The gamers taking on the industry to stop it switching off games

ShareSaveAdd as preferred on GoogleLaura CressTechnology reporterUbisoftThe Crew was released by Ubisoft in 2014, and discontinued in 2024Can a company take away something you've already paid for? In the world of online video games, some already do. Publishers can decide to switch off a game's servers, often leaving it effectively unplayable. Stop Killing Games, a growing consumer rights campaign started by American YouTuber Ross Scott in 2024, is challenging that practice. In January, the group submitted a petition featuring nearly 1.3 million signatures to the European Commission, triggering a public hearing in the European Parliament in April. What began as an online campaign is now awaiting a decision from one of the EU's most powerful institutions. Scott's campaign began following an announcement from the major studio Ubisoft, saying it would shut down the online-only racing game The Crew in 2024. The French company said it was taking the game, which attracted more than 12 million players during its lifetime, offline, citing "upcoming server infrastructure and licensing constraints". For players such as Chemicalflood, who told me he had been playing The Crew for nearly a decade, the move - which left the game unplayable - felt personal. "I was around 18 at the time of the launch - it was a big part of my adult life growing up," he said. "It was a great escape from hardship at the time, so it has always been something special to me." Over the years, he said, the game became something he shared with his children, who enjoyed exploring its virtual recreation of the United States. "The shutdown itself wasn't upsetting," he explained. "But how they handled it was the kick in the teeth." For Chemicalflood and many fans like him, the issue was not that Ubisoft ended support. It was that players lost access altogether. The announcement from Ubisoft caught the attention of Scott, also known online as Accursed Farms, who had already been creating content around the issue of ownership around games for several years. "I just hate seeing creative works effectively destroyed," he told me. He quickly decided to start a campaign, naming it Stop Killing Games - the killing referring to when "every copy of that game that's ever been sold has been disabled, and no one on the planet can run it". Whammy4, a gamer who founded the fan community The Crew Unlimited and helped lead efforts to preserve the game after its shutdown, likened it to "someone just breaking into your home and stealing your bike or your car". "You buy a physical copy of a game, you bring it home and install the game, you play it for some amount of time. Then all of a sudden the publisher completely destroys all copies of the game worldwide, including yours." "No refunds, no actual heads-up at the time of purchase, and nothing you can do to keep it at all," he said. Ubisoft has already defended its position in court. Responding to a proposed class-action lawsuit brought by two The Crew players in California, the studio argued that customers had purchased a licence to use the game, not unlimited ownership rights, and that players had been warned online services would not be available forever. The lawsuit was dismissed without prejudice in June 2025, after the plaintiffs voluntarily withdrew the case. The wider games industry has also pushed back against the campaign. Video Games Europe, which represents many of the industry's largest publishers, said shutting down online services "must be an option" when games are no longer commercially viable. It also warned that some of the campaign's proposals could make online-only games significantly more expensive to develop. "In no way are we asking companies to keep servers running or services going, they can end it any time they want," said Scott. Instead, he and his fellow campaigners argue that when a game is shut down it should be done "responsibly", with publishers considering "end-of-life plans" such as updating the game to work offline or releasing software that allows players to continue running it. While The Crew may have lit the touchpaper for Stop Killing Games' launch, there have been many games before and since which have suddenly been shut down. The issue has become more prominent as online-dependent "live-service" games have grown across the industry. In May, Sony announced plans to discontinue support for the multiplayer title Destruction AllStars. Meanwhile, Sony's live-service shooter Concord was taken offline less than two weeks after launch in 2024 after struggling to attract players, although customers were offered full refunds. Joost van Dreunen, a professor of games business at NYU Stern, argues that unlike books, films or music, many games are built around communities and online interaction. "Games, especially live-service games, are more like digital communities and much less so consumable experiences," he said. But sustaining those communities has become incr

The gamers taking on the industry to stop it switching off games

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