The Stop Killing Games campaign won its first real legislative vote this week. According to Eurogamer, the California State Assembly passed the Protect Our Games Act 43 to 16, and the bill now moves to the State Senate. If it becomes law, companies selling server-dependent games in California would have to give players advance notice before a shutdown and leave purchased games in some playable state afterwards, whether that's an offline mode, community servers or something else that works.
Where Stop Killing Games came from
The campaign traces back to one game. Ubisoft sold The Crew, delisted it, shut down its servers, and in doing so made it unplayable for everyone who owned it, including people who only ever played alone. The game needed an online connection for parts of the experience that had nothing to do with other players, so when the servers went, the copies on players' drives stopped working too.
What players asked for in response was fairly modest. Nobody serious expects every multiplayer service to run forever. The ask is narrower: if I paid for a game, it shouldn't be able to vanish completely because a server somewhere was switched off.
What the Protect Our Games Act would require
Based on Eurogamer's reporting, the California bill focuses on two things:
- Notice. Players get told ahead of time that support is ending, rather than finding out when the game fails to launch.
- A way to keep playing. The publisher provides some route to a working game after shutdown: an offline patch, released server software for community hosting, or a similar handoff.
It doesn't require companies to keep official servers running indefinitely, and it doesn't treat every online feature as something that must survive. Matchmaking for a competitive shooter is a different problem from a single-player campaign that phones home for no good reason.
The industry's objection, and why it's partly fair
The ESA, the US games industry's trade body, opposed the bill. Its argument, as quoted by Eurogamer, is that strict shutdown rules would push developers to spend limited resources maintaining old systems instead of making new games. That concern is real, especially for small studios. Middleware licences expire, and the engineers who understand a ten-year-old backend have usually moved on.
But most of that cost comes from planning for the shutdown too late. A team that knows from the start which services are essential, which licences run out and which parts could run locally can plan the exit cheaply. A team that thinks about it for the first time when revenue drops has only expensive options left. The bill mostly pushes that planning earlier.
A healthy ending looks like Factorio
In the same week, PC Gamer reported that Wube Software plans for Factorio's upcoming 2.1 patch to be its last major update. After that, the studio will stick to bug fixes, platform support, compatibility and modding support.
Some players will always want one more patch. But this is what a good ending looks like. The game stops growing and stays playable, and the version you bought keeps working on your machine. A game reaching its final shape is a very different thing from a game being switched off from outside, and a lot of the preservation debate comes down to that difference.
"Buy" has been doing a lot of work
Part of why this fight gets heated is that the store button uses one word for several different arrangements. You "buy" a game, it appears in your "library", and the interface makes it feel permanent. The terms of service may say you licensed access to a service. Players weren't wrong to believe the interface. The industry spent years making digital purchases feel as solid as a shelf of boxes, because that made people comfortable buying digitally.
The practical fixes aren't glamorous:
- Say it on the store page. Which modes need online services, and what happens when support ends.
- Write the end-of-life plan before launch, not in the last week before shutdown.
- Patch in offline modes where the game can reasonably run without a server.
- Release server binaries or tools where community hosting is realistic.
- Refund or compensate when a recently sold product becomes unusable.
That's paperwork, patches and plain language, mostly. It shouldn't take a consumer campaign and a state legislature to get there, but here we are.
What players can keep in the meantime
Laws like this one take years to land, if they land at all. In the meantime, the record around a game is the part players control. Screenshots, save files where the platform lets you export them, a review written in launch week, a list of the games a group of friends played together: none of it keeps a dead game running, but all of it helps explain later why it mattered.
That's the small part of the problem we work on. Perthro is a game journal, not an archive, and it can't bring back a game whose servers are gone. What it can hold is your side: which platform you played on, how many hours, what you thought of it, and who you played with. For the bigger picture (the 87% of classic games that are out of print, and why re-releases aren't archives) see our piece on why video game preservation can't depend on the store.
