In the past few months, a buzz has begun to swell within the wider gaming community, with more and more people starting to discuss the Stop Killing Games initiative. With hype spreading its way across Facebook, YouTube, Discord, and more, you’ve likely at least heard of it in passing already. Quite simply, the movement’s stated aim is to keep video games playable indefinitely, and ensure the preservation of these experiences for decades to come. But some people claim the legal action they’re seeking to take to achieve this has the potential to kill the so-called ‘live service games’ model, which would include live service horror games such as Dead by Daylight. So what is all the fuss about, and might some of our favourite games be on the chopping block if these legal demands are actually met?
What is Stop Killing Games?
Quite simply, Stop Killing Games is a movement within the gaming fandom to prevent publishers from rendering a paid-for product unusable as-and-when they feel like it. The movement, which has its own website, was started by YouTuber Ross Scott. Its biggest initiative is a petition (which has hundreds of thousands of signatures so far) to the EU, asking that they implement new regulations continent-wide to achieve the movement’s goals.
Often the champions of consumer rights, the EU has passed many quality of life laws that force American companies to either play ball with their regulations, or be prevented from doing business in most of Europe, one of the world’s wealthiest continents. While these laws don’t necessarily apply in non-EU countries, it’s usually easier for companies to just follow the same rules everywhere, rather than operate two different policies in various regions.
The controversy which brought this movement into mainstream discussion was Ubisoft’s treatment of their open world racing game The Crew. This was a driving game which allowed you to explore pretty much the entire United States, drive at top speeds across some of their famous interstate routes, and race against friends or AIs in numerous locations. The game featured the ability for both friends and strangers to enter your world and make the drive with you, or challenge you to a tense high speed showdown. Because of this functionality, the game was online-only. That means that if you didn’t have an internet connection, the game didn’t work – at all.
As the game was reaching ten years old, and Ubisoft had made two new Crew games since the original launched, the decision was taken to shut down the servers. Which, of course, rendered the game completely unplayable. Copies of the game on people’s Ubisoft launchers were even replaced with a message informing them that their game was now gone, and included a link to the store so that they could go and buy something else. To put it lightly, this was not received well by fans.
The whole shutdown was a rather confusing move, as the game was perfectly playable as a single player experience, with it even marketed as a single player game in addition to multiplayer and MMO. The multiplayer functionality was really more of a fun gimmick than a core element of play, and losing that wouldn’t necessarily destroy your The Crew experience.
Rather than destroying The Crew forever, and essentially confiscating people’s copy of the game itself, a much more consumer friendly approach would be to simply code an offline version of the game and push it as a final update. While this would cost some development resources, sure, this is a product people had paid for, and so it’s only right that they find a way to make sure people can still use the software that they own. And, honestly, the game being playable offline should have always been possible from day one – there’s no reason not for this to be the case, other than the online-only system serving as extremely heavy-handed DRM.
A more recently published example of an online-only game causing controversy would be the dungeon themed button-masher Diablo 4. This is a game which is, let’s be honest, a single player game. Sure, there is an online economy, and you can see ghosts of other players from time to time, but overwhelmingly, this is a single player experience, with perhaps scope for direct co-op with friends. This is not a game which needs online functionality to be able to enjoy by yourself. And yet, if the game’s servers happen to be down on a certain day, or your internet is laggy, you can kiss goodbye to playing, as the game is online only. While that game only released last year, we have to wonder what will happen when player numbers drop below the threshold of profitability, and they decide to just get rid of a full length single player game that people paid $60 for.
And this is what SKG is all about at the heart of it – preventing gaming companies from pulling the plug on online-only games people had paid good money for. In my opinion, there is little difference between Ubisoft’s handling of The Crew disaster, and the company sending an employee to my house to steal back my physical copy of Assassin’s Creed Origins. Or at least, them scratching up my disc to the point that it no longer works, simply because they decided that they don’t support that title anymore. The ideal goal of SKG is to force publishers into having (and budgeting for) an end-of-life plan for all their games, to ensure that they can still be enjoyed after official support ends.
This is an issue that affects more than just longstanding games, but even titles that have freshly released. Sony is still reeling from the monumental failure of their multi-hundred million dollar hero shooter Concord, a game which I saw precisely zero marketing for, and had never even heard of until it had already failed. And, rather than try desperately to salvage the smoking wreckage of that eight year long misfire, they cut their losses, refunded every copy, and called it a day.
It’s not the first time a game like that has crashed and burned. The PS4 version of Cyberpunk 2077 was famously refunded due to poor performance, in addition to the disastrous battle-royale The Culling 2 and the zombie MMO The Day Before. In these cases, refunds were issued, and the result was, at the very least, a huge financial disaster for the company involved.
Unlike with the case of The Crew, it isn’t fair to claim that these games were ‘stolen’ from consumers, as they were given their money back. But that just brings up a bigger question – how long does a game have to stay active before it can be stolen from the consumer without consequence? A week? A month? A year? Ten years? When I buy a video game, I want to believe that I can revisit this as a retro title for decades to come, and unless Ubisoft is going to start refunding every historical purchase of The Crew, those people who had their single player game taken away from them are not going to be made whole any time soon. When something is marketed as single player, then it fundamentally shouldn’t come with an expiration date, you’re buying for life.
Further still, a refund only considers the financial aspect of the consumer’s loss. It doesn’t change the fact that their product is gone. It raises the question of ‘just because this game was a complete disaster, does that give us the right to destroy it?’. I have absolutely zero interest in hero shooters – couldn’t care less. But let’s say I was one of the one hundred people in the world who actually did enjoy Concord – what then? Sure, I got my money back… but I wanted Concord.
This invokes the issue of game preservation and the destruction of art. Should a movie studio be able to track down and destroy every available copy of a movie that flopped? Should streaming services archive old shows so that they can never be legally watched anymore? If the few dedicated Concord-heads out there really want to download and use the game files for whatever purpose – be that running over LAN or private servers – shouldn’t they be allowed to? By all means, refund their purchase, but allow them to still download and boot up the files they originally paid for. No matter how bad it was, the files still represent eight years of work, and a game that was fun for a chosen few. And now it’s just gone. A refund is usually demanded by the customer for a product they no longer want. A store employee generally doesn’t snatch the disc out of your hands as you leave the store, and jam the $60 you put down back into yout pocket.
I like watching bad movies just as much as I enjoy some good ones. Just because their art was bad, and they don’t want to support it for more than two weeks, doesn’t mean that it should completely vanish forever, even if it would only live on as an obscure curiosity of what not to do. I think that even with a refund issued, the principal remains – can companies really just remove products you own from your possession just because they weren’t good?
As someone who routinely waits years after a game releases to buy it at the best prices, and someone who mostly enjoys and plays older games, I can’t help but have strong sympathy for the stated goal of SKG here, both for consumer protection and game preservation reasons. While I’m not that into racing games, I could easily see myself picking up what is an ostensibly single player game during a Steam sale, and not getting around to it for five or more years, only to finally boot it up and discover that what I paid for no longer exists.
By just quickly browsing my game library and thinking about my favourite titles generally, a large number of them are more than ten years old, nostalgic games I grew up playing. I have a PS2 hooked up to my TV right now, and it can still run Shrek 2 The Video Game just as well as it could when I was five. The thought that some of my favourite games, something like Persona 4 Golden could just… vanish one day, and be replaced with a splash screen saying “go and buy Persona 5 lmao” is deeply chilling.
What This Could Mean for Live Service Games
The concept of a live-service game isn’t the easiest to pin down, as it’s not exactly a genre, but more of a business model, and a delivery method for the product. Some LSGs come with a price tag to own the game (Such as Dead By Daylight), or they might be free to play, and monetised via microtransactions, like most Battle Royale games. These are games which aren’t simply developed, released, and moved on from – a finished product like a single player title might be. LSGs are usually kept regularly updated with new content, battle passes, seasons, maps, and purchasable skins, for better or for worse. This can include mostly single player or small group experiences, such as the aforementioned Diablo 4, and Rocksteady’s disastrous recent Suicide Squad video game. But, it can also include games with large player pools, like Rainbow 6: Siege or Counter Strike 2.
These are the kind of games that would allegedly be threatened should the EU pass a law saying that purchased software cannot be rendered useless at a later date when the company wants to wind down the service. Take Fortnite for example. While the game itself is free to play (ironically, apart from the perfectly single player Save the World mode which you need to buy), the game is packed with purchasable skins, songs for the in-game Guitar Hero clone, and other microtransactions that are yours to keep forever. As this is a game people have undoubtedly financially invested in to own non-consumable in-game items, the question then becomes ‘when Fortnite eventually gets to the point where it lacks the player base to support it, what will happen to all the items you bought?’. As Fortnite’s microtransactions make up for a worryingly large share of Epic Games’ profits, I have to assume that refunds are off the table.
The general concern is the law that this petition seeks to pass might essentially make any live service game a ticking time bomb of a financial nightmare for the developer. Any company who has released one would be forced to keep the servers live in perpetuity, long after any interest in the game has shrivelled away. It would cost them thousands of dollars every single day, just for the amusement of the approximately twenty determined people worldwide who still live for this particular game.
How This Could Impact Dead By Daylight
So, bringing this around to the topic at hand, how could live service horror games such as Dead by Daylight feel the sting of a ruling like this? If a motion was to pass ensuring that you could never wake up one day and find that DBD is just… gone – what kind of impact would that have on the game, and its development team?
Honestly, I don’t think there is too much to worry about here. All that is needed is for Behavior to have an end of life plan in place for the game. When you break it down, the lower the player numbers per match are in any given game, the smoother creating a post-support version becomes. For example, Fortnite is a game with 100 player lobbies. Sure, you can have a private, invite-only lobby, if you can sort out that many players (usually only possible with an organised event), but generally, keeping a service like that running is going to be a challenge without official server support. With DBD, you’re talking 5 player lobbies max (not counting the limited-time 2v8 mode), and those are numbers which are absolutely achievable.
While the game without any support could definitely start to look a little janky over time, there isn’t anything fundamentally stopping it from continuing to exist. But how do we know this? How can I say that with such confidence that even after they shut down the official servers, the community could remain alive, and even thrive. Well honestly? This isn’t the first time something like this has happened in the horror game space.
The Fall, Fall and Decay of Friday the 13th: The Game
Friday the 13th: The Game is (was?) an online multiplayer horror game based on the movie franchise of the same name. The gameplay is somewhat similar to Dead by Daylight on a superficial level – a team of survivors have to run around a map and achieve a specific set of tasks in order to unlock the ability to escape, while one single player takes on the role on a slasher villain who has to kill them all before they can pull it off. There were undoubtedly differences between the two, for example, F13 allows you to fight back with weapons to weaken the killer, and knock him to the ground for a time. It’s even possible to outright kill Jason, although doing so requires an extremely specific setup and tight coordination between survivors, making the chances of pulling this off vanishingly low. The game also includes proximity voice chat (which even the killer can hear) and much larger survivor groups than DBD. I’d be a #FakeFan of F13 if I said it was a Dead By Daylight clone, but I think it’s fair to say that they at least bear significant superficial similarities to one another.
F13 actually launched a year later than DBD did, in 2017, and yet, the servers have already been shut down for a good few years at the time of writing. The developers, Gun Media, couldn’t have picked a worse time to licence and release A Friday the 13th game. This release came right when the co-creators of the movies decided to start suing each other into the ground over the right to make sequels, which put the whole franchise on hold indefinitely. This had a heavy impact on the game, meaning that promised content never arrived, and certain skins were unable to be sold outside of their initial existence as crowdfunding rewards. With their ability to continue updating the game with new franchise elements suspended, (as no one was sure who had the rights to licence them the copyright to begin with), the company behind the game had no choice other than to abandon it.
Annoyingly, any attempt by fans to release a definitive edition with the lost content included (most notably, a Jason X skin and sci-fi map) have been thwarted by legal efforts, and so the game sits in a sad, sorry limbo.
So, the game must be dead right? An empty icon on your steam page, leading to a shutdown page? Well, no. I happened to play this game semi-regularly with a friend around the time of the server shutdown, and yeah, the impact was felt for sure, but this wasn’t the end for F13: The game.
The First Shutdown
Some time in the early 2020s, the official servers for the game were taken offline, and hand-on support for the game came to an end. Yet, it remained playable, and even for sale. This was thanks to community servers being accessible within the game – anyone who wanted to play a little F13 could simply host a lobby using their computer as a server, and allow randos to join them. While I never tried to host one of these myself, there was little change to the basic matchmaking system at first glance. You still click the “find game” button, and get loaded into a match with a group of drunken, edgy players, just as you did before. The only difference was that this server wasn’t hosted by Steam/Valve, or by Gun Media, but by fans and other players. Well, maybe that wasn’t the only difference…
If my memory serves me correctly, Easy Anti-cheat would still technically boot when you opened the game, but boy did that ring hollow. These are private servers, modded by the host, and so all kinds of shenanigans were possible. Expanded lobbies with twice as many camp counsellors (this game’s version of a survivor), multiple Jasons on the same map, it was disorganised chaos. The 2v8 gamemode in DBDwas admittedly fun, but it was also a limited time event, and I’m sure anyone who played it in its current form quickly realised why this could never be a serious game mode. It’s unbalanced, it’s ridiculous, and neither team can properly coordinate with so many extra people running around. F13 was like that, but in pretty much every lobby you joined; all kinds of mods, hacks, cheats, and emotes were injected right into the game, and I’ll be honest, queuing for a game during this time was absolutely obnoxious.
You had to hope and pray that when you clicked on find match, that you’d get paired with a host who actually wanted to play the game properly, and hadn’t selected a bunch of whacky settings that would slow down the match or make a farce of the basic gameplay loop. Leaving and hitting find match again would also just land you back in the exact same lobby due to the low active player count, so re-rolling the dice on your host was unlikely to help at all. Unless you liked the chaos – which was honestly fun for maybe a match or two – you were just out of luck, and would be hard pressed to find anyone taking the game seriously.
I remember having specific beef with one player simply named ‘The Radio’, who would run around the map blasting generic pop and EDM music through the proximity chat, making no attempt whatsoever to play properly or escape. He was quite simply only there to add an annoying ambiance to the gameplay experience. But still, I had some good times kiting him towards Jason or just attacking him myself with the axes, planks, and frying pans that survivors can find lying around the map.
Playing the game during this period was no walk in the park, sure, but it was playable, and if you were active enough on the Steam community tab or perhaps fan discords, it wouldn’t be impossible to assemble a lobby of people who wanted to play the baremetal game without ridiculous hacks.
The Return of Support
With the Friday the 13th lawsuit winding down to a messy and unsatisfying conclusion for all involved, and (fingers crossed) the constant appeals and counter-suing coming to an end, it was only fitting that official support make some kind of a comeback. While Gun Media were not necessarily free to continue development now the licence was sorted out (the guy who owns Jason is now different from the guy who owns Camp Crystal Lake as a setting, it’s a whole thing!), it was a sign of the times to see server support, bug fixes, and proper treatment of gameplay return.
They weren’t adding new content or anything like that, but at the very least, a functional anti-cheat returned to the game, and 20 survivor lobbies with multiple Jasons seemingly purged from the experience. While you technically cannot buy the game anymore, as their licence to the franchise is dead in the water, support for online play has been extended to the end of 2024. This was the state of the game when I last played it, and honestly, it still worked a treat. While this game might be janky as hell and have a wildly toxic community, there was something that made it special to fans that was just a different vibe to DBD, and for a time, at least during in late 2023 which was when I last played, you could log in and find a normal, hack free match with no issues.
The Second Shutdown
Information on what is happening with the game right now is somewhat conflicted and unclear. Official support is back… kinda? Some people on the Steam discussion page as of today at time of writing are discussing hacked lobbies and private matches as if they’ve made a return – and perhaps they have. Community discussion, as it often is, doesn’t follow one clear narrative, and it’s unclear if the company is providing ant support as of this very moment.
But forget whether the game is at its best, the real meat of the issue is whether the game will be playable at all in the future, or if even the private servers, along with everything else, will be killed off for good. For every article or post saying that any ability to play the game will be removed at the end of 2024, someone else implies that the thematically appropriate undeath the game is currently experiencing will continue long after any support has been withdrawn.
With that being said, the consensus from mainstream articles on the topic seem to believe that Gun Media have promised to keep the game running until the end of 2024, but that’s when full backend support shuts down, and in theory, the game is fully dead. With the dev team too afraid of the lawsuit (and probably, too lazy) to fully institute the community server option without their hands-off backend support for it, it seems as if this game may be heading for the same dustbin that Stop Killing Games is looking to plunder for its many discarded treasures. The only hope now is fan modders and genuine community support divorced from the official dev team. Simply loading into the game and clicking find match may no longer place you in a privately hosted lobby full of edgelords and roleplayers, but there is nothing to stop fans from releasing an online patch to fully implement P2P lobbies and matchmaking, dragging Jason out of the grave for more action for the millionth time. For a franchise that has multiple movies with titles like “The Final Chapter,” “The Final Friday”, and “The Last One We’re Making, We Totes Promise, For Real This Time”, the constant resurrection of this poor game is weirdly appropriate.
If this full shutdown notion is really going to happen, it’s sad to see a developer not willing to do bare minimum of quickly coding in the ability for people to make entirely independent private servers that don’t rely on their back end in some way. Especially as they’ve previously released updates to this game after their licence expired; technical, bug-related fixes which were not related to trademarked franchise concepts. Still, the limited offline, single player features the game did have are sure to continue to function even without any online support, which is more than can be said for The Crew. And, as long as the developers don’t pull the dick move of using takedowns like they did against the definitive edition fan projects, then perhaps fan-modded backends for server support could be added to the game manually. And, since Gun Media no longer have any financial interest in this game whatsoever, we can only hope they back off of people trying to restore this project to its former glory going forward.
In any case, what didn’t happen when they shut down this game’s servers the first time, was that people didn’t wake up one morning with the game removed from their Steam library with a message to go and buy something else. The game still exists, you still own it, and I believe you can even still download it as long as you already owned a copy. Even if the technical backend for online play to function is removed, you can still access the files of the game you own and do whatever you like with them on the comfort of your own desktop, and in comparison, that’s a consumer rights win.
I think the hacked lobby limbo, as frustrating as it was, was the template for what a ‘good’ game shutdown could look like. Give the power to the players to make their own lobbies, and do your best to integrate that as simply as possible into your existing product to make uninterrupted play as simple as possible. There are still private servers running shooters from the 90s and ancient, dead MMOs today. If that kind of functionality could be baked into the game itself, that makes for a best practice solution for any game whose company doesn’t want to (or can’t) sell it anymore. While being sandwiched between two angry Jasons and ‘The Radio’ wasn’t exactly my idea of a well balanced video game, I’d still take that over a really, genuinely fun game being destroyed forever, for everyone. Perhaps that solution as it exists now won’t last forever, but that magical period of time is still what I want to hold up and say ‘look, instead of making your game unplayable, this is what you could do instead!’.
A Post-Shutdown Dead by Daylight
Right now, Dead by Daylight is thriving. With player counts regularly in the tens of thousands, and regular, awesome, high budget DLCs coming out on a frequent basis, it’s fair to say this now eight year old game isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. But, especially in the online-only gaming world, all good things must eventually come to an end. When this happens, it is important that both the core game, any purchased DLC, and any microtransaction items purchased by a player can still be used after the game has been closed.
Having the core gamemode still function, as we’ve seen, is entirely possible with a minimal patch job by the developers, but it’s not without its own challenges.
Matchmaking
As discussed in the previous segment, matchmaking would initially be one of the easiest things to make work, by simply allowing people in-game to host their own servers. Unlike F13, you can play a match of Dead By Daylight with only five players, which really isn’t that many. This is a popular game, and just checking my own personal Steam account, I have a lot more than five friends on there who own a copy. Look, maybe if you’re solo queueing, you may end up at the mercy of a crazy, backwards, hacked lobby filled with 3 killers and flying Dwights. But, with the existence of dedicated fan communities that even the most obscure dead games have managed to build around them, I don’t think that it would be an insurmountable task to find four other people somewhere online who genuinely want to play a few matches without too much funny business. It would be my dearest hope that the end of life update Behaviour releases in this scenario would make hosting these servers yourself as simple a process as possible, allowing play to continue decades after they stop selling the game.
The game already has AI survivors. They’re not particularly good at the game, I’ll grant you – but they’re there. Given that games have had genuinely challenging ‘hard mode’ AI players since at least the 90s or before, I really don’t think it would be too hard to design some AIs of varying difficulties. Ones that are actually good at the game. The devs have endless amounts of data from people of all skill levels, thousands of hours of streams on Twitch from the most experienced to most newbie players at their disposal. In a world where generative AI is becoming more and more commonplace, surely feeding the controller inputs of tens of thousands of matches at various skill levels into a proprietary AI could create enough high quality data for a fully offline, single player mode in the game?
Sure, that sounds expensive to do, very much so for an end of life plan. But there’s honestly no reason why they can’t do that right now, while the game is still thriving. An offline ‘vs bots’ mode would be a fantastic way to practise, have fun when your internet connection is slow or missing, and even trophy hunt on Steam if they deem the game mode to be balanced enough for that to be enabled. I’m all for adding this feature today, as there isn’t really a downside to more options for fun being in your game. And, if that addition happens to expand the functionality of the game post-shutdown, that’s just icing on the cake.
Anti-cheat
The biggest problem faced by a post-shutdown DBDwould likely be the anti-cheat. I can’t really see Behaviour continuing to pay for an Easy Anti Cheat licence for a game they no longer sell or support, so really, any anti-cheat implantation would be on the honour system. And yes, that’s as terrifying a prospect as it sounds. With the servers being in the hands of private users, it’s really up to the host to ban people who are very clearly not playing fair. but if the host is the one cheating, or implementing crazy, one-sided hacked game modes, you may be plum out of luck. This is why playing with existing friends, or finding fan communities of people who genuinely want to play the game properly would become an important component of enjoying the game.
On the other hand, this does open up the possibility for all kinds of good faith fan modding that the anti-cheat would ban you for today – including rebalances of certain characters or perks, new or changed game modes, or even additional killers and skins. As long as the server host has the right mods installed, the sky is the limit, allowing for much greater creativity in the game without your account being at risk.
The lack of anti-cheat is a real double edged sword, and realistically, people joining a random solo queued match are unlikely to come out of this one unscathed.
Security Concerns
The ethical hacking community is a group of people who test the security of various computer systems, then report any potential exploits they find to the owner, rather than exploiting them for criminal ends. Whether they’re a dedicated hobbyist or a highly paid professional, these friendly website warriors are probably the reason why you’ve made it this far without getting hacked via your favourite Steam games, and the web would be a worse place without them.
To this day, games like Left 4 Dead 2, an action/horror game which released all the way back in 2009, still receive regular updates through the Steamclient. These are usually only a few kilobytes or even just bytes large, with patch notes saying things such as “Fixed two exploits that could remotely crash servers.”. The fact is, old games use outdated technology to facilitate online play, and if the code of the game isn’t updated to accommodate for the latest advances in online security, you can open yourself up to various backdoors and exploits, ranging from the irritating and impish, all the way to life-ruination level malicious.
Hosting a server on your computer is essentially allowing a few internet strangers direct access to your PC, with the ability to send information back and forth to it. Even if you’ve taken the time to put your own security in place, if the game isn’t updated with the kind of exploit fixes that Valve continues to add to L4D2, the possibility that the game could age out of being safe to play is a real risk.
There are definitely ways to offset this – Minecraft is the best example of a multiplayer game that has historically functioned via external, third party server hosting, and there are a ton of companies and services that allow you to host your own server for even old versions of that game, completely independent of Mojang, and more importantly, independent of your personal system. While I believe that the most significant risk would be on those hosting the games (who are more likely to be tech-inclined and therefore prepared), the possibility of getting that connection reversed to attack your system as a joining player still exists.
The workaround for this would simply be a case of finding trusted third party hosting platforms for matches, using your own common sense for what you would and wouldn’t trust, and taking your own technical precautions. Many, many dead online games have fan-run private servers that are routinely operated in a non-malicious way, and provide hours of nostalgic fun to people who would otherwise not get that chance. This is clearly something that’s possible to do right, and still keeps thousands of people entertained every day, encompassing everything from Quake to Club Penguin. Still security tech is at the very least something which needs to be factored into end of life plans.
New Content
Yeah, this one is a bit of a non-starter. In this scenario, the game is dead, and no more development from the company would be taking place. That means no new killers or survivors, no seasonal events, or community goals, and no battle pass/tomes.
DBDis a game which has, in live service fashion, constantly evolved since release, with map reworks, new content and characters, gameplay mechanics, and upgrades. Computers which used to be able to run the game are no longer able to as the technology and code gets more complex and the file size increases. With an end-of-life patch, this would essentially stop, the game frozen in time, an image of what it was like the day the game was shuttered.
I would, at minimum, hope that they don’t end it during a specific event, so random pumpkins aren’t spawning for the rest of eternity, but rather get the game into a good ‘default’ position before pressing the off switch. If they’re feeling generous, which they really should be, as new DLC purchases could hardly happen going forward, they’d grant everyone who owns the game access to all in-game characters and other content, except licensed characters which obviously have revenue split agreements that must be honoured. At the very least, sell all DLC for dirt cheap, like they did right before they lost Stranger Things for the first time. They would also ideally give out unlimited items/max out the bloodweb for everyone, just so people can experience the ultimate version of the game they paid for from now until forever.
And, as discussed in a previous section, the death of anti-cheat and company oversight opens the game up for all kinds of modding and original fan content. So as long as the core community is still there, there is no reason that new fanmade killers and custom perks couldn’t continue to spice up the game for years to come.
Conclusion
Overall, there is no reason why Stop Killing Games should spell doom for the live service game industry. All it means is that companies must have an end-of-life plan in place to ensure these games are still playable in some capacity once server support is removed. Dead by Daylight is the gold standard for online-only horror games, but many other franchises such as Friday the 13th, Texas Chainsaw, Evil Dead, and Blair Witch have followed in their footsteps with online, multiplayer offerings.
When it looks like live service titles are here to stay in the horror genre, it’s worth making sure that these games can continue to release and thrive, but also, that we can continue to enjoy them forever, offline or not, without them being confiscated in ten years time. So raise a glass, crack open a Mountain Dew, and log onto your favourite online horror game for a few matches – here’s to many great years of gaming to come; cheers.
