Video game industry majors Nintendo, Sony, and EA dropped financial support for the passage of Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), as an increasing number of the bill's proponents are feeling the sting of bad PR as a result of their endorsement of the bill. Last month we've seen domain registrar GoDaddy suffer a mass exodus of tens of thousands of domains to its competitors due to its initial endorsement of SOPA, which it later withdrew seeing the public outcry that has some real implications on its business.

This latest withdrawal from Nintendo, Sony, and EA appears to be similar, a knee-jerk response to the bad PR each of SOPA's endorsers are getting. The updated list of the bill's endorsements (read: here) shows the three companies to be missing from it (they were earlier listed). SOPA has been widely criticized as being overkill, too wide-ranged, and too vaguely written to tackle online piracy. Critics say it is peppered with loopholes that make censorship by corporations and governments easy. Think of it as using a tactical nuclear strike to take down a pillbox. Sure, the pillbox will be obliterated, but you end up destroying everything unrelated to it in a very wide area surrounding it.