Are there really that many companies screwing over consumers? I’d appreciate if Stop Killing Games actually kept a running list of which companies and which games are anti-consumer.

Before Ross started this campaign, he'd been steadily creating a video series dedicated to cataloging games that are killed for the past 8 years, called Dead Game News. Here's a link to a playlist of the series, and you can see the titles of the games that have been killed in the title of the episodes. The Crew is certainly not alone, it was chosen to be a centerpiece of the campaign because it had so many people who owned it, having a fairly high profile shutdown, and being a super clear-cut example of a publisher actively disabling a game that clearly didn't need to be.

I’m also not sold on the idea that a ban is the only way to protect consumers.

Instead of banning it completely,

I want to point out that outright banning live service games has never been suggested or wanted in this campaign. The proposed solution is to make it a legal requirement to have an end-of-life plan for live service games that are not subscription based. This would effectively mean the publisher/developer would need to account for the need to make the game playable after they decide to end support from the beginning of development, and make choices that would make that possible (choosing software and licenses that won't conflict with an End-of-Life). Alternatively, they could either make it not require a central server at all, or make it subscription based.

While the game is supported, they would still be able to run it however they please, their profit model would not be banned, the only thing that changes is what happens when the game is no longer profitable enough to support.

I’m in favour of the Buddhist idea of impermanence. Everything is temporary and trying to make a game exist forever is as silly as trying to live forever.

There's nothing wrong with that, but many people have the philosophy of preserving our history, so as to learn from it, and for future generations to experience. I personally am very grateful that I can read the thoughts of someone who lived a thousand years before me in a book, thanks to fanatical archivists who preserved it. It's the closest any of us can come to experiencing a time machine, the very concept can fill one with awe. Nothing will last forever, but I and many others derive meaning and value from keeping history alive for future generations to learn from, to enjoy, to ponder. Us preserving things in our corner does not disturb someone else from living with impermanence, it is only there for those who wish to partake.

There’s a few listed here:

https://delistedgames.com/extinct-list/

But the problem is usually much larger where a game requires you to login to play even the single player component but is unable to do so with entire services going down, such as gamespy or others, more on that here:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DefunctOnlineVideoGames

The list grows ever larger and even some online game news publications have their own lists, small example below:

https://kotaku.com/dead-games-2023-delisted-servers-offline-1850083031

There’s quite a few others, but I do agree with the point that there should be an aggregate for all of these, that could be presented as a universal list that hopefully stops growing in the coming years.

There’s also the problem of “going digital”. Previously you’d have at least the physical disks/mediums of the game in your possession but with the ever growing digital only culture, the moment a game gets delisted and you can no longer download it, that is it. Cult classic or not.

P.S - Nintendo seems to have liked your Buddhist idea of impermanence and has done that to Super Mario 35, existed for a total of 6 months. Personally, I would’ve liked to at least try it seeing how it hasn’t been all that long ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_Bros._35