At one point in my career I was working on a chemical process developed in the 1920's and bought the original antique book from a hundred years ago in which that chemical process was first described. My ability to do so didn't require the publishing company from a hundred years to still be around. Once a book is printed, under proper care it can last centuries; and if a sufficient number of copies have been printed at the time, availability of that book a hundred years later is still very possible. To some extent the same is true about movies, where old rolls of films are still being found and restored. Books and movies are then also often digitized, to preserve them even longer. I can see the interest in treating games a media, and preserving them in a similar fashion. But one has to admit that there are some fundamental differences.

Games very frequently have a very strong link to the hardware for which they were published. If I feel nostalgic for the Amiga games of my youth, a fundamental problem would be getting hold of a still working Amiga computer. There are emulators, which are a bit similar to the digitization of films and books in preserving games for a longer time. But it all gets a bit trickier when we talk about modern live service games, which require connecting to an online server to run. I don't think many game companies would shut down such servers as long as the revenue stream from people still playing exceeds the cost of running the servers. But any law requiring them to run the servers for longer would create a liability for the game companies. In the extreme case it is theoretically possible that the Stop Killing Games initiative would actually kill games, before they are even released, because game companies wouldn't want to take the risk of running servers at a loss for years to come. If the regulation doesn't require servers to keep running, but requires code to be made open source in order to enable private servers, that would also be a liability for game companies, because they might have wanted to keep that code proprietary for their next game. I do believe that meaningful regulation on the issue is possible, but my confidence in the European Union working out a sensible regulation is limited, as they have a strong history of over-regulation.

While it would certainly be possible to have a meaningful debate about the merits, advantages and disadvantages of the Stop Killing Games initiative, the sad news is that reality just showed that we can't have meaningful debates on the internet anymore. Instead of debating, people were just shouting at each other, insulting each other, threatening and harassing each other, and telling lies about each other. And a bunch of people pretty obviously just jumped on the bandwagon for one side or the other not because they believed in the importance of the issue being "discussed", but because a flame war drives clicks, which drive revenue. Social media with ad revenue have turned the internet into a much bigger version of the Jerry Springer Show, in which fake controversy is presented for commercial purposes.