Stop Killing Games
Stop Killing Games
Sun, 31 May 2026
The "Stop Killing Games" movement is making progress with<br>the advancement of California AB 1921, a bill designed to<br>stop developers from permanently bricking games when they<br>shut down their servers. If you're a gamer who has watched a<br>$70 purchase turn into a useless desktop icon overnight,<br>you're entirely justified in your outrage. Having a software<br>developer reach into your home and break your own software is<br>a profound violation of trust.
But as the movement gains momentum, it's becoming clear<br>that they're aiming at the wrong target.
Right now, advocates are treating game preservation purely<br>as a consumer rights issue. They're lobbying for laws that<br>force developers to build offline modes, issue final server<br>patches, or offer refunds. This is fundamentally treating a<br>symptom while ignoring the disease. The real problem isn't<br>that developers are "killing games" - it's that they have the<br>unquestioned, systemic power to do so in the first place.
What gamers are actually experiencing is the inherent<br>injustice of proprietary software. It's a system built from<br>the ground up to mistreat users by denying them control over<br>their own computers.
Without using the exact vocabulary, the gaming community<br>is spontaneously waking up to the exact ethical arguments the<br>Free Software Foundation has been making for forty years.<br>Gamers are currently saying, "You shouldn't be able to<br>control how and when I run this code." They don't just want a<br>band-aid; they're intuitively demanding software freedom.<br>They just haven't realized it yet.
The Anatomy of a Kill Switch
When a game "dies" because a publisher unplugs the server,<br>it isn't experiencing a natural death - it's an execution.<br>But how is it possible for a company to reach across the<br>internet and execute a piece of software living on your hard<br>drive?
It's only possible because the software is<br>proprietary.
Decades ago, Richard Stallman and the Free Software<br>Foundation established a fundamental rule of modern<br>computing: If the user doesn't control the program, the<br>program controls the user. And when a program controls the<br>user, the developer holds absolute power over both.
With proprietary software, the developer holds all the<br>keys. They don't share the source code, they lock down the<br>server architecture, and enforce compliance through Digital<br>Restrictions Management (DRM). Even games which are normally<br>played locally can require a constant connection to the<br>server and refuse to run otherwise. These mechanisms aren't<br>merely technical necessities; they're digital handcuffs.<br>They're designed specifically to prevent you from studying<br>how the game works, changing it so that it's not dependent on<br>a server for authorization to run locally, or modifying the<br>client to connect to a different, community-run server to<br>keep the world alive.
The "Stop Killing Games" movement views server shutdowns<br>as an unfortunate business practice that should be regulated.<br>But through the lens of software freedom, we can see the<br>deeper truth: the ability to flip a switch and turn your $70<br>game into a digital paperweight isn't an accidental oversight<br>or an unavoidable side effect of modern networking.
It's the intended design.
Proprietary software is built to assert dominance over<br>your machine. Its very nature is designed to deny you the<br>fundamental right to run the software as you see fit, for as<br>long as you see fit. The mistreatment you feel when a game is<br>taken from you is baked into the code itself. The kill switch<br>isn't a bug in the proprietary software model - it's the<br>ultimate expression of it.
Gamers Already Understand Free Software<br>Ethics
The most tragic part of the disconnect between the gaming<br>community and the Free Software movement is that they're<br>fighting the same battle. Gamers are already articulating the<br>core ethics of software freedom - they just aren't using the<br>academic terminology of licenses and source code<br>repositories.
Listen to the shared outrage driving the "Stop Killing<br>Games" campaign: "I have this software. It's sitting on<br>my hard drive. You shouldn't have the legal or technical<br>ability to reach into my computer, break my software, and<br>walk away."
This is the exact warning Richard Stallman and the Free<br>Software Foundation have been shouting from the rooftops<br>since the 1980s. Gamers are experiencing, on a mass scale,<br>exactly how proprietary software is actively used to mistreat<br>people. They're realizing that when the source code is hidden<br>and legally restricted, they're entirely at the mercy of<br>someone else.
The public has already grasped this concept in the<br>physical world through the Right to Repair movement.
When John Deere used proprietary software to lock farmers<br>out of repairing their own tractors, or when Apple<br>deliberately made it impossible to replace a cracked iPhone<br>screen without specialized authorization, the public<br>recognized it immediately as an extortionate scam. They<br>understood that...