RANT Stop Killing Games Is Right, and Pirate Software Isn't
A million and a half signatures say publishers don't get to switch a paid-for game off. Pirate Software's case against that rests on a client-server argument that doesn't hold up.
Ubisoft delisted The Crew from sale in December 2023, then switched its servers off entirely on the 31st of March the following year, so a racing game people had already bought outright, including its single-player campaign, stopped booting because the client needed a permanent connection to Ubisoft’s servers just to prove you owned it. Anyone left holding a boxed copy had, from that day, a disc that could still spin in the drive and do precisely nothing else. That’s the case that got Ross Scott off his usual beat of narrating Half-Life’s plot to camera (Freeman’s Mind, if you’ve somehow missed it) and into drafting actual legislation, and eighteen months on I’ve signed everything with his name on it that I could find.
Pirate Software, a Twitch streamer who also runs a small studio and has built a following teaching game development, thinks the whole campaign is a mess, and said so in a video back in August 2024. I’ll get to his specific claims, because some of them are wrong in a checkable way, but the more basic problem is that his objection argues against a version of the initiative that doesn’t exist, and it’s exactly the kind of thing I said would earn a place among the general grievances I promised when this site started, the first one so far that’s made me want to write to an actual regulator afterwards.
What the initiative is actually asking for
Scott’s Stop Killing Games campaign started that April, and its EU arm, a Citizens’ Initiative called Stop Destroying Videogames, was registered that June and opened for signature collection at the end of July, giving it a year to reach a million signatures spread across at least seven member states. The initiative’s own wording doesn’t ask publishers to run servers forever. It asks for an end-of-life plan: when the official service for a game stops, the game gets left in a state a player can still run, an offline mode, a patch that points the client at a private server instead of a corporate one, something. Games that are genuinely ongoing services rather than products with a server bolted on for convenience, Scott’s own example is World of Warcraft, are explicitly carved out, because nobody involved is proposing Blizzard maintain free public access to a subscription game indefinitely. The distinction that matters is between a game you bought once that later had an online requirement welded on, usually for anti-piracy reasons, and a game you pay monthly to keep playing.
The number that actually moved
The EU petition sat at around 450,000 signatures for most of the first half of this year, less than half its target with the clock running down. Then, on the 23rd of June, Scott posted a video called The End of Stop Killing Games, arguing that Pirate Software’s video from the previous August had stalled momentum at exactly the point it mattered. It hit 450,000 views in three days. Within about ten days the petition crossed a million signatures, it reached 1.4 million by the 20th of July, and closed on the 31st with roughly 1,448,000, comfortably past the target and across enough countries to count. Whatever you make of the argument that followed, it didn’t cost the campaign momentum, and getting that many Europeans to look up a Citizens’ Initiative and add their name to it isn’t a small thing to arrange.
Where Pirate Software’s argument breaks
Hall’s video makes two real claims once you strip the framing away: that the wording is too vague to implement without banning live-service games outright, and that players never owned the game to begin with, only a licence, so there’s nothing here worth preserving. Neither holds up well. The licence point is a definitional trick, a EULA can say whatever it likes about what you’re buying, but that doesn’t settle what a regulator is allowed to require of the seller, and “the contract already says so” has never been much of a defence against a law that says the contract can’t say that. The vagueness claim is the one that actually bothers me, because it’s a technical argument from someone who runs a studio and should know the difference between an infrastructure commitment and a patch. An offline mode or a private-server option isn’t the same engineering problem as running a publisher’s live servers forever, it’s exposing the matchmaking and authentication calls a client already makes so a player-hosted server can answer them instead of a corporate one.
Scott’s response video accused Hall of skipping the live-service exemption entirely and arguing as if the initiative would force every multiplayer game into an offline mode. Having read the wording myself, that’s a fair description of what happened, whether it was a misreading or a convenient one. Hall posted a tweet accusing Scott’s audience of brigading his channel, deleted it within a day, and came back two days later with an apology for the tone (“I should not have lashed out”), as reported at the time, rather than the substance, which matches a pattern I’ve noticed in every launcher vendor’s apology I’ve had to cover: the delivery gets the regret, the underlying claim doesn’t.
What actually happens next
The signatures are sitting with the national verification authorities named in the ECI regulation right now, who get three months to confirm how many are valid before the file reaches the European Commission. The Commission then has six months to give a formal response, and a response isn’t the same thing as a new law, it can just as easily be a promise to look into industry standards and nothing more. That’s a slower, less satisfying process than a video crossing a view-count milestone, and it means the part of this that actually changes what a publisher’s allowed to do is still ahead of where I’m writing this from, not behind it. I’d rather have a bureaucratic process with a chance of changing something than a viral moment that doesn’t, every time.