So, until there are new developments on the stop Killing Games movement, this will be my last word on it for some time. For those who don’t know, I talked about stop Killing Games in this video titled Stop Killing Games reaches its goal as internet protest its biggest critic for misinformation. It’s a long video, but it breaks down pretty much everything you need to know about the whole situation, what’s transpired throughout the course of its events. But I specifically want to talk about the response from the games industry, specifically the video game zero organization that represents some of the top publishers. And before I give my take on this, I want to give two opinions. Number one, doing the right thing is not always convenient. It’s not always the most cost-effective measure. It is at times a pain in the butt to do the right thing, but you do the right thing anyway because it’s the right thing to do because it is the morally upstanding thing to do. And then number two, when money is involved in any kind of transaction, then the folks paying that money and their protection needs to be a priority because they’re giving a piece of their livelihood to you and trusting you that you’ll deliver a product that you feel like you on some level have some semblance of autonomy over and you are able to retain it and keep it for as long as you yourself maintain it. So why do I bring up these two points? Because essentially the games industry’s argument as for why stop killing games is unreasonable is because it’s inconvenient and because they essentially want to prioritize developers financial prospects. I’ve covered this statement from Video Games Europe in my last video, but I want to kind of do a deeper dive and I want to express more of my opinions on this because it really highlights just how for granted customers are taken, how they’re treated as a means to an end rather than as people, as humans who are entrusting you with a piece of their livelihood. Companies always talk about their appreciations for the customers and the fans and whatnot, but that just never really seems to be the priority when hits a fan. When suddenly the prospect of a legislation that guarantees customers get protection, when that becomes a possibility and that becomes too inconvenient for companies, all of a sudden it’s time for them to try to reason with everyone and try to talk about how, oh, think about the poor companies and the developers asking money from the customers. But before we Anyways, back to the matter at hand. This right here is a statement from Video Games Europe published on July 4th, 2025. I’ve read this before, but I want to read this and provide additional context and additional thoughts as to why the statement is just wildly inconsiderate to customers. It reads right here, “We appreciate the passion of our community. However, the decision to discontinue online services is multifaceted, never taken lightly, and must be an option for companies when an online experience is no longer commercially viable.” This first sentence nobody’s disagreeing with. We understand that sometimes uh or often times rather a live service just it it’s not financially possible for a company to maintain it when there are not enough players spending money on it and sunsetting games is something that should be allowed if that live service is bleeding money for them. So nobody’s arguing against that. That part’s fine. This continues. 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 perspective changes in compliance with local consumer protection laws. But when they buy the product, they’re not told that what you’re actually purchasing is, you know, a license that you don’t have really any semblance of ownership over that digital product. They don’t tell you that one day this thing will just disappear from the face of the planet. That one day the product that you purchased will be null and void. That’s the part that you’re not told upfront when you pay money for a live service video game. And not even just live services, even single player games that are digital only that require online downloads and whatnot on day one, like Ubisoft games that require a day one patch that act as a key to be able to access the game for the games to run. And you know how in the future when those servers go down, you won’t be able to access that patch. And so if you don’t have that game already downloaded, then that game will essentially become digital waste. None of that is ever actually explained to customers. All that is kind of hidden away in fine print at best and at worst laws have not caught up enough to essentially protect consumers from this and to force companies to be a lot more blatant about that notice. Which is why right here they say in compliance with local consumer protection laws, implying that they follow things to the letter of the law, but the law hasn’t caught up. So as long as the law doesn’t force them to be better, they won’t do better. Now, they do try to say here that we fairly inform players when their game is about to be sunset, when we’re about to strip that game away from them forever, when we’re about to nuke the game from existence. But warning somebody that they’re about to get scammed or that something nefarious is about to happen doesn’t make the situation itself fair. If somebody says, “Hey, we gave you fair warning that we’re going to come into your house and burglar your stuff,” does that mean that burgling is fair game because you got advanced notice months or a year before it happened? No. Burgling is still burgling. But then here’s the part where they really try to justify why completely nuking games from existence is okay and necessary. 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 leave rights holders liable. So, a couple things here. A, once a product is sunset, you are no longer the overseer of it. What the community does with that, that’s on them. You can also just put in your EULA that once the game is sunset like you absolve yourself of all responsibility because yeah the game is no longer like supported. It’s shut down officially. And the whole idea of like this leaves right holders liable legally liable that is just not true because you didn’t officially sanction any potential activities that might be considered illicit or illegal with a game. And in terms of protecting the people from themselves, like your solution to all of this is, well, to protect you from yourselves, you’re going to nuke the game and take the game from you because we don’t trust you adults to be able to handle our product in a shutdown state. This is them trying to say, “We’re destroying your games in consideration of you, the customers, to keep you safe. Nobody asked for your safekeeping and nuking games entirely and not preserving them and stripping products that players bought that being the solution is just ridiculous. Companies trying to say, “We know what’s best for you, so we will control how you use your products,” is not the way to go. It is egregious as hell. It’s like saying, “We no longer make and support that one IKEA table that you bought, so we’re going to take it away from you because we no longer have purview over that IKEA table, and we don’t want you to. We don’t want people to use that table illicitly.” What if somebody takes a leg and sharpens it and makes them, you know, stab somebody with it? Well, at that point, it’s like IKEA is not liable for that. It’s the person who decided to use the tool that way, the the product that way. They’re liable. They’re responsible for that modification and that action, not IKEA. You know what I mean? It’s like it it’s it’s just a really silly kind of excuse to try to make this all seem like it’s for us and not for the company’s benefits. And then here’s another part that gets me. 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. And this is where my introductory opinions from this video comes in. The two that I said were number one, doing the right thing is not always convenient. It’s sometimes a pain in the butt, but we do it because it is the right thing to do, because it’s the ethical thing to do. And number two, when there’s transactions involved, monetary transactions, when people are giving a piece of their livelihood to you, you have a responsibility, no matter how inconvenient, to deliver some semblance of protection and some semblance of reasonable customer service and some semblance of reasonable product like guarantees. And when people aren’t warned that when they’re paying money, that product one day will disappear forever. Not because of any actions they did, not because of their inability to take care of the product, but because the company decided so. And even if a company did issue that warning, the fact that that is a possibility at all, the fact that companies are allowed to do this, this whole stripping products away from people just because it’s digital, like in what world is that okay? The only reason it’s more okay is because there’s no physical actions involved. Like if I have an IKEA table that IKEA wants to strip away, they’d have to come physically into my house and take that product away from me. Whereas with digital products, you can do that without physically stepping in someone else’s home, right? You can just hit a couple buttons and suddenly that product is no longer in players library. Suddenly you’ve stripped that product away from the customer. But the lack of a physical presence doesn’t mean it’s not as good as somebody coming into your house and stealing it. Just the digital format allows for essentially a ghost to come in and steal that product from you instead of a physical entity who you can stop and prevent from doing that. But the excuse that they’re making is, won’t you think about the video game companies and the developers and their choices and how prohibitively expensive that would be? First of all, the idea that some kind of endoflife solution would be prohibitively expensive is complete and utter nonsense and We’ve seen plenty of games issue patches that add offline modes that were live services intended to be online only. But when they were sunset and, you know, they had the stand to be like, well, at the very least, even if this didn’t go well, players deserve to keep that game and be able to access it and have it be in a functional playable state on some level. What they did was issue that offline patch like Redfall and like Suicide Squad Kill the Justice League because those games, sure, they’re much better played online, but they do have campaigns. You can still technically play those games by yourself and have it be a functional game that you can interact with, engage in, and whose content is still readily available to you, even if in a less than ideal state because it was designed for multiplayer. Now, make no mistake, there are some games currently that were designed to be online only. there’s a lot of like server side stuff happening and so reversing that aspect would be more complicated. But the thing about stop killing games is that it does not retroactively say all the games that have already been built for online only where it’s a lot of stuff happening server side where it actually would be just an incredible effort to add some kind of offline mode or end of life uh kind of plan where that would be actually really tough to do. Stop killing games doesn’t target those. It’s saying that from here on out, once this becomes law or once this initiative passes through and you know lawmakers look at it and once laws are established from here on out make it so that from here on out games can’t just do things that way where they have to on some level down the line be able to provide some kind of end of life service and structure the game that way and built that way so that an endoflife uh kind of scenario is a possibility where the game is left in some kind of functional playable state, not in the best state possible without online support and without support from developers, just functional. You know, even if it means an MMO that’s a wasteland, as long as you can still access that MMO and run around and do things in it, even if you know, you can’t beat the one raid boss by yourself because the game shut down and you can’t engage with other players, as long as you can functionally engage with the game, that’s preservation. That’s fine. If you can allow those players to host their own servers and bring people together and you know host their own like private parties, take that experience and do what they want with it. If that is on some level implemented, that’s all that stop killing games is asking for, not for live services to remain online in perpetuity and all these things that are claimed by certain folks like Pirate Software. This whole notion that this would be prohibly expensive to implement, I think that’s just I mean, all these innovations that happened in gaming, you’re telling me that the line of innovation is drawn at trying to preserve those games, trying to protect consumers from companies being able to just nuke those games from existence. That’s where we draw the line of like, this is just not possible, you guys. I promise you it’s possible. I’m not saying that there aren’t certain genres of games where that would be a more complex issue. But to say that it’s impossible to say that there aren’t workarounds or ways around that or ways to implement that for any genre of game moving forward. Essentially what they’re saying is it would just be so hard and so you know what they say prohibitively expensive. I don’t believe that to be the case. But basically it’s so inconvenient to protect customers and it would serve nothing for companies bottom lines because when they shut down a game they just want to shut it down and not have it bleed more money. But again, doing the right thing isn’t always convenient. You do it because it’s simply the right thing to do. And when you sell a product to paying customers who are giving you a piece of their livelihood, it is a responsibility to go out of your way to have some inconveniences happen in order for you to do the right thing by the customers who are paying you money. When you make developer choices, unless you’re a charity, which developers are not, you are asking people to pay money. Your choices have to keep in consideration customer protections and the fact that you do on some level have some responsibility because you’re taking money from customers. We don’t live in a world where we can make any choice that we want. We live in a world where our choices have to be respectful of others. We have to take others into consideration so we can be civilized, right? And so, yeah, this might make some developer choices a little more complex and a little more complicated, a little more inconvenient, but if it ultimately means protecting the customers and being responsible for the people who are paying you money for a product that should function a certain way and should be functional, you know, for as long as it can be functional, uh, and not involve the company making that decision for the customers, then those inconveniences, as much of a pain in the ass as they are, are something that developers have to take on because it’s simply the right thing to do. Inconvenience is no excuse to not do the right thing. And I think the reason why Pirate Software in particular has garnered so much backlash is look, he is a game developer and I value game developers perspective. And I’m not saying they shouldn’t be a part of the conversation or that they’re not allowed to raise concerns and issues, but how aggressively he’s pursued the shutdown of Stop Killing Games or Stop Killing Games not going through and what reasoning he’s given it. you know, he kind of talks about it in his two videos that he made about stop killing games. And I did watch them, by the way, and it basically comes down to like there are complex issues when it comes especially like serverside games. He also misconstrun playable state as like having to convert live service or multiplayer games into single player and rebalance everything to that end. No, no, no. All we’re saying is that that live service, it doesn’t have to be rebalanced. You don’t have to touch it. Just leave it functional. just leave it accessible. Even if it is imbalanced uh with just one player being able to access it privately, as long as it’s functional and playable, it doesn’t matter if it’s balanced or not. He then argues, well, it’s not game preservation because that’s not how the game was meant to be played, but the product at least exists. That’s that’s the thing. We don’t want the products to cease to exist just because it’s, you know, not ideal to play the game in a state where the servers have been shut down and there isn’t an influx of players. But a big argument that Pirate Software makes is that, you know, won’t you think about the developers and the fact that this would like strip away some of their choices and freedoms in terms of being able to make certain types of games? And right here in this FAQ that he posted, you know, on this stop killing games video where he answers some questions, he talks about essentially how it wouldn’t be convenient for developers, how it can be a bit of a pain in the ass for developers and how this uh, you know, on a technical level, there’s more here than people are considering when it comes to something like stop killing games passing. I’m not saying that those possible technical complexities aren’t worth discussing. I’m not saying developers shouldn’t be a part of the conversation. What I’m saying is that the idea of like just we got to kill stop killing games altogether because developers would be impacted by this when developers are taking money from players from paying customers and for some reason like the developers choices are being prioritized instead of protections for the customers. Like if developers choices involve screwing over customers then those choices just shouldn’t be made or they should be adjusted. But it’s this black and white mentality of stop killing games should be killed. He’s so absolutist about having to kill stop killing games because it’s inconvenient for developers. Well, having games nuked from players libraries is inconvenient for consumers and them paying money for a product that will disappear one day. Like that that is only normalized in gaming and in digital media. That’s not the case for like you know when you buy products that are in physical form. And I don’t think there should be a distinction between how products are handled physically or digitally because they’re both products no matter what. And so the same protections that people have when it comes to their physical products where somebody can’t just come in and just take their I don’t know whatever IKEA table or take their IKEA table and destroy it because IKEA wants to nuke all of the tables that are of that brand because they stop supporting or whatever. Just in the same way of like that would be absurd. Digital products should be treated exactly the same way. It seems less absurd because the physical actions aren’t involved. But in my opinion, it’s just as absurd. It’s ridiculous that that is a notion we’re trying to normalize and that there’s a lack of consideration for how bad that is and that the excuse for why we shouldn’t resolve this is because it’s too inconvenient. The whole like ah it just involves more effort on the part of the product makers. That’s the excuse for not protecting customers. That’s your responsibility as product makers. the ability for customers to retain the product that they bought. That’s just like a basic consumer right, you know, like we’re not arguing for anything insane here. Like we’re that’s not an unreasonable take. Consumers buying products having to result in consumers keeping product is not some crazy argument. That that is not a morally gray area. That’s just black and white if you ask me. Companies want to look away from that because it’s just inconvenient. It doesn’t serve their bottom line. It’s additional effort, additional money. But you’re in the business of making products for paying customers. That is what you got to do. That is your responsibility. And there’s no excuse, you know, when especially when that excuse is it’s too inconvenient. That kind of makes this okay. The idea that games can just not only be not preserved for the sake of games history and gaming as an art form, but as you know, a product, it should not just be able to be nuked by the whims of the companies. Or at the very least, that’s one man’s take. Let me further updated on all things gaming news reviews and discussions stay tuned right here on Yong Yeah. I’ll see you guys next time. Yong.