This week, Ars hosted a live discussion with Ross Scott about the Stop Killing Games movement and its ongoing efforts to ensure that games remain playable even after the original publisher shuts down the online servers undergirding them.

Scott talked with Ars Technica Senior Gaming Editor Kyle Orland, saying said he felt the situation around long-term game access was already "intolerable a decade and a half ago" and that he "kept hoping someone else would kick this off, [someone] more experienced or knowledgeable, but it felt like nothing was happening." Scott said he felt making the effort to organize a movement against the practice was like "[drawing] the short straw on this, essentially."

During the conversation, Scott noted how the standard practice of shutting down game access for any reason, at any time, with minimal notice, would seem ludicrous in other areas of life:

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Google began offering third-party app store downloads in the Play Store earlier this week, but US District Judge James Donato says the company isn't doing enough. After reviewing the process for accessing the first non-Google store, Donato ruled that Google has added unnecessary "anticompetitive friction," ordering the company to rectify the issues.

While Epic and Google are patching things up with a global partnership agreement, the two are still on opposite sides of the antitrust case in the US. Google lost the case in 2023, and the intervening years have been about determining how to implement remedies to address Google's anticompetitive behavior. One of the court's key elements is the requirement that Google include third-party app stores in the Play Store, giving users an easy way to get apps from non-Google sources. Aptoide Games became the first such app store recently.

However, Google worked hard to avoid this outcome, attempting to settle with Epic to keep third-party app stores out. When it was forced to admit the Aptoide store under the terms of the ruling, Google didn't exactly put up a banner welcoming third-party app stores. In fact, Judge Donato found in a Thursday hearing that Google's implementation was not good enough, according to The Verge.

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