It’s amazing what a little bit of time can make: Two years after kicking off what looked to be a long-shot campaign to push back on the practice of shutting down server-dependent videogames once they’re no longer profitable, Stop Killing Games founder Ross Scott and organizer Moritz Katzner appeared in front of the European Parliament to present their case—and it seemed to go very well.
The whole thing is a bit dry, as parliamentary committees tend to be, but the conversation is interesting. Consultant Daniel Ondruška, for instance, said the Stop Killing Games movement “is not trying to be unreasonable,” and isn’t seeking eternal online support or retro reactivation for games that have already been shut down—just requirements to keep it from happening in the future.
“Games that were developed 20 years ago still function,” Ondruška said. “Games that were developed three years ago, as it was mentioned before, don’t. It’s a design decision. It’s a business decision.”
After laying out in detail how game shutdowns actually occur, Scott, the Stop Killing Games founder, also weighed in on the business side of it, saying that when end-of-life planning is included in a game’s development budget, the impact is “very small.” He added that some estimates for end-of-life costs by game studios are “faulty,” because they factor in features that are no longer needed in an offline game.
This is an edited version of the hearing provided by EU politics news channel Europe Echo; the full, unedited hearing is linked above.
At the end of the hearing, MEP [Member of European Parliament] Anna Cavazzini, chair of the Committees on the Internal Market and Consumer Protection thanked and congratulated the speakers “for the great work you have done,” and said she’d “heard a lot of support from basically all the political groups for your initiative.” MEP Ilhan Kyuchyuk shared similar sentiments, reiterating “the broad support” from the relevant committees.
The mood during a post-hearing press conference on Twitch was clearly upbeat: “Absolutely incredible,” Katzner responded when asked by Scott how he thought it went. “I think that everyone that watched it might have noticed that there was no MEP that wasn’t responding positively. Even the commission was pretty positive, I’d say.”
Katzner also said it’s important to understand that this hearing “was our first step into the public, into the legislative process,” and that the committee is still reviewing Stop Killing Games’ submission. But, he continued, “every single MEP” present for the hearing expressed support for the initiative, and that for the purposes of the hearing, it was “mission achieved.”
Scott concurred: “I feel like if things had gone off absolutely perfectly on our end, the results actually might not have been that much different. If there’d been a little more prep time it might have gone a little smoother, but then, for the end result? I think it would’ve been the same.”
XThe discussion with other relevant parties, hosted by Katzner, goes on for a good bit after that, but it seems quite positive overall. The mood is probably best summed up, though, by a meme shared by Katzner on X:
(Image credit: Moritz Katzner (Twitter))
“There’s a long road ahead,” Katzner wrote, “but the momentum is real.”
The appearance before the EU committee caps off a strong start to 2026 for Stop Killing Games: In February the org announced that it’s launching NGOs in the EU and US “to do long-term counter lobbying” on the issue of game shutdowns, and in March it backed a lawsuit against Ubisoft, filed by France’s “leading consumer association,” over the shutdown of The Crew.
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