"You Should Decide When the Game Is Over". Stop Killing Games Demands Rights for Players After Anthem Shutdown
The closure of Anthem's servers in January 2026 has become a new symbol of the problem that the Stop Killing Games initiative is fighting for.
The idea is simple:
As a customer, you should have the right to decide when you finish your adventure with a game.
If a player has invested money in a product, they should have access to it, even if it is no longer profitable for the publisher.
Industry veteran Mark Darrah reported that Anthem originally had code for local servers that worked even before release. This would have allowed players to run their sessions without relying on EA's servers. The feature was abandoned, which SKG assesses as limiting the game's life cycle and user control.
According to the initiative, "what is trash to one person may be treasure to another." Even if a project has not met the expectations of a corporation, users should not lose access to it. Activists believe that publishers are obligated to provide the means for independently maintaining the game, rather than turning it into "useless data on a disk."
