- Primary Subject: Stop Killing Games (Games Preservation Debate & Legal Limits)
- Key Update: Re-evaluating Stop Killing Games highlights how difficult it is to turn preservation demands into law, as technical, legal, and economic constraints make a universal “keep games playable” rule impractical.
- Status: Confirmed
- Last Verified: August 14, 2026
- Quick Answer: Stop Killing Games reflects a real concern about always-online games becoming unplayable, but experts argue that a blanket preservation law is difficult to implement across different game types due to legal, technical, and cost limitations.
Stop Killing Games has spent the past two years arguing that publishers shouldn't be able to sell games that eventually become completely unplayable, but a video game policy expert now says that demand could be extraordinarily difficult to turn into law.
Speaking to The Game Business, Flux Digital Policy director Dr Celia Pontin said the industry is taking the campaign "seriously and fairly intensely," while warning that consumer law, intellectual property rules and technical dependencies could make a universal preservation requirement impractical.
The movement began after Ubisoft shut down The Crew in 2024, leaving the always-online racer unplayable even for people who had bought it.
Stop Killing Games has since pushed for stronger consumer protections across multiple countries, but Pontin believes there's a mismatch between what players understandably want and what companies could realistically be required to provide.
I think that's worth taking seriously, but it doesn't suddenly make the reason Stop Killing Games exists any less frustrating.
Can Every Dead Game Really Be Saved The Same Way?
The Crew remains such a frustrating example because so much of the game wasn't actually reliant on other players.
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It contained a large world and plenty of content that could be experienced alone, yet an online requirement meant the entire thing disappeared when Ubisoft turned the servers off.
For anyone who paid for the game, it's reasonable to ask why some form of offline patch wasn't part of the shutdown plan.
The difficulty is that legislation can't simply be written around The Crew. It also has to account for MMORPGs, extraction shooters, free-to-play games and everything else that happens to rely on servers.
Even defining what counts as "playable" becomes complicated. If an MMO remains accessible after shutdown but loses matchmaking, trading and most of its quests, has it actually been preserved? Technically, perhaps, but a significant part of the original experience would still be gone.
The same issue applies to the popular suggestion that publishers could simply hand abandoned games over to their communities. Community-run servers have kept plenty of older games alive, but making that a legal requirement is considerably more complicated. Modern games can contain licensed music, middleware, voice performances, artwork and technology owned by multiple companies.
They may also depend on authentication providers, databases, anti-cheat software and cloud platforms that the publisher doesn't fully control.
Cost is another concern. Ubisoft preparing an end-of-life version of one of its games is very different from asking a three-person independent studio to do the same.
Publishers obviously have an interest in avoiding extra obligations, but even I can't write off every technical or legal concern as a convenient excuse once the details start piling up.
At the same time, expecting every online game to remain fully functional forever isn't realistic. Servers cost money to operate, licenses expire, third-party services change and multiplayer communities eventually move on.
Preserving a game also doesn't necessarily mean preserving every feature exactly as it existed at launch.
A more practical question is what publishers should be expected to do when continued play is reasonably possible. For one game, that might mean an offline mode.
Another might be suitable for private servers, while some games may simply depend on infrastructure that can't realistically be separated from the original service.
Stop Killing Games may not result in every discontinued game remaining playable indefinitely.
But if the campaign gets publishers to be clearer about what we're actually buying, plan properly for shutdowns and preserve games when they realistically can, that's still a pretty worthwhile result.
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