Launched in April of 2024 by Ross Scott, the Stop Killing Games initiative aims to have developers ensure their games are playable once the servers go down. Brought on by the “death” of The Crew, a mostly single-player game that required an online connection to play, the various petitions surrounding this initiative started off strong.
The European Citizens Initiative is the biggest petition of the lot, requiring a million or more signatures to be considered for EU policy. In a matter of months, the petition had garnered over 400,000 signatures. Sadly, momentum slowed in a big way around this point.
This may have, in part, been due to a stream in which PirateSoftware a.k.a. Thor, a popular streamer and content creator, bashed the initiative as “trash.” He went on to say that he would actively tell anyone he could not to support the initiative. Given how influential Thor is (I often watch his clips myself), it’s easy to see why some would think that he had a hand in the demise of Stop Killing Games.
Ross didn’t initially respond to the stream nor the resulting clips, but finally, in June of 2025, he made a video titled “The end of Stop Killing Games,” in which he raised all the points that Thor misunderstood about the initiative. He made it clear that the arguments against it were from a point of ignorance and cleared up any and all facts that Thor got wrong.
This led to multiple other creators weighing in on the subject with their views, among which penguinz0 and Josh Strife stand out as some of the largest.
This resulted in a mind-blowing turnaround as the movement picked up momentum instantly, rocketing up to its goal just 10 days after Ross published his video on PirateSoftware. That’s a whopping 550,000-odd votes in just the last two weeks.
It’s been an amazing turnaround worthy of its own movie script, and I, for one, am very happy for Ross, Stop Killing Games, and EU gamers as a whole. We all want to buy games that we love and assume ownership.
I mean, imagine someone from Square Enix popped by your house to grab your copy of Final Fantasy 7, stating that “this product has reached the end of its life.” There would be a fight, I’m sure. And for EU gamers, Ross has stepped into the ring and landed a heavy opening blow in that fight.
Let’s hope this initiative reached all of its goals and helps gamers have more clarity about whether they’re buying a copy to own or merely a license to use said product for a period of time. At the very least, we can then make more informed choices about which developers we support and which we avoid.
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