“It’s all of us against apathy, entropy, and loss of art” – Stop Killing Games has reached the EU Parliament, but what happens now?

Late February, the Stop Killing games initiative landed in Brussels. There, members of the European Parliament met with those looking to keep video games playable in an era which seems defined by a constant string of end-of-life notices, be it Anthem or Highguard. Meetings with MPs and a press conference were conducted, as the online movement entered infamously treacherous waters: parliamentary politics.

How did it go? How open were statespeople to the woes of the video game industry, and where does this all go from here? To find out, Eurogamer spoke with Josh “Strife” Hayes, a YouTuber and streamer who built himself a career covering games both old and new, and has now become an advocate for the Stop Killing Games initiative. He spoke at the aforementioned press conference, and had since returned home to England following the stint in Europe.

Hayes credits much of the success of Stop Killing Games to Ross Scott, also known by his YouTube channel Accursed Farms, who “picked up the banner” and pushed the movement to internet popularity. Scott led and popularised the movement with a selection of videos covering the initiative. Ignited by the shuttering of Ubisoft’s The Crew, it was Scott and his peers at Stop Killing Games that resulted in millions of signatures thrusting the topic into the European halls of government.

“Through Ross’ pursuit to keep games playable through consumer-focused law, I was able to look at the wider ecosystem of gaming and realised, we’re losing a huge amount of artistic and cultural artifacts made by talented people. Through my own work with MMORPGs I’ve played a number of MMOs that are now unavailable.”

What Stop Killing Games wants is this: an end-of-life policy to be added to future game releases, so that once servers are shuttered the games can still be experienced by those who have bought them. This does not mean full functionality as it was at launch, nor does it apply retroactively to many decades of prior releases. It’s a push for a new standard moving forward.

This pitch, it turns out, seems to have been initially met with a substantial knowledge barrier, one built on dated assumptions. “Politicians want to represent their constituents and their best interests,” Hayes explains. “Politics is still an old man’s game, and there are still not a huge number of those within the political sphere who understand the video game culture as much as those who work within that culture.

“We’re losing a huge amount of artistic and cultural artifacts made by talented people”

“So we have a very emotive title: Stop Killing Games. A demand, a rather aggressive use of ‘killing’, and games as a signifier of all games. But politicians still don’t really understand the difference between Tetris and Portal. They don’t understand between Minecraft and League of Legends, and I’m pretty sure no politician has played The Stanley Parable because they wouldn’t understand the references in it. So politicians look at us like, how are games dying in the first place? What’s killing them? Why aren’t you able to play them, don’t you just put the cartridge in the Nintendo? We had to say, nope, that’s how it used to be. They think that way is still the standard.”

However, according to Hayes, given time and a bit of a catch-up on the current state of video game consumerism, the real crux of the argument from the Stop Killing Games team revealed itself. “We explained to politicians that this is a much deeper consumer advocacy issue, that these games are products and are being removed via a one-sided contract that gives companies permission to do so whenever. These politicians then realised this wasn’t about little Timmy being able to play his Nintendo: it was actually about European consumers and global consumers being deprived of goods they had purchased. Or, they were services sold under the guise of goods which were following the legal framework for services. When they realised this put companies in a huge position of power and consumers were being mistreated, then they began to care.”

The lingering feeling after some time back home from Hayes is hope, one dotted with a few crucial asterisks. After all, the European Union has “exceptional consumer advocacy groups and pretty good consumer protection” in Hayes’ mind. The major takeaway is that, once explained as the consumer-rights problem it is, Stop Killing Games manifested itself as a particular kind of gold dust in the political sphere: it was bipartisan.

“The Commission and Parliament sort of have checks and balances against each other. There can be all manner of political machinations going on between them, when one side supports something and the other doesn’t out of principle or a power play,” states Hayes. “But what we found is, this isn’t just a bipartisan issue, but an unified issue. It’s less about political peacocking, but more about MPs from all parties coming together to say this issue is affecting everyone who votes across ideologies. They, I think, will be able to enact some real change.”

“I don’t need to play Highguard to not want it to die.”

There are, however, some roadblocks in place that must be surmounted by the ongoing Stop Killing Games movement. For one, it requires instilling a counter-perspective to the video game industry itself, the primary source of information politicians would have had insight into.

As Hayes puts it: “The gaming industry is such a big industry, but these politicians aren’t necessarily exposed to gaming within their own lives. Their exposure comes from the industry itself, which of course has a vested interest in making sure its business interests are protected at all costs. We’re coming along as saying what future we want to build – but it has been a challenge to convince politicians we don’t see the gaming industry as an enemy. This is not a clash, it’s a unified effort between the players, developers, and publishers to make sure the art remains available forever. Politicians come to it like, who is against who. That’s the framework they’re operating on. We had to go, it’s all of us against apathy, entropy, and loss of art.”

Perhaps a depressing silver lining, but recent events have gone a long way in proving the initiative’s argument. Take Highguard, set to shut down later this week, despite over two million players trying it out and less than a month passing since its release. This game, all games, shouldn’t be unceremoniously made unavailable to play in Hayes’ eyes.

“I’ve not played Highguard. I don’t need to play Highguard to not want it to die. Someone out there loves Highguard. There is value there: music, narrative, environmental design… The idea that a developer can pour so much time into something, and for it to end up as someone’s favourite game, just for that person to be told it’s going away forever and they can never play it again. That sucks. It really sucks.”

From here on out, Stop Killing Games must remain a constant force for its goals. This, perhaps, presents its fiercest challenge. At a time when interest fatigue and fading enthusiasm is a real problem, the passage of time has proven to dilute the sense of urgency in everything from video game preservation movements to real world atrocity. When staunch online advocates care one month and cease the next, how does Stop Killing Games keep people interested in the incoming months and years of political pushing? The salvation for Stop Killing Games may turn out to be its very antagonist.

“The biggest benefit that Stop Killing Game has in terms of remaining in the cultural zeitgeist is that games keep dying,” Hayes concludes. “The thing we are trying to stop keeps happening. Every time it happens, someone’s favourite game is going offline forever. Someone is losing their favourite piece of art, and someone will say to that person ‘I wish we could Stop Killing Games’.”