Feiyang Peng
This past summer, petitions across the EU and the UK gathered over a million signatures urging lawmakers to prohibit developers from “killing” purchased games through unilateral termination.1 Though the Stop Killing Games movement (“SKG”)—an online consumer-rights campaign sparked by Ubisoft’s termination of The Crew—touches on issues from digital obsolescence to open-source software, its core frustration stems from the growing gap between consumers’ intuitions about ownership and the legal reality of our license-based digital economy.2
Despite the law’s traditional skepticism towards restrictive property forms, courts treat software users not as owners but as licensees with limited access.3 A typical End User License Agreement (“EULA”) reserves title in the publisher, imposes transfer and use limits, and—most importantly for SKG—does not guarantee indefinite access.4 Termination clauses are then enforced by Digital Rights Management (“DRM”) technologies that can lock users out of servers or revoke access remotely.5
This distinction between ownership and access is not obvious to the consumer, who expects that clicking “Buy Now” will have the same effect as a brick-and-mortar store purchase: convey ownership of a thing, the deprivation of which feels indistinguishable from theft.6 Players understand that supporting games—particularly online ones—entails ongoing costs and generally do not demand perpetual maintenance.7 But their attachment to the characters and worlds they’ve built reflects basic intuitions about property: that we have a justified interest in preserving what we’ve labored for or invested our personality into.8 That interest need not be ownership; SKG petitioners ask not for the full bundle of rights but only for continued access. After hundreds of hours of play, end-of-support alternatives like limited offline modes or authorized private servers feel like reasonable asks.9
Setting aside the technical hurdles, video games are legal frankensteins of leased parts, from proprietary backend code to licensed music, likeness, and logos.10 Most studios license “middleware” such as game engines, motion-capture suites, and DRM systems rather than reinvent them at greater cost.11 These contracts generally forbid the redistribution or disclosure of source code, so even developers who wish to open-source their games could not deliver a functioning product without breaching.12
Consider The Crew, whose shutdown triggered the petition: the game contained dozens of licensed car brands and logos, each under a separate, time-limited agreement.13 Sports franchises like FIFA require hundreds of publicity and likeness rights negotiated with leagues, clubs, and individual athletes; when those licenses lapsed, FIFA rebranded as EA Sports FC.14 Music-driven franchises such as Guitar Hero must secure synchronization and master-use licenses, typically granted for only a few years.15 These arrangements make it impossible to preserve games without renegotiating a web of third-party rights.
The practice of killing games, then, is the inevitable outcome of an ecosystem built on temporary permissions. IP and contract law’s division of rights and reliance on time-limited licensing render most alternatives to termination untenable. Forcing reversal would not only upend a mature industry but also undercut the license economy’s most tangible benefit: lower prices.16
So, let us take a step back. The SKG movement rests on the assumption that players should get to access a game they’ve bought for as long as they wish—a normative question legislatures are not ready to tackle. And while disclosure reforms, like California’s 2025 statute requiring digital marketplaces to specify when a product is licensed rather than sold, can begin aligning consumer expectations with legal realities, forcing fine-print information onto consumers has a limited effect.17
What the industry needs is not a blunt legislative mandate but an organized self-regulatory framework that standardizes expected lifespan and post-support plans into a clear “menu of options.”18 It has done this before: in 1994, when congressional scrutiny of violent games threatened direct regulation, publishers created the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB) that, with a simple, uniform system of ratings and certification marks, taught players what to expect from a game’s content and privacy protections.29 A similar framework could teach players what to expect from a game’s longevity, preempting fragmented legislation and rebuilding goodwill between players and publishers.
Consumer frustration is often the first step toward institutional reform. By articulating the emotional cost of a vanishing digital library, the Stop Killing Games movement has already done its part. The responsibility now lies with industry and lawmakers to transform that moral intuition into a predictable legal-consumer framework—to, in short, operationalize transparency, so that when players press “Buy Now,” they know exactly what they are buying, and for how long it will last.
[1] Stop Destroying Games, Eur. Citizen’s Initiative (July 31, 2024), https://eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home/disabled [https://web.archive.org/web/20251020204519/https://eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home/disabled]; Prohibit publishers irrevocably disabling video games they have already sold, UK Gov’t & Parliament, https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/702074 [https://web.archive.org/web/20251020204642/https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/702074] (last visited Oct. 18, 2025).
[2] Stop Killing Games, https://www.stopkillinggames.com [https://web.archive.org/web/20251020204846/https://www.stopkillinggames.com/] (last visited Oct. 18, 2025).
[3] See Vernor v. Autodesk, Inc., 621 F.3d 1102, 1111 (9th Cir. 2010); MDY Indus., LLC v. Blizzard Ent., Inc., 629 F.3d 928, 938 (9th Cir. 2010).
[4] See, e.g., End user license agreement, Ubisoft (Jan. 2023), https://www.ubisoft.com/legal/documents/eula/en-US [https://perma.cc/XE5J-4DGB] (“You and UBISOFT (or its licensors) may terminate this EULA, at any time, for any reason. Termination by UBISOFT will be effective . . . at the time of UBISOFT’s decision to discontinue offering and/or supporting the Product . . . Upon termination for any reason, You must immediately uninstall the Product and destroy all copies of the Product in Your possession.”).
[5] The pros, cons, and future of DRM, CBC News (Aug. 7, 2009), https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/the-pros-cons-and-future-of-drm-1.785237 [https://web.archive.org/web/20251020205709/https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/the-pros-cons-and-future-of-drm-1.785237].
[6] See Aaron Perzanowski & Chris Jay Hoofnagle, What We Buy When We ‘Buy Now’, 165 Univ. of Pa. L. Rev. 315, 322 (2017) (“Our data demonstrate that a sizable percentage of consumers is misled with respect to the rights they acquire when they ‘buy’ digital media goods.”).
[7] Frequently Asked Questions, Stop Killing Games, https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq [https://perma.cc/LD39-C6GG] (“We agree that it is unrealistic to expect companies to support games indefinitely and do not advocate for that in any way.”).
[8] See John Locke, Chapter V: Of Property, in Two Treatises on Government (Rod Hay ed., 1823); Margaret Jane Radin, Property and Personhood, 34 Stanford L. Rev. 957, 959–961 (1982).
[9] Frequently Asked Questions, supra note 7 (“What we are asking for is that [publishers] implement an end-of-life plan to modify or patch the game so that it can run on customer systems with no further support from the company being necessary.”).
[10] For more details on the technical difficulties of implementing end-of-life options, see Pauld Kilduff-Taylor, Stop Killing Games will become an endless nightmare if we don’t wake up, Mode Collapse (Oct. 8, 2025), https://modecollapse.substack.com/p/stop-killing-games-will-become-an [https://web.archive.org/web/20251020210103/https://modecollapse.substack.com/p/stop-killing-games-will-become-an]
[11] See Part 1: Software licensing in video game development — a practice guide, Waterfront L. (Sep. 23, 2019), https://waterfront.law/part-1-software-licensing-in-video-game-development-a-practical-guide/ [https://web.archive.org/web/20251020210224/https://waterfront.law/part-1-software-licensing-in-video-game-development-a-practical-guide/].
[12] Id.
[13] See Sergio Ferreira, The Stop Killing Games initiative doesn’t understand what it’s asking for, Games Industry.biz, (July 30, 2025), https://www.gamesindustry.biz/the-stop-killing-games-initiative-doesnt-understand-what-its-asking-for-opinion [https://web.archive.org/web/20251020210453/https://www.gamesindustry.biz/the-stop-killing-games-initiative-doesnt-understand-what-its-asking-for-opinion] (“[The Crew] featured real-world licensed vehicles from manufacturers like Ford, Ferrari, and McLaren . . . It is not unreasonable at all to believe that expiring or non-renewable licenses were a key factor behind Ubisoft's decision to terminate the game after nearly a decade of service.”).
[14] See Santi Pedrazas Arenas, Breaking the Game: The Legal Fallout of the EA-FIFA Divorce, Wash. J. of L., Tech. & Arts: Blog (May 11, 2025), https://wjlta.com/2025/05/11/breaking-the-game-the-legal-fallout-of-the-ea-fifa-divorce/ [https://web.archive.org/web/20251020210610/https://wjlta.com/2025/05/11/breaking-the-game-the-legal-fallout-of-the-ea-fifa-divorce/].
[15] See What is a Synchronization License?, Emerson Thompson Bennett (June 18, 2025), https://www.etblaw.com/what-is-a-synchronization-license/ [https://web.archive.org/web/20251020210740/https://www.etblaw.com/favicon.ico].
[16] See Michael Heller & James Salzman, Mine!: How the Hidden Rules of Ownership Control Our Lives, p. 266 (2021).
[17] Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code § 17500.6(b)(1) (“The seller provides to the consumer before executing each transaction a clear and conspicuous statement that . . . [s]tates in plain language that “buying” or “purchasing” the digital good is a license.”); See generally Omri Ben-Shahar & Carl E. Schneider, The Failure of Mandated Disclosure, 159 Univ. of Pa. L. Rev. 647 (2011).
[18] See Heller, supra note 16 at 235–239 (discussing the utility of default rules and opt-out regimes, specifically the ‘Marriage Menu’); see also Hanoch Dagan & Michael Heller, The Choice Theory of Contracts (2017).
[19] See Charlie Hall, A brief history of the ESRB rating system, Polygon (Mar. 3, 2018), https://www.polygon.com/2018/3/3/17068788/esrb-ratings-changes-history-loot-boxes/ [https://web.archive.org/web/20251020210848/https://www.polygon.com/2018/3/3/17068788/esrb-ratings-changes-history-loot-boxes/] (discussing the structure and formation of the ESRB, as well as its efficacy in achieving consumer welfare).