the politicians actually do their job this year, that kill switch might just become illegal.
