Stop Regulating Games

Why "Consumer Protection" Legislation Only Hurts Consumers

Recently, a certain controversy has been making its rounds across the wide, open, and free space of the internet. Outraged by awful business practices, many people who enjoy the humble hobby of playing videogames have taken to social media and the European Parliament asking for one simple thing: “Stop Killing Games”.

This initiative was born from Ubisoft’s online racing videogame, The Crew, being shut down in March 2024, and the licenses for the game revoked, rendering everyone’s access to the game void shortly thereafter; no refunds, no way to legally access the game. Completely erased. Because of this, many were rightfully outraged, and this was only made worse by the fact that Ubisoft later attempted to prevent the community from rebooting the game through reverse-engineered private servers and an offline mode. This is why people, in their usual naïveté, took to those who will always save them [needs citation] in times of need: regulators.

The “Stop Killing Games” movement then began, and it quickly got hundreds of thousands of signatures. The objective? Have the European Parliament vote for it, because consumers have a right to keep playing the games they purchased even after they are shut down, even if they agreed that they did not have that right in the EULA for the game they bought. One would think that the easiest way to prevent this is by simply not buying videogames from predatory companies like Ubisoft or Electronic Arts, but the common citizen, judging by voting patterns, seems to not be reasonable enough to think ahead when making decisions, so at the end of the day, they always end up running back to the hands of the State for assistance.

However, what do the rightfully angry people behind this initiative propose, apart from, of course, more regulations? Are they, perhaps, finally pushing for legislation that will end up having positive effects only? While on paper their proposals may sound very nice, my analysis is that they will lead to, at best, nothing, and at worst, stabbing the game industry. Allow me to explain.

Who Shall Save Us from Ourselves?

How does this come to happen? How is it that a company can simply sell a product, then abruptly tell you that “You no longer have a right to use what you paid for?”. The objective answer is, well, contracts, that EULA and Terms of Use people voluntarily agree when they buy and install a videogame. When people bought The Crew, they adhered to this clause which is present in all Ubisoft games, voluntarily:

The EULA is effective from the earlier of the date You purchase, download or use the Product, until terminated according to its terms. You and UBISOFT (or its licensors) may terminate this EULA, at any time, for any reason. Termination by UBISOFT will be effective upon (a) notice to You or (b) termination of Your UBISOFT Account (if any) or (c) at the time of UBISOFT’s decision to discontinue offering and/or supporting the Product. [1]

However, there’s also a secondary answer, which specifically answer the first question I put forward: we have allowed this to happen because we allow ourselves to act impulsively, because of a collective action problem, and short-term thinking. Individually, we accept the terms because the immediate reward (playing the game) gives us that dopamine rush which we value more than the distant, abstract risk of a server shutdown or the game being taken away from us.

While that statement might sound harsh, I am stating it as a matter of fact. Markets work on incentives, and we buy products agreeing to terms that we will later regret, we are just telling the companies we buy from “This is fine, I don’t mind”. How do we have any right to complain about a problem we ourselves created? We could have avoided all of this had we thought ahead and complained directly to the publishers about the fact that the game we were paying for was, in fact, never “ours”, and that the access we had to it was completely arbitrary and conditional. We wouldn’t have paid for our computers, consoles or phones if we knew that someone could come and take them away, legally, at any given time, so why did we agree to these same terms when purchasing an online game? Why did we agree to obtaining a license, not ownership of a product, if we were going to complain about this later? It would seem that, in the modern day and age, responsibility is a sin.

We cannot continue to act in ways that will eventually go against our interests and then blame others. If you don’t teach a dog that biting people is wrong, then the dog will bite. If you don’t teach a child that insulting is bad manners, the child will insult. If you don’t stop buying games from companies that will void your access to it eventually, the companies will keep making and selling these games. What this ends up doing is creating a vicious cycle whereby we make mistakes out of willful ignorance or impulse, and once it is time to accept responsibility, we throw a tantrum and ask the State to fix our mistakes, legitimizing its coercive power by reminding it that we are seemingly no more than naïve children, and that the State is our all-benevolent parent.

What is perhaps most damning, though, is that this initiative, Stop Killing Games, was born as merely an emotional reaction. Not only was it created from an apparent incapacity from people to accept they’re guilty of a mistake they made, but it was seemingly started with the idea that the market cannot regulate itself, or, more specifically, that consumers are too idiotic to fight back, as if the average person is chained and spoon-fed things they don’t agree with. This line of thought is profoundly nihilistic, and, ironically, contradictory. To cite the great Frédéric Bastiat:

“Since the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to allow them liberty, how comes it to pass that the tendencies of organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their agents form a part of the human race? Do they consider that they are composed of different materials from the rest of mankind?” [2]

Such an insight from over 175 years ago has flown over the head of just about every single person who has ever proposed regulation as the ultimate solution for all our problems. How perfect would our world be if, just by virtue of signing a bill in congress, human nature and the actions that stem from it were to be magically fixed.

One may, at this point, believe that based on these arguments, it would seem as if there is no solution to this other than to allow companies to run free and ruin our life experiences, not unlike Nock’s defeatist view of the State. If anyone has reached this conclusion so far into this text, then you have failed to understand it. The solution to this problem has been under our noses for the entire time: do not buy things if you don’t like the terms you have to agree to when purchasing them. This is the way markets have forever regulated themselves and will continue to do so. Consumers have a choice, and their choices are the market signals that companies must respond to unless they wish to go bankrupt. Boycotting comes not only from public outrage leading to reputational damage, but from rejection of trade with those who are being boycotted. Complaining online, but buying the next big game with the exact same EULA that a game like The Crew has, is not helpful, but the contrary.

We have had many boycotts work in the past:

• Star Wars Battlefront II had terribly predatory pay-to-win loot box systems upon launch. The outrage was not only in the form of extreme criticism online, but of people just not buying and not playing the game. The loot boxes were removed shortly after launch, and the monetization system was reworked to remove the pay-to-win mechanics.

• No Man’s Sky was, upon launch in 2016, a disaster. Many of its promised features were missing, and the disappointment from the public was tremendous, so much so that there were refunds en masse. Throughout the next few years, the developers quietly worked to rebuild the game, releasing free major updates regularly, and turning the game into a success.

• When the Sonic the Hedgehog movie trailer was first released, fans were horrified by Sonic’s character design. The backlash was so enormous that the studio delayed the movie’s release just to rework Sonic’s design to include his classic big-eyed face.

• Cyberpunk 2077 launched in 2020 as a buggy, broken, unfinished mess. It was mass refunded, temporarily removed from the PlayStation Store, and CD Projekt Red’s stock price dropped by about 40%. They then spent years patching the game and releasing free DLC to make up for their disastrous launch.

• Other examples were the Xbox One Kinect and DRM controversies, the Fallout 76 launch disaster, Ubisoft’s “Quartz” project, and endless other examples of games, consoles, movies and other pop media which were massively affected by voluntary boycott.

What do all these cases share in common? They were all caused by consumers using their own capacity to say “No, we don’t want this”, and acting in accordance with this statement. They did not require the government to step in and use its powers to regulate these things so that they’d never happen again. Why can’t we achieve the same thing Stop Killing Games proposes through these same voluntary means? Are we selectively stupid? Or just acting out of emotion without sparing any time for a second thought?

“Competition does a much more effective job than government at protecting consumers.”

― Thomas Sowell, Compassion Versus Guilt and Other Essays

Planning for Death

The main and most important point behind the Stop Killing Games movement is that it seeks to legally force any online live service game that is marketed in the European Union to include either an offline mode, or to facilitate access to the tools needed to host a private server. Why? Because this way, if someone pays for a videogame, they keep the possibility to continue playing indefinitely after its official servers are taken down.

While a nice idea, it is rather easy to find how it can easily fall into endless loopholes and gray areas which would make this proposal, at large, pointless. It would seem as if the very people behind it, however, have realized these problems, as made evident by its website’s Q&A section. However, no matter how well-intended their suggestions might be, I firmly believe them to ultimately be either inconsistent, pointless, or outright detrimental to the game industry, and by extension, consumers.

So, what are the reasons that are cited by the people pushing for the Stop Killing Games package of regulations, and where do they fail? Let me break it down.

The Loss of Art

Videogames are, undeniably, a modern form of art. The destruction of art, be it a book, a recording, a film, a painting, or anything else, is nothing short of a cultural tragedy. However, in the modern era, can games really be destroyed? After all, we have long since moved away from having to buy cassettes or CDs to play our videogames. In the modern day, almost the entirety of all games in the market are sold exclusively in digital format, which means they are infinitely replicable, and the only way to truly destroy them is if all the copies of a game were to be deleted from every single device on Earth. As of now, we don’t live in an Orwellian world where others have access to our devices at all times, so I find this virtually impossible to happen for any game that was distributed to, at least, a dozen people or so, let alone for games which sold millions of copies.

The problem, however, is that live service games are entirely dependent on players having access to the servers. If players have no internet connection, they are not capable of playing the game, and it is the same if the servers are not online. Once the servers for any live service game are taken down, this effectively renders the game unplayable. So, how do we get around this? The Stop Killing Games people propose something simple: let’s force companies to either include a version of the game that is playable offline, or to facilitate access to the software used to host servers. This seemingly straightforward solution, however, is plagued by technical, economic, and legal complications that would make it unworkable in practice. More on this later.

Make Them Pay

If companies face penalties for destroying copies of games they have sold, this is very likely to start curbing this behavior. [3]

It is very curious that this would be the logic that the people proposing regulations are putting forward, because it is exactly what consumers are supposed to do and are known for doing. The issue here, though, is that for these people, “penalties” need to be legal and enforced by the State, instead of by the very consumers who are free to consent, or not, to a transaction based on its terms.

So, if destroying a game you paid for became illegal in France, companies that patched the game would likely apply the same patch to the games worldwide. [3]

This refers to the Brussels effect, and its logic is not necessarily wrong, after all, in some cases just regulating one market (the EU’s, specifically) can cause a company’s entire approach to business change, as proponents exemplify with Australia forcing Valve to offer refunds. The issue, though, is that this pretends that such behavior is a constant. However, we’ve seen that this never happened with, for instance, Germany’s videogame censorship laws, which limit violence and Nazi symbology, nor with China’s restrictions of “immoral” content. In fact, even the European Union’s GDPR compliance laws only worked to make many companies only show said compliance features to European users. Similarly, the Brazilian refund policy for digital games is only enforced by companies like Valve or Sony in Brazil, not globally. It is the same with Germany’s blocking of YouTube videos due to GEMA compliance, or games like Danganronpa or Persona changing their content according to each region’s age rating and content restriction laws.

The worst thing here, though, is that such wishful thinking will lead to one of three outcomes:

1. It works, and game publishers comply globally.

2. It works only in the regions where they are forced to comply, and the rest of the globe is not affected.

3. Companies decide to stop selling their games in the regions where they are forced to comply with these laws, and instead offshore purchases.

Option 2 seems likely, in my opinion, but even option 3 cannot be ruled out based on examples: Apple offshores EU purchases through Ireland to pay a lower corporate tax rate. Google shut down Google News in Spain after Spain passed the “Google Tax” in 2014. Netflix used to avoid the French Cultural Tax (“taxe vidéo”) by routing French subscriptions through the Netherlands. Even Valve routes most Steam purchases through Luxembourg to reduce the number of laws they must comply with and the taxes they have to pay.

How can we expect this one law to work, when many others haven’t? It is, at best, a bet.

Gives Us Servers, or Give Us Death (Or at Least Offline)

The principal idea, as mentioned earlier, is that users, once the game is discontinued, should be allowed to play an offline version of the game, or at least have access to private servers. However, this is just impossible to consistently regulate.

The majority of online multiplayer games in the past functioned without any company servers and were conducted by the customers privately hosting servers themselves and connecting to each other. [3]

The first mistake they made is assuming that older online games, which worked using Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networking or user-hosted dedicated servers, are the same as modern online videogames. Battlefield 1942, Quake, Unreal Tournament and other such games are no longer the standard for online gaming, neither are their networking systems. Even older games, such as console-only games, or large MMOs used developer-hosted server infrastructure, which single individuals would have a hard time maintaining due to costs and complexity.

If we look at modern online videogames, such as Destiny 2 or GTA Online, we see that they need real-time shared environments that just can’t be peer-hosted. They have complex live service models with frequent updates, seasonal events, cloud-hosted assets, integrated monetization and these all require central content delivery and player account management. Their anti-cheats and matchmaking are often also cloud-based, and cross-platform play or in-game economies and currency are impossible without centralized accounts and inventory systems. The idea that if any of these large online games were to shut down tomorrow, then players could simply host their own servers, is nothing short of absurd, at least if what consumers want is to retain the same gameplay experience. Let us not even get into the fact that P2P networks are much more susceptible to hacking, DDoS attacks, and cheating, as they don’t really allow for server-side validation. Even dedicated servers need strong cybersecurity infrastructure to allow for a consistent and enjoyable gameplay experience, or else, your game will be a dumpster fire of cheating.

Let Us Regulate (Arbitrarily)

Previously, I said that the idea of legally ensuring games to include offline play or private servers is impossible to regulate in practice. If all that is legally required for these games is to allow for an “offline option” after their servers are shut down, then developers could simply implement the most bare-bones, basic offline play mode possible just to comply with the law, so games could plainly include a glorified demo and comply with the law this way. Then, what about games that are not exclusively online, but which are largely built around online play? Most modern shooters, sport games, fighting games and such are mostly oriented towards online gameplay: Battlefield, EAFC, Rainbow Six, Smash Bros and others all include offline gameplay, but their experiences are nowhere near or like those of online gameplay. So, unless you were to specifically include a clause that forces the online-only content to be playable offline (even if it’s unreasonable in practice), you could just have companies release all their games with a short singleplayer mode, such as Battlefield’s campaigns, or Smash Bros’ vs. CPU mode, and they would be lifted of any liability upon shutting down their servers.

This also ignores the fact that most modern online games include microtransactions. How do you ensure that players keep the content unlocked from their microtransactions once the game shuts down? After all, these are all cloud-based and tied to each player’s accounts. If I paid money to buy costumes for my characters in a gacha game, once the servers go down, how can I ensure I don’t lose access to this content? This forces companies to either release all the data from users so that copies of the original servers can be made (which is a massive security breach), keep hosting their servers indefinitely (even if It would bankrupt them), or just voiding people’s access to content they paid for (defeating the whole point of the initiative). Alternatively, you could force companies to, upon shutting down servers, make all the previously-paywalled content free to access, which would entirely defeat the point of microtransactions by discouraging users from purchasing any as they will know that, eventually, they’ll get access to all of that content for free.

So, you can’t possibly regulate online games with microtransactions, you can’t ensure that games can be reliably hosted by users after their servers are shut down (let alone bigger ones), and you can’t ensure that the “offline” mode of these games is playable. There’s no definition for a “playable” game, and each game is different. There are games that only work by virtue of being online, and which could simply never be played offline. You cannot objectively and consistently regulate what content an “offline” version of a game should include. If you ask for the latest version of the game, then you’d be asking companies to avoid ever implementing features that could be hard or impossible to replicate offline because they can only exist in a client-server architecture, unless they want to be sued, of course. This would also discourage implementing any temporary content or innovating with online-dependent features, because they could be sued if they don’t preserve said features. In fact, how do you even preserve things that were never client-side? How do you preserve Destiny 2’s world simulation, activities, and loadouts when they were never hosted in the user’s computers? What do you end up with? A broken, empty sandbox? Even if you ask that the offline mode retains the same content that was available at launch, then good luck playing games that were a buggy, unplayable mess upon release. In the end, where do you draw the line? You don’t; you can’t.

The Free-to-Play and Subscription Problem

Games come in, practically, three flavors: free, paid, or paid (repeatedly). Stop Killing Games targets, primarily, the games you pay for once. One doesn’t ever pay for free-to-play games, at most, you just pay for whatever microtransactions or DLC they might have, but then, if you ask free-to-play games to preserve this content, you run into the very same dilemma I specified in the previous section. So, what about subscription-based games?

Subscription-based gaming for individual games has largely faded out in the modern videogame market because microtransactions are a far better deal, but I firmly believe that the Stop Killing Games regulations would cause a resurgence of this model. Why? Well, it is simple: when you pay for a subscription, you are paying for a temporary license to have access to that service. You don’t own it, in any way, by virtue of a contract specifying that your access is tied to your continuous payment of a fee for an ongoing service. This would be the perfect game for live service games to simply avoid having to comply with most of these laws, because once questioned, they could plainly say: “The players never owned the game. They did not purchase it, they subscribed to it, the same way Netflix users never owned the movies they watched on the platform. We just granted them limited-time access.” Denying this would mean that subscription services in all areas, be them music, video, software, e-books or else, would have to comply to similar regulations, causing a regulatory domino effect.

This will inevitably just end up having future online games become subscription-based, or, alternatively, render the vast majority of their content behind a continuous paywall, while the base game could comply with the bare minimum required by law and be paid, or be entirely free to play. Because the rest of the content will be available based on a subscription, then the law won’t apply unless, then again, you specifically regulated it so that it did, which would lead to unreasonable cases where people could end up arguing that they have a right to access every movie on Netflix because they once paid for a subscription, even if just for a month. The perfect way companies could even dance around this would be by introducing cheap yearly subscriptions: “Play the game for just $10/USD a year!”. The price would not be different to that of the base game, and it would still give the companies a way to simply avoid complying with the regulations proposed by Stop Killing Games.

“Well, we’ll just force them to allow players to preserve the content they did pay for”, someone insisted when I brought up this dilemma to them. They were not able to answer my question of “how”, because there is no answer that isn’t arbitrary or unreasonable. Do people who paid for a subscription for World of Warcraft 20 years ago get a right to keep the game once it shuts down? If they are entitled only to the content they had paid for, then how can you ensure they do get access to the specific version of World of Warcraft they played, not any other, implying that version is still accessible or playable at all. And what about multi-tiered subscription-based games? Do people who paid for the lowest tier get access to the content from the highest tier? If so, you run into the same issue with making all microtransaction content free. How do you make sure that, when the game is discontinued, they keep access only to what they paid for, and that they don’t lose access to it? Inevitably, you’d have to keep the servers of the game running to, at least, match each user account to the content they had paid for. Then, lastly, you’d just then be making subscription-based games unprofitable alongside other models, because people would just decide to pay for the game once to ensure permanent access to it at a later date.

Ironically, “consumer protection laws” would just work to make consumer choice worse: you won’t be able to buy a game anymore, you certainly won’t own it, it will all be subscription-based, and you will be happy.

And the Small Companies Be Damned!

Developing a videogame requires time, money, knowledge and a lot of effort. Many great games were developed by not more than a single person, or a small group of individuals. Think Among Us, Valheim or Deep Rock Galactic. Today, many online-only games are developed and maintained by small teams with modest means. Stop Killing Games proposes that these financially-vulnerable developers face higher costs and barriers of entry to the videogame market. What this bill seeks is to monopolize online gaming in the hands of only the big publishers.

Many small developers simply lack the financial means to build and maintain robust offline fallbacks, or fully documented public server codebases for their games. Asking them to do this would make them have to face extra developing time, which means extra costs.

Even if a developer wants to release server binaries or source code, they often don’t legally own all the tech their games use. Many indie games are developed using proprietary engines or libraries, such as Unity Multiplayer, Photon, Microsoft Azure PlayFab and others. These third-party services often prohibit redistributing server binaries or Software Development Kits (SDK); why? This I touch on in the last section of this essay. The point here, though, is that these smaller developers generally lack the leverage to negotiate licensing charges with tech giants such as Microsoft or Unity. For instance, Among Us developers, Innersloth, used Unity Networking for their game, which means they can’t legally publish core server code without violating Unity’s Terms of Service. Additionally, many indie developers build their games in ways that hard-wire online dependencies into core gameplay logic, such as inventory management, matchmaking, save data, NPC spawns or other aspects of the gameplay. Reworking all of this tight coupling so that their games could be fully playable offline would simply take months of work, which would lead most studios to bankruptcy.

Then again, as previously mentioned, offline modes for modern online games aren’t just a switch you can change and suddenly the game is playable. Many online games would turn into empty sandboxes when moved to an offline mode using only client-side assets and structure, which would turn them practically unplayable, defeating the goal of these regulations. While massive companies, like Ubisoft or Electronic Arts, could withstand the costs of fully translating an online experience to singleplayer, smaller ones simply cannot. Creating AI substitutes for players and world events, replacing or simulating backend services (often resource-intensive) client-side, rewriting authentication and authorization code, or providing network loopbacks to simulate gameplay that would normally require input from other players, these are all things that any small developer would be incapable of dealing with unless they want to put all of their belongings up for sale to avoid being sued.

In the great game of regulations, the one played by armchair intellectuals, outraged emotional people, and rich politicians in fancy suits who put on fake smiles and give empty speeches, the only ones who lose are the small players, while the intellectuals, activists and politicians cheer at the fact the State once more hurt people in the name of the “common good”.

Section Post-script

What about videogames made by a single person and available only on web, or for mobile devices? Many of these are free to play, and might include small microtransactions, while much of their content is server-side. What do you even do with these? Furthermore, how do you even prove that some games with microtransactions had said microtransactions take place if they were done indirectly, through untraceable means, or to third parties? And what about paid mods? Are those also reached by these regulations? What about quasi-games, like those web games that are entirely text-based but might include microtransactions? And what if games unlock content through “voluntary donations” instead of actual microtransactions? Hell, why doesn’t this also apply to software? There are tons of SaaS software out there, why only games? Why not music? And films? And e-books? Aren’t we being selective?

The Real Problem: Intellectual Property

Multiple times I hinted at this before, but finally, we got here. Intellectual property is, simply put, the root of all these problems. I am not here to explain the philosophical problems of intellectual property, for that you should read Stephan Kinsella’s Against Intellectual Property, and, if you’d like to learn more about the real-world impact of intellectual property, you could read my essay, Ideas Are Free: A Case Against Intellectual Property.

So, what’s the issue with intellectual property (from now on called IP) here? It’s rather simple: because of IP, digital goods, which are non-scarce and infinitely replicable, can be “owned” or “licensed”, and, by extension, said “ownership” or “licensing” can be revoked, at any time. These are copyrighted works, often using patented technologies, and therefore, they are entirely protected by IP law. You cannot “own” these games because you are not owner of their contents. By virtue of their IP “rights”, the developer (or usually, publisher) of the videogame has ongoing control over how and whether the game functions, even if you’ve paid for access.

Kinsella explains this very eloquently:

It is important to point out that ownership of an idea, or ideal object, effectively gives the IP owners a property right in every physical embodiment of that work or invention. Consider a copyrighted book. Copyright holder A has a right to the underlying ideal object, of which the book is but one example. The copyright system gives A the right in the very pattern of words in the book; therefore, by implication, A has a right to every tangible instantiation or embodiment of the book—i.e., a right in every physical version of the book, or, at least, to every book within the jurisdiction of the legal system that recognizes the copyright. [4]

This can also be translated to videogames. If you own a CD containing the game, you don’t own the game itself, just the CD, however, because the contents of that CD are owned by someone else, they override your very own property rights over it by limiting what you can do with said CD: you cannot copy it, you cannot modify and redistribute its contents, you cannot even use its content in particular ways. This is the same with digital-only games; someone else has the legal capacity to limit what you do with the files that are in your device.

Because of this ridiculous premise, which we accept irrationally as necessary (due to a prisoner’s dilemma, as I explained in my previous essay), games like The Crew were allowed to not only be shut down, but for anyone who decided to revive it by modifying its files to allow offline play or private servers to be sued by those who owned the “rights” over the game and its content. Nobody is legally allowed to create a copy of the game, redistribute it, modify it, or use its source code. This means that its publishers, Ubisoft, have a complete monopoly over the game. Because of such monopolies, other attempts at reviving discontinued games, such as Electronic Art’s and DICE’s Battlefield 2 were trampled, or emulators like Yuzu, for Nintendo Switch, were forcefully discontinued after Nintendo sued its developers.

If the IP monopolies that are legally granted to these companies by virtue of having an idea first, were to be loosened, or completely eliminated, then situations like the one we have at hand, and which quick-started the Stop Killing Games initiative, would be far less common. Why? Because players would be allowed, from the get-go, to modify these games, redistribute them, create private servers, copy their source code, recreate them, or doing just about anything that would be considered a violation of the would-be rights of the copyright-holders.

Let us also not ignore that most games are not owned by their developers, but rather, by their publishers. The developers, the ones who put in all their work and effort to make a game, are often alienated from their labor through the intellectual “property rights” over their works belonging to their publisher. Yes, the previous statement sounded Marxist, but it does not make it any less true that developers do not have a right over their own labor, even if it is infinitely replicable. Many cases of developers having their games taken down by their publishers against their will exist: City of Heroes in 2012, LawBreakers in 2018 (the developers wanted to revive the game, but weren’t allowed), BattleForge in 2013, and Star Wars Galaxies in 2011 being just a few examples. All of these shutdowns were possible because the publishers had the last say over the destiny of these videogames, and developers had no other choice than to agree, because they did not own the IP of these products.

Ironically, the Stop Killing Games Q&A claims that they do not aim to give up their intellectual property:

No, we would not require the company to give up any of its intellectual property rights, only allow players to continue running the game they purchased. In no way would that involve the publisher forfeiting any intellectual property rights. [3]

However, they openly wish to regulate the game industry as to force companies to release parts of their codebase, their netcode, possibly-patented technologies, proprietary engines, libraries, binaries or SDKs, all of which may be protected by intellectual property. So? Which will it be? You cannot pretend to be pro-IP and also ask for IP to be completely ignored arbitrarily because it fits your demands.

This is, perhaps, the only part of the regulation I could get behind, because it serves to undermine IP. Nevertheless, the way it is framed clearly shows that the person who thought of this did not even care to carefully analyze what it is that they’re proposing, let alone their potential effects.

Stop Regulating Games

Then again, I will fall into tautology, because I want to make this point very clear: the problem is IP. We already have IP making game preservation legally challenging, or impossible. Hosting private servers? Illegal. Decompiling game clients to remove online checks? Circumvents DRM, illegal. Sharing patched or modified versions of a game? Illegal. Uploading games online for archiving purposes? Illegal. Creating derivatives of a game, or using its assets or trademarks? Illegal. How, then, are more regulations supposed to help fix a problem that exists primarily due to overregulation? We could straighforwardly get rid of all these problems if we simply targeted IP, instead of business practices, and if, of course, we weren’t impulsive and unwilling to be held responsible for our actions.

The problem with Stop Killing Games is that it attacks the symptom, not the cause. The people drafting this bill assume that companies naturally have absolute and eternal control over their works, so they try to regulate their behavior as perpetual monopolists. They seem to not understand that, just as with every single monopoly, it is not more and not less than a creation of State regulation. They seem to be willing to just enter another regulatory ballet, which will most likely fail to fix any issues, and likely, worsen them. An easier solution is to just stop granting companies indefinite, exclusive legal control over works they no longer exploit. Instead of writing dozens of pages trying to make mental gymnastics to build a framework with more holes than sand in the Saharan Desert, it’d be easier if they just proposed something simpler: “If a company stops providing access to a copyrighted work, its intellectual property rights over that work should be forfeit.”. I am not even proposing that companies should give up their trademarks (for now, at least), but rather that they just stop punishing people for trying to fix the things they broke and abandoned.

The bottom-line is very clear now, and I will lay it out very simply so that anyone can understand. This is my own 9-point manifesto:

• Vocally and financially boycott companies that kill the games you like. Consumer action is how the market fixes bad practices.

• Demand better contracts, terms of service and transparency, so we know what we’re buying. Else, stop buying games if you will come to regret the terms you agreed to.

• Attack the cause: push for intellectual property reform so that preserving games isn’t a crime.

• Educate others to understand the differences between “ownership” and licenses in the digital age.

• Build or support open-source alternatives and projects that keep games alive when companies won’t, and boycott companies when they try to intervene.

• Support developers who voluntarily release server code or offline modes.

• Stop giving the State power or legitimacy to regulate an industry already crippled by intellectual property monopolies, in which the smaller players are more prone to losing.

• Don’t ask to regulate small studios out of the market just because a regulation seems convenient or well-intentioned.

• Always remember that you are the only valid and capable regulator, not the government. You vote and regulate with your wallet. You choose what you buy, so companies depend on you, not you on them.

We don’t have to ask companies to Stop Killing Games, we just need to ask the government to Stop Regulating Games.

“The worst thing that can happen to a good cause is, not to be skillfully attacked, but to be ineptly defended.”

― Frédéric Bastiat

Citations

1. Ubisoft Entertainment S.A., Ubisoft EMEA SAS, Ubisoft Inc., & Ubisoft Mobile Games SARL. (2021). End User License Agreement. https://media.contentapi.ea.com/content/dam/eacom/en-us/eula/the-crew-2-eula-en.pdf (Same EULA applies to all Ubisoft games since at least 2021)

2. Bastiat, Frédéric. (1850/2007). The Law (p. 46). Ludwig von Mises Institute. https://cdn.mises.org/thelaw.pdf

3. Stop Killing Games. (2024). FAQ. Retrieved July 5, 2025, from https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq

4. Kinsella, N. Stephan. (2001). Against intellectual property. Journal of Libertarian Studies, 15(2), 1–53, p. 8. Retrieved from https://mises.org/library/against-intellectual-property-0