"We were only three votes away": Stop Killing Games-backed California bill to keep online games playable fails to win over senate committee

The Protect Our Games Act has hit a snag

A Californian bill aiming to force publishers shutting down servers for online games to provide a version of the game players can keep on playing independently of said servers or issue full refunds has failed to pass a committee vote in the state's senate. That means the bill's march through the legislature, which has been backed by the wider Stop Killing Games campaign, has come to a relative standstill for now.

As noted by the campaigners in their latest update posted to Reddit, the bill - dubbed AB 1921 or the Protect Our Games Act - failed to pass a vote by the Californian senate's Business, Professions and Economic Development committee yesterday, June 29th. Of the 11 politicians voting at the hearing, four voted in favour of the bill advancing, three against, and a further four abstained. That wasn't enough to secure the bill the majority it needed.

As a result, the bill looks to have been stopped in its tracks for now. However, the committee's latest motion does note that reconsideration was granted following the failure to pass, suggesting it will get a second chance to pass this vote at some juncture.

Following this setback, the Stop Killing Games campaigners have reflected that even getting the bill to this point without hitting a snag like this has been an achievement beyond what they'd anticipated. "This was our first attempt, in our first year, in the United States, with a U.S. budget of zero dollars," they wrote. "No paid staff in California. No war chest. No in-person lobbying operation. The timeline was so compressed that we could not get funding in place fast enough to put people in the building. We ran this on volunteers, emails, phone calls, and the truth. And we still pushed a consumer rights bill through the entire state assembly, 43 to 16, and into a senate committee vote. We were only three votes away from this becoming law."

Thus, ruing the success that the Entertainment Software Association (ESA)'s in-person efforts to argue against the bill have had, the Stop Killing Games lot have declared that for the next session, they'll "come back with an in-person lobbying presence, the funding to do this properly, and a long list of organizations and developers signed on in support". The group also noted they intend to introduce versions of the bill in other states' legislatures and "are seriously looking at the federal level".

Beyond their game-specific efforts, Stop Killing Games have also just launched a sister campaign to push against the likes of the UK's recently unveiled plan to ban under 16s from social media by introducing age verification from early 2027. The campaign's called Stop Killing the Internet and has been formed in partnership with existing campaign groups such as Big Brother Watch and Index on Censorship.