The EU Commission officially passed on proposing any new laws concerning video game end-of-life protections as requested by the Stop Killing Games initiative. Even so, it seems they cannot really do anything to stop the movement due to its strong support in the EU Parliament, and it has itself outlined a few points that could cause trouble for publishers.
As announced by the EU Commission, the SKG movement requested it propose new regulations that would prevent publishers from cutting off support to video games once they reach their “end-of-life” stage, i.e., force them to patch their games to make them playable offline after servers are shut down.
However, “at this stage it cannot propose a legal obligation to keep video games playable after they stop being provided commercially,” the Commission said, chiefly due to “existing intellectual property laws “that give “rights holders,” meaning publishers, “exclusive rights over their creations.”
