The EU Said No to Game Preservation. That’s Fine — Now the Real Work Begins.
The European Commission had a choice. Millions of people signed the Stop Killing Games petition — 1.3 million of them, enough to trigger a mandatory response. The ask was simple: require publishers to keep the games you bought in a playable state, even after they stop selling them. The answer came back yesterday: no.
Not a “we’ll look into it.” Not a “maybe in phases.” A firm “we’re not doing that” — with a side of “we’ll ask the industry nicely to write a voluntary code of conduct.”
Here’s why the EC said no: existing copyright and IP law. The argument is that you can’t force a company to maintain servers, keep a game running, or provide patches for a product they’ve stopped selling without running into all sorts of legal problems around licensing, IP ownership, and liability. It’s not a bad argument, legally speaking. Copyright law wasn’t designed for a world where games are services and your “purchase” is really a revocable license.
But let’s be honest about what this actually means.
The Bet
The EU is betting that voluntary industry standards will fix this. They’ll work with publishers to develop a “code of conduct” about how to sunset games — how much notice to give, whether to release offline patches, that sort of thing. A report is due by the end of 2026.
Here’s the thing: I’ve seen this movie before. Voluntary codes of conduct in tech are what companies sign when they want regulators to go away. They’re full of “best efforts” language and empty on enforcement. When’s the last time a publisher got fined for violating a voluntary code? When has one even been called out?
The Counter-Bet
OK, the counterargument: maybe voluntary is the only realistic path here. Copyright law is genuinely complicated. You can’t force Ubisoft to keep servers running in perpetuity for a game they made 12 years ago with 200 remaining players. The cost of mandatory preservation could actually kill the business models that fund game development in the first place. Live-service games exist because they have ongoing costs. If you mandate they stay up forever, you either get fewer games or much more expensive ones.
And there’s a second counterargument: 1.3 million signatures is a lot of people, but it’s 0.3% of the EU population. This wasn’t some overwhelming democratic mandate — it was a loud and passionate minority. The EU listened, considered, and decided the legal and economic tradeoffs weren’t there.
I think both of these arguments have real weight. I’d change my mind on this if someone showed me a workable mandatory framework that didn’t nuke the live-service model entirely. But the EC didn’t even try to design one — they just punted.
Where We Go From Here
The interesting thing is that this isn’t the end. California is already moving on a state law about communicating end-of-support to players. Steam has started adding language that makes it clear you’re buying a license, not a product. The conversation has shifted permanently — even the EC acknowledged that the status quo isn’t acceptable.
The real fight isn’t in Brussels. It’s in the storefronts, the EULAs, and the consumer protection frameworks that will slowly, painfully, force publishers to treat games less like services and more like things people buy. The EU said no to a mandate yesterday. But the Stop Killing Games movement lit a fire that isn’t going out.
Voluntary codes are better than nothing. But I’ll believe publishers will do the right thing when they start doing it without being asked.
Sources: Engadget, Wikipedia - Stop Killing Games, Reuters