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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Nicole Carpenter

‘They kill games, we fight back’: the activists campaigning to keep video games playable

A masked figure in red armor fires an ornate rifle with a muzzle flash in a fantasy setting
Highguard, a multiplayer shooting game that was taken offline in March. Photograph: Wildlight Entertainment, Inc.

You can never be sure how long an online video game will last. Developer BioWare shut off sci-fi shooter Anthem’s servers in January, after seven years. Electronic Arts discontinued access to The Sims Mobile the same month. Wildlight Entertainment shuttered its Highguard servers in March, mere months after the game’s release. Activision Blizzard took Call of Duty: Warzone Mobile offline in April. Dozens more games have had their servers shut down in the first six months of 2026, adding to an already long list of video games that are no longer playable.

There is little that players can do when a company decides to stop supporting online play. Communities work hard to keep their favourite games online, sometimes keeping dead games running on private servers, though that may not necessarily be entirely legal. Generally, though, when a game goes offline it is dead and it’s not coming back.

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