You Should Own Your Games - WAN Show July 4, 2025

Quick Overview

The "Stop Killing Games" initiative successfully garnered over 1 million signatures, pushing the EU Commission to consider legislation that would compel developers to properly sunset games, ensuring their continued playability. Concurrently, Apple faced significant backlash for using its Wallet app to send unsolicited F1 movie promotions, directly violating its own App Store guidelines and exposing its corporate hypocrisy regarding user privacy.

Key Points: The "Stop Killing Games" petition surpassed 1 million signatures, prompting the EU Commission to consider legislation that would mandate proper game sunsetting, ensuring games remain playable after developer support ceases. An ideal game sunsetting plan involves handing over game maintenance to the community, as demonstrated by "Forged Alliance Forever," where players maintain servers and mods, allowing IP holders to continue profiting from game sales. EA announced the shutdown of "Anthem" servers on January 12, 2026, and its removal from EA Play by August 15, 2025, illustrating the problem the "Stop Killing Games" initiative aims to solve. Apple sent unsolicited push notifications via its Wallet app for a $10 F1 movie discount, directly violating its own App Store Guideline 4.5.4, which prohibits promotional notifications without explicit user opt-in. Apple's F1 promotion is criticized as hypocritical, as the company "is taking their very operating system and behaving no different from when Microsoft integrated one drive that bothers you to subscribe to it or put stupid Candy Crush in the stupid start menu." LED lighting technology has seen immense advancements, with modern lights being "ludicrously bright" and capable of running an "entire set off a single circuit," a significant improvement over older, expensive, and less efficient options like Kenoflow lights. Challenges to legislating game preservation include third-party licensing (e.g., music) and the possibility of developers circumventing laws by patching out multiplayer or other functionalities.