According to Statista, the video game industry made approximately $520 billion worldwide in 2025. The revenue of this industry is primarily driven by free-to-play live service games that feature in-game transactions. Fortnite and Roblox currently lead the space. Fortnite has an average of 1 million active users daily, and Roblox averages around 140 million daily users.
The fact that these titles are free-to-play allows players to feel allowed to indulge by spending money on in-game currency to purchase cosmetic items. While this practice is fine in itself, a problem arises when an online game shuts down. When these types of games shut down, players who may have spent anywhere from a few dollars to hundreds or thousands now have lost all of their purchased items permanently. This can be devastating, and the Stop Killing Games movement aims to create legislation to address this issue.
What is Stop Killing Games?
The Stop Killing Games movement aims to make it so that games that rely on server access will be playable when those servers eventually shut down. Most people will likely assume that this only refers to online multiplayer titles. However, some single-player titles, including Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, Gran Turismo 7, and Hitman 3, require an internet connection to access certain features or the entire game in some cases.
When the servers of these titles go down, players lose access to everything they spent their money on. To combat this, the campaign aims to create legislation worldwide that will force companies to allow these titles to be playable in some form after the termination of the servers. Though the legislation may sound extremely beneficial for gamers, it has received much pushback from legislators and industry lobbyists.
Worldwide Legislation Attempts
The Stop Killing Games movement has gained most of its traction in Europe. The European Citizens’ Initiative was a petition that required 1 million signatures from European citizens. The initiative was successfully adopted by the European Commission on June 16. There is now a movement towards adopting policies throughout Europe.
In the United States, the movement has not had as much success. A bill in California made its way through the state Assembly, but was stopped as it didn’t pass the vote in the California State Senate. After this loss, a volunteer wrote online, “We are not limiting this to California. We intend to introduce versions of this in other state legislatures, and we are seriously looking at the federal level.”
The Future of Digital Preservation
The future of digital preservation holds out with some hope for a better future with better legislation. Corporations attempt to criminalize emulation, while gamers argue that emulation is the only way to play old titles that have not been ported to newer hardware. In some cases, these titles have been abandoned in their entirety, with some game series going extinct.
Recently, it has been put into question whether anyone truly owns digital products or whether individuals only purchase licenses to access digital media. At the forefront of this scrutiny is Sony. Before 2021, PlayStation users were able to purchase movies on the PlayStation Store. However, on Sept. 1, PlayStation will remove over 550 titles from users who have purchased them. There will be no way to retrieve these titles and no refunds, which has sparked much outrage online.
PlayStation plans to no longer sell physical discs beginning in January 2028. Additionally, Xbox’s next console, titled Project Helix, will be PC-based and will likely drop disc functionality. This is supported by the reported development of a testing disc-to-digital feature being developed by Xbox that digitizes physical games. Seeing as consoles are the last haven of physical games and there is now a shift away from these models, there are many calls to ensure that players truly own what they purchase.
