A coalition of gamers has declared war on the concept of planned obsolescence in video games. Their crime: expecting that software they purchased should remain playable after the publisher decides to flip the off switch. Radical stuff.
Stop Killing Games, the movement behind this insurgency, is challenging the legal fiction that publishers own the right to delete a product from existence once it stops generating revenue. The audacity. Publishers have spent decades training us to accept that games are temporary leases, not purchases—digital ashes scattered the moment the quarterly earnings call demands it. Now gamers want the inconvenient thing: permanence.
The coalition’s position is simple enough to fit on a napkin: make it illegal to shut down a game without ensuring it remains playable. Maybe through preservation, maybe through source code release, maybe through literally anything other than “pay full price, get zero years of guaranteed access.” Publishers are scrambling to explain why this is actually impossible, which is impressive considering they manage to do impossible things constantly when venture capital demands it.
What makes this genuinely absurd is that the industry treats games as both art and disposable product depending on which argument saves them money. A film from 1980 is protected intellectual property worth licensing forever. A game from 2015 is a liability to be erased. The coalition is basically asking corporations to pick a lane—either games matter or they don’t.
The real comedy is watching an industry that charges $70 for a single-player experience suddenly discover that preservation costs money and therefore shouldn’t be required. As if consumers asked for the business model where you own nothing and have no recourse.