I think the immediate contradiction in the petition is the fact that they want games to remain "in a playable state" when the games are being shut down. If a game is "shut down", it's not a in playable state anymore. If a game requires studio support to be playable (i.e.., an online multiplayer game) and the studio doesn't want to support the game anymore, you cannot force them to make the game playable. You might be able to claim a refund for money spent on micro-transactions but that's about it. It's called free enterprise not forced enterprise. I said that in the Jason Hall thread and was instantly banned. Fortunately I found this thread. I actually wrote an entire essay since I was banned last week explaining the many issues I see with this petition and modern gaming.
I. Tensions between the petition and multiplayer online games
The most successful games today are online multiplayer games. If the player base decreases below a certain level and it’s not profitable to keep the servers up, the game is going to be shut down. There is just no way around it.
When I brought that up, in the Jason Hall thread, I was instantly banned, along with many others. One person who responded to me pointed out that, sometimes, studios will shut down a game even though there is still a fairly large player base and that’s not fair. Here, we are talking about purely strategical decisions to shut down a game to create a “fear of missing out” and yes, that is shitty marketing. Obviously if you paid 70 dollars (or 60 euros) for a game and the company deactivate it remotely within 6 months of your purchase because they are Ubisoft, then honestly, you should get a refund (and never buy their games again). I’m not a libertarian, that’s just dishonest. But frankly, that’s not what we are talking about. Because the games that are being put online and then removed in this fashion are not usually games that you paid to own. And this is where the core of the argument collapses for me.
It’s not that “you own nothing”, it’s that you did
not pay for the game. Most modern video games operate under a free-to-play model that depends entirely on (1) active player base and (2) in-game purchases (which are optional) NOT upfront sale. So you can’t apply the logic you applied 20 years ago to your purchase of a video game because you’re not buying the game in the first place and if you’re paying a fixed charge, it’s probably on a monthly subscription basis. Read the terms, this is not the same as purchasing a physical copy of a finite tangible product and you don’t have a right to it staying online forever. In fact, I would argue that you don’t want that (but you don’t know it). Whether it’s
Fortnite,
PUBG, or
Apex Legends these games are an ongoing experience that require constant maintenance which comes with a cost. For these games the publishers don’t charge for access to the base game but rely on players buying cosmetic items, season passes, and other shit that personally I don’t buy because I’m very big brain and I get to play games for free (not Fortnite though).
Before Epic Games developed Fortnite, they put out a game called Paragon in 2016. The game was popular and had a big player base but in 2018 it was shut down by Epic Games. And the reason for it was simply that they were re-allocating resources towards the development of Fortnite. Fortnite was 100 times more successful than Paragon and if they had not shot down that earlier game, Fortnite would have never been released. On the other hand, Fortnite could have been a massive failure, and the studio could have closed as a result. But that risk taking attitude is a defining characteristic of the American spirit of free enterprise and yes, they do it for money. But hold on… after Paragon was shut down, the assets for Paragon were released by Epic to be used freely in their Unreal Engine, so people could use those assets to do their own videogames. As of today, you can try and still play Paragon which is being developed and maintained by a Korean studio called SoulEve. My point is that it can be done, or not, but it’s not something you should force a company to do. I have heard that it’s hard to find matches in Korean Paragon because of the low player count, so you will probably be left queuing forever. That’s pretty much the dynamic. Do you want to be playing the same game forever and ever? I don’t personally care, because I have been playing the same game since 2018 but most people want new games and innovation.
Technological progress has always come with a degree of natural loss and obsolescence. When television formats evolved and display technology changed, old consoles became impossible to use without additional adapters or workarounds. That affected even the PS3 but we didn’t rise as a gamer class and demanded refunds from Nintendo or Sony. Instead, we sought solutions through emulation, or using retro hardware. And I absolutely think that these should be encouraged and not fought against by the publishers but that’s a different idea from the petition. Online games are no different: they are built for a specific technical ecosystem that inevitably moves forward. Expecting publishers to keep every server, license, and feature alive forever ignores this simple fact, that innovation and renewal always bring some level of closure for what came before. And for all the doomers saying “gaming sucks now!” you’re wrong. It’s not perfect but you get to play incredible games that you wouldn’t even have dreamed of as a kid, and I think you look at the past with rose tainted glasses.
II. Issues with playing online games that studios don't want to support anymore without assuming control
The petition (unless I misunderstood it) says that they want the right to play the game but none of the obligations attached to it. How are they going to run massive servers without monetization? How are they going to deal with licensing and IP within the game? How are they going to deal with personal data of the players? The wording of the petition seems to brush this aside. You can’t just leave all these issues to the studio and run their game. Like many people who read the petition, I concluded that it wanted to achieve was a form of compulsory open-sourcing under a GPL license and even though that's not apparently the goal, it is indirectly what the petition aims to do because as someone pointed out above, I don't know how you are planning to access a game that a studio don't want to support anymore, if it's an online game? If
they don't want to run the servers,
you will have to take them over - is there something here I'm missing? In any case, it's useful to use to look at GPL license for how you can enforce this against a studio.
Let’s take the example of Doom. Doom today belongs to Bethesda – indirectly Microsoft (as parent company). The game was created in 1993 by id Software. The source code for the game was released in 1997 but the assets for the game are still copyrighted. So you can make your own Doom game as a fan project (as people on this website would know), but you cannot use their assets in your game (textures, monster designs or music). In practice, they don’t really sue fans but if you were to make your own version of the game using their copyrighted assets, and you distributed that, they’d probably send you a takedown notice. So why did id Software, the original developer of Doom, release the source code? We need to look into this in order to understand why, creating a legal obligation to do this in every case, is not the best answer.
In the 1990s, id Software (especially John Carmack, their lead programmer) believed strongly in open tech. Carmack’s view was that the real value was in the assets and the brand — the artwork, level design, music, i.e., the Doom name. By releasing the source code, they fostered a huge modding and developer community which kept Doom relevant for decades. But beyond this, the real reason was that it was good for the company, and good for business, to release the code. In truth, by 1997, their engine was obsolete. When they released the Doom engine code, id Software had already moved on to the Quake and Quake II engines which were much more advanced. The Doom engine was no longer a competitive advantage for them. Releasing it cost them nothing strategically, but built goodwill and kept the community alive. It provided countless other benefits, free publicity for the game and the successors, building good-will with the fans, helped move the tech forward, and improved the popularity of FPS games. As an aside, when you release the source code under the GPL license, it means that anybody that uses that source code to make their own version needs to keep the software open source as well. So it creates a virtuous circle that exists outside of traditional IP laws. I think that’s great. It's a great strategy. You can’t force companies to do that…
A government cannot judge when software is truly obsolete or when its release would do more harm than good. Id Software knew the Doom engine was outdated when they released it, but for many companies, an older version of a tool can still have significant commercial value as a licensing asset, training tool, or foundation for upgrades. For example, if a company like Epic Games or Unity were forced to open-source their current or even slightly older engines, it could destroy their business model overnight. Open-sourcing takes time and effort. When id released the Doom engine source, they did it in a way that the community could realistically use: they cleaned up the code, documented it, chose a license, and supported a community of developers who built ports and mods. If companies were forced to open-source proprietary code on demand, they might just dump messy, undocumented code with security flaws or third-party dependencies they don’t have the right to share. In Doom’s case, the source code was just the technical part — the game’s real staying power came from its design, music, levels, and name recognition. If a law forced companies to open-source not only code but also assets, trademarks, or related IP, it could destroy them.
Some people have suggested that video games should be treated like books in a public library, with companies required to open up their old code for everyone to access. It’s a well-meaning idea, but in practice it’s about preservation and archiving, i.e., not something you can mandate. A game’s source code is a studio’s core creative work and competitive edge, often reused and reworked for years. Forcing it into the public domain would strip away that value. Think of it like expensive law textbooks: they’re not freely available at any library — they’re part of a costly, specialized ecosystem. In the same way, studios should choose when and how to share their code, just as id Software did, so that open source stays a benefit to them. If they don’t benefit, the market will dry up and you won’t get games like you do. You’ll be playing Tetris until the wall comes down.
III. Overregulation kills games and corrodes the life’s essence
Look at this guys, this so rigged.
This is the comparative market size of US vs EU companies that are less than 50 years old with $10B market cap (I know you’re not stupid it says in the picture).
This is with China and South Africa. SOUTH AFRICA is doing almost better than us.
And you want me, a europoor to beg the Commission for MORE EU REGULATION. The thing that has caused the above? Because you want to keep playing your old games… How do I say this?
In 2018, Emmanuel Macron (the President of the French) pointed out: “
The US has GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon), China has BATX (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi), and Europe has GDPR.” We have consumer protection laws and we produce nothing. And the problem is that he genuinely meant this as a praise. This is the core problem here: while the US and China have Microsoft, Epics, and Tencent, Europe focuses on rules instead of innovation.
So yes, we have the best healthcare programs and the best consumer protection laws and the best worker protection laws in the world but we are dead, as a continent and as a people, our greatness has long faded. Over-regulation, rigid labor laws, high compliance costs, and restrictive IP rules choke the experimentation needed to build the next generation of great games, or anything else for that matter. Don’t be blind to this because you want something, but you won’t get it for free – the state is a leviathan and before you know it, everything you have will be gone and that’s much worse that your video game going offline.
The mindset that wants to regulate away the natural life cycle of digital games is the same mindset that holds Europe back. When regulation is kept to a minimum, some games fail or evolve so that others games can appear. Protecting fair play for consumers does not mean freezing innovation in place. If we want Europe to be more than a place where spaghettis are made we must let developers experiment, pivot, and sometimes shut things down. Think of loot boxes or pay-to-win. Everyone was upset about those and people like Jim Sterling wanted more regulations and laws to crack down on these and create a fair playing field for gamers and it didn’t happen, and it got better by itself. The game I’m playing has been online for years and it’s free and you can’t pay to win. There is a currency in the game, and loot boxes I’m sure still somewhere in the tabs, but it’s really not bothering anyone.
This kind of initiative is going to benefit no one. Stop thinking like a consoomer for a minute and think from your perspective as Americans. You have 1/3 of your consumer base in Europe. We don’t produce anything because we are overtaxed and over-regulated, we buy your shit. If 1/3 of your consumer base starts saying, we won’t buy your shit unless you do X or Y and this X or Y prevents you from doing business, you’re going to be screwed on a level that you cannot anticipate. For Europeans, it’s even worse, you’re asking us to increase the regulatory burden to improve your video game experience in the US. It really annoys me that there is not a single person that sees this the way I do and that I get banned for saying this.
