Brazil's Stop Killing Games bill puts Brasília on a collision course with the platform lobby

On the morning of 10 July 2026, Congresswoman Jandira Feghali filed Bill 3612/2026 in Brasília's Câmara dos Deputados, a measure that would force video-game publishers to keep multiplayer and online-only titles playable once commercial sales end. The text, inspired by the transnational Stop Killing Games movement, treats the practice of shuttering servers — and effectively bricking copies customers have already paid for — as a consumer-protection failure rather than a routine business decision. Brazil is now the first major Latin American legislature to put the question on the docket in formal statutory language.

Feghali's bill lands in a chamber that has spent the better part of two years rebuilding a working coalition under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and it lands in a global industry that has so far treated shutdowns as a cost-of-doing-business item. The text proposes obligations on publishers operating in the Brazilian market: prior notice of at least six months before a game is delisted or its servers switched off; preservation of functional access for any title already sold to a Brazilian consumer; and, where preservation is technically infeasible, mandatory release of the server software so that community-run or sanctioned third parties can keep the title alive. Penalties, according to the bill summary circulated this week, would scale with revenue and could include suspension from operating in the country.

The political economy is straightforward and worth saying out loud. Brazil is one of the five largest gaming markets on earth, with an installed base that consoles, PC storefronts and mobile publishers cannot afford to ignore. A statutory floor in Brasília now means that any multinational weighing a sunset decision has to run the numbers twice: once for the legal exposure in Brazil, and once for the precedent it sets everywhere else a sympathetic lawmaker is watching. That second column is the one that worries the platform lobby more than the first.

A consumer-rights frame, not a piracy frame

Feghali, a medical doctor by training and a long-standing voice on the left of the Workers' Party (PT) bench, has framed the bill in the language of consumer protection rather than intellectual-property reform. That distinction matters. Industry pushback in similar jurisdictions — France, the United Kingdom, the European Union — has historically leaned on a copyright-and-trade-secrets defence: server code is proprietary, releasing it under duress sets a dangerous precedent, and forcing a company to operate infrastructure it has chosen to retire is a form of compulsory licensing.

The Brazilian text pushes back on each of those points. Prior notice and continued access, the argument runs, do not force a publisher to reveal its code; they simply prevent a company from converting a paid licence into a worthless artefact on a date of its own choosing. The release-or-release-the-code clause is the lever, and it is the clause that industry lawyers will scrutinise first. Feghali's office has signalled willingness to negotiate the technical-preservation threshold, but not the principle that a sale, once concluded, ought to mean something durable.

Why Brasília, and why now

The Stop Killing Games movement has spent three years converting a niche grievance — the death of favourite online games, sometimes years after the marketing budget dried up — into a recognisable policy ask in multiple parliaments. Brazil's entry into that conversation is not accidental. The Câmara dos Deputados has been a friendly venue for digital-rights legislation since the Marco Civil da Internet era, and Brazilian civil-society groups working on consumer law in the digital economy have built the institutional muscle to draft technically credible text. Bill 3612/2026 reads as the work of people who know what they are asking for.

There is also a regional logic. A Brazilian statute creates a template that Argentina, Chile and Colombia can borrow with relatively modest redrafting, and Mercosur's consumer-protection harmonisation track gives Brasília a venue to push the standard upward rather than wait for it to be set in Brussels or Washington. For a country that has spent the past decade insisting that digital governance cannot be outsourced to the platforms' home jurisdictions, this is exactly the kind of file the Lula government is happy to claim.

The lobby counter

Expect the counter-mobilisation to be visible fast. Brazilian industry body ABRAGAMES and the international publishers' local representatives will argue that the bill chills investment, that server costs are ongoing and not always recoverable, and that mandatory code release exposes studios to security and cheating risks. None of these arguments is frivolous. The honest version of the counter-case is that some shutdowns reflect genuine commercial failure — a game that did not find an audience and that no operator, including the publisher, can afford to keep the lights on for.

The honest version of the pro-bill case is that the industry's preferred answer to that problem — silence, then a quiet kill-switch — has been tried for a decade and has produced a backlash large enough to generate legislation on three continents. Bill 3612/2026's bet is that the right policy mix is not a ban on shutdowns but a duty to give the community a chance to absorb the game before it disappears. Whether the chamber's committee stage narrows that duty into something publishers can live with, or widens it into something they cannot, will determine whether the law, if it passes, is a model or a cautionary tale.

What the public record still does not show is how the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Communications intend to position themselves, or which of the centre and centre-right parties will be willing to attach their names to the report. Those questions will be answered in committee, not in the press. Until then, the bill's principal effect is to force the conversation onto the agenda of every Brazilian studio and every multinational publisher selling into the country — which is, for the moment, exactly what the Stop Killing Games movement asked Brasília to do.