Game companies can make games that have already been purchased inoperable – now gamers are calling on the EU to help
The aim of the Stop Killing Games campaign is to oblige game companies to offer the option to keep games that are about to be removed alive. Finns have participated enthusiastically in the campaign.
Mattias Mattila
2.7. 20:36
The gaming community has become aware of a special problem in the online and digital jungle of video games: game companies can, if they wish, make games that players have already purchased inoperable.
One example of this (
https://yle.fi/a/74-20114635) happened last year, when the Ubisoft game company first pulled the car game The Crew (2014) from the market and eventually shut down the game servers.
The ten-year-old game was therefore first pulled from sale, and eventually even players who had purchased the game lost access to the game.
The car game was originally released in physical and digital copies, but it required a constant network connection to a game server maintained by Ubisoft in order to function.
The Crew is just one example of a problem plaguing the industry.
Gamer community wants a chance to keep games alive
Many gamers believe that the situation is unsustainable. Even if you buy a game, you don’t necessarily own it in full. The seller can take the game down.
Now gamers are calling on the EU to intervene.
Last year, a small community of gamers drafted a European Citizens’ Initiative (
https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/initiatives/details/2024/000007_fi) that aims to prevent publishers from arbitrarily taking video games offline. According to the initiative, the game company should first offer reasonable means for the gamer community to keep the game alive if they want to.
According to the initiative, the aim is not to acquire the rights to the games, and the publisher is not expected to provide resources for the video game after it has stopped offering the game.
Instead, the idea is that the publisher would have an obligation to leave the game in a working condition so that the gaming community could maintain the game in one way or another if they wanted to.
In the case of The Crew, this would have meant that Ubisoft, in the opinion of the initiators, should have either left the servers up or, for example, given players the opportunity to set up their own servers for the game.
The campaign invokes the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, which states, among other things:
"No one shall be deprived of their possessions except in the public interest, in the cases and under the conditions laid down by law, and in such a way that they are paid fair compensation for the loss of possessions within a reasonable time."
Article 17, paragraph 1, of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union
According to the initiators of the citizens' initiative, this is not currently the case with games. The initiative states that the practice of gaming companies deprives Europeans of their possessions.
– The aim of this initiative is to rectify the situation, the initiative states.
One month to collect names
The citizens' initiative has collected (
https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/initiatives/details/2024/000007_fi) just under 800,000 names in eleven months, i.e. by the beginning of July, when there should be a total of one million by the deadline, i.e. by the end of July, for the matter to be considered by the European Commission.
In Finland, 30,000 gamers or people concerned about developments in the gaming industry have already signed the citizens' initiative, which is relatively high compared to other countries.
The number of signatures has grown rapidly in recent days as the gaming community has woken up to campaign for the initiative. The initiative has been discussed on popular YouTube channels, such as Spedicey (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_5WIzkM0r8) and Accursed Farms (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3z4w_h2-UkM)).
There have also been some controversies on the subject, for example when American coder Jason Thor Hall, aka Pirate Software (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioqSvLqB46Y), who runs his own game company, did not swallow the idea of the campaign without chewing. In his opinion, the proposal could potentially be harmful to game developers and the entire gaming industry.
Ross Scott, the owner of the Accursed Farms channel, is the founder of the entire campaign. On his channel, the gaming community decided that it would try to get the #StopKillingGames hashtag to trend on social media on Wednesday.
The gaming industry is in transition
The Crew case is evidence that the video game industry is in transition.
Digitally sold copies of games have long been commonplace, but their problems have only recently begun to be discussed more.
As monthly fee services and various licensing mechanisms become more common, game ownership is becoming increasingly unclear.
It is likely that cases like The Crew will become more common and the discussion will become even more heated.
Story updated on July 3 at 9:29: Added information that Ross Scott of Accursed Farms is the founder of the campaign.