The Gamer-Rights Group Fighting to Make the Industry Stop Killing Games (Servers) (bbc.co.uk) 52
"Can a company take away something you've already paid for?" asks the BBC. "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... 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.
Two key points from the article:
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... 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.
Two key points from the article:
- "In March, French consumer group UFC-Que Choisir launched legal action against Ubisoft over the shutdown of The Crew, arguing that players were misled about the permanence of their purchase and that some of the company's contract terms were unfair."
- "The European Commission must respond to the European Citizens' Initiative — the petition brought by the group — by 27 July."
Thanks to Alain Williams — Slashdot reader #2,972 — for sharing the article.
Good. (Score:4, Insightful)
I hope this succeeds in compelling game-makers to adopt "life after end-of-life" measures for their products as, once this precedent is set, we can do the same for hardware makers.
Re: Good. (Score:1)
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Gamers have no rights, instead they have things they accepted terms of service for.
Gamers are consumers. Consumers have rights (in most countries, I know this concept may be foreign to Americans, pun intended). Consumer rights can't be signed away through ToS agreements.
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Sure. If you assume the law is written exactly the way you think it is written then that's what will happen. I mean it's not a completely unlikely scenario, but it also ignores the many laws that exist across the world which have created meaningful change for consumers.
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Re:Good. (Score:5, Insightful)
How about we stop sellers from using a "BUY" button if we're not really buying or owning everything.
Require it to be replaced with a "LICENSE" button which leads to a window completely describing IN PLAIN ENGLISH what it means.
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Also the licence must include an earliest end date, before which the servers cannot be shut off without triggering a full refund.
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Or "RENT", explicitly stating that you are renting access to the game for a fixed period of time.
After all, "a licence to use the game" is being violated if you can't use the game any more due to it requiring access to a server that no longer exists.
If a game is no longer commercially viable then they should be required to release the server components and/or the source code, allowing anyone to create their own server. Since by their own admission it's not commercially viable they wouldn't lose anything by
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Yeah, dramatically curbing them banking on the concept of people feeling like they bought it and forcing them to show that you're just licensing it for a period of time, forcing them to just be more open and honest about what they are trying to offer.
License, and how long that license will be valid for at a minimum, that would be awesome.
Let capitalism do what it does. That would help it.
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Open source it then (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why I do not rent software, nor do I buy software that is server dependant.
FileMaker Pro 7 still runs fine on the machine I bought it for, it also runs fine in an emulator. It just works, it does exactly the same things it did when I bought it. It is not worn out, broken, or what ever. So I just keep using it
And you can keep you AI wank out of my computers too.
Re:Open source it then (Score:4, Informative)
There are a few problems with "just open source it" though. For instance, they could rely on other licensed software that they paid for, and you can't necessarily just transition that to being open source. For example, EA open-sourced Command and Conquer Generals ( https://github.com/electronica... [github.com] ), but you can't really compile it without also obtaining other licensed software such as GameSpy.
Re:Open source it then (Score:5, Informative)
The main aim of Stop Killing Games is to ensure the practice of rug-pulling eventually comes to an end. They are not trying to save MMOs, for example.
Moreover they don't demand that every game currently on the market comply with open-sourcing requirements: at a minimum, companies always have the option of simply providing customers with adequate notice before shutdown. Open-sourcing the server would be nice, but it's hardly the only way to protect consumers' interests. Scott has, for example, suggested game boxes being marked with an estimated expiry date for online service functionality.
But most importantly: because this is about future games, not the present, the market has time to change. If studios and publishers are designing their games with a fair EOL in mind, then they can make decisions from the get-go to avoid licensing dependencies that they won't be able to release in a possible 'afterlife' version of the game. As suggested by your example of GameSpy in C&C: Generals, when a commercial dependency is crucial to a game's success, it tends to be a client-side library, but typically the problematic dependencies aren't crucial; they're e.g. add-ons for Unity or Unreal that the studio bought to save time. In a world with SKG laws, the providers of these dependencies aren't going to be a stagnant target either—demand for compliant libraries will motivate development of open-source versions.
Interestingly, the will for doing this does exist among game developers; they just need the institutional support from legislation to twist the arms of the studios and publishers. Ross Scott has talked to a lot of devs who are burnt out from having their projects cancelled, leaving them with huge gaping holes in their resumes and portfolios where they've spent years on unreleased projects that are stuck under NDA. In general they tend to see SKG as a path to ensuring the games that do see the light of day aren't also scrapped, which would erode their work histories even further. (Apparently it also just plain feels bad to have your work erased from history. Shocking, I know.)
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Indeed, game studios know about licencing issues and these days often add a "streaming friendly" mode which replaces any licensed music and visuals so that streamers don't get copyright claims.
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They sold you a piece of software, err, sorry, a license to use a piece of software, and then it turns out they didn't have the legal right to sell you that license because it conflicts with other contracts they signed? That doesn't justify their actions. It makes them even worse by adding fraud on top of everything else.
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If the code is open, then third party dependencies can be replaced or removed. A lot of games have been successfully open sourced and continue to be played to this day - eg quake/doom etc.
Also there's far less likely to be such dependencies in server side code, so long as the game has the ability to connect to an arbitrary server instead of having a fixed address hard coded.
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If you do not want to run the servers, open source it.
Congrats, we now have a bunch of code which doesn't work and a client which can't connect. No there's more involved, and game companies often cite this as a pathetic excuse when questioned on why they don't open source it.
What we need is rules up front that games with netcode get designed with the ability to connect to custom servers, and matchmake to individuals in Steam.
Literally just the other day some friends were suggesting we play UT2004. I was behind CGNAT at the time, so I told someone else to host
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What about the people who it's not too hard for?
Games are really fun when you have no one to play them with. /s
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"therefore, no video games exist because nobody has ever been motivated to get them working in a way that is accessible to people who can't make them themselves."
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You misunderstood. Yeah plenty of games effectively don't exist because people don't just lack the motivation but also the skill to get them working.
That's the whole point of my anecdote: We never ended up playing UT 2004, and I wasn't going to play it by myself, so the complication effectively meant the gamew was dead to me.
Multiplayer games rely on the fact that many people can get something working.
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I was behind CGNAT at the time, so I told someone else to host the server
There are some countries where ALL users are behind CGNAT, and the lack of IPv6 support in games is a serious problem.
Here it's easy to get gigabit fibre with low latency between users, but all legacy traffic goes through CGNAT. It's perfect for playing games between friends, but only possible with IPv6.
Quake3 got patched with IPv6 support many years ago however:
https://ioquake3.org/ioquake3/... [ioquake3.org]
Having routers which block inbound traffic by default is also a problem. People are hung up on a 20 year old threa
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What we need is rules up front that games with netcode get designed with the ability to connect to custom servers, and matchmake to individuals in Steam.
For all the positive, pro-consumer elements of Steam, unless Steam builds some sort of generic network abstraction layer into the Steam client, I don't think that swapping out "a dependence on Gamespy" for "a dependence on Steam" is really the answer here...
Literally just the other day some friends were suggesting we play UT2004. I was behind CGNAT at the time, so I told someone else to host the server and reminded them they need to open a port on their router first. - Everyone gave up.
Back in 2004, *everyone* had to port forward in order to host a game server. That's the alternative to "let EA host it until they don't feel like it anymore". The point is to give the control back to gamers, but responsibility comes with that - specifica
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The problem with that, from Ubisoft's perspective, is that every moment you spend playing an "old" game is a moment not spent playing Ubisoft's latest game. They would probably argue that's stealing since they seem to feel entitled to customers continuously spending money on their new products. I guess I've "stolen" a lot from Ubisoft since I refuse to buy their products.
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Got to have the latest clothes, watch, phone, shoes, car, etc etc etc as a fashion item
iPhone 11, and I don't see any need to change it, it does everything I need and and lot more I don't.
My world view is fix it if you can, get it fixed by someone if you can't, give it to someone else for parts, recycle it.
But then again I am mid 60's and believe in climate change.
Re: Open source it then (Score:2)
I was just forced to get a new phone recently because my six year old phone stopped booting.
I think it's the SSD storage. It booted up once after letting it sit over night but pretty much froze and restarted.
Just make sure you have proper backup, so you don't lose data.
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Everything is "shared" via iCloud or buy home server.
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A game server does not need to be open source to work, and several games distribute the game server along with the game itself. For example Space Engineers does distribute the server binaries (and the modding SDK) along with the game itself.
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Problem is they dont want a solution, their solution is to take one game off you so you need to buy another , it's to turn games into a consumable where you need to keep feeding the beast.
The risk of being open sourced will force th4em into that middle ground.
It leverage
EU ain't so bad after all (Score:2)
Funny how an American initiative is using the EU-body to make it happen. Wish more people are as open minded in this world.
Re: EU ain't so bad after all (Score:2)
Portugal is the new America.
Friendly Reminder (Score:5, Insightful)
If buying isn't owning, then piracy isn't stealing.
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Aside from "you bought a license, not software" being obviously BS, it doesn't really matter. If you bought a license, then you own the license. They can't take it back. If they block you from exercising the rights you purchased, that's cause for a lawsuit.
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Piracy of a game that has no server to connect to doesn't help anyone. In fact all this does is further promote the act of requiring offline games to connect to a server to check for permission to run, and install anti-features like Denuvo that cripple game performance in the name of making a buck.
Consumer laws are a better approach than trying to fight back as an individual against someone who has far more resources than you do.
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Games didn't use to be like this. The license for items like cars was for the entire time you could play the game, which when the publisher stopped publishing it, the people who bought it could still use it with those licensed items. They weren't removed later from the game.
The best part (Score:2)
Is that this is a stone on the shoe of the future plan of making single player games server dependent.
Things like Stadia, where all the files only exist on a remote server and can (and will) be erased are impossible to implement with this.
Construction solved this problem. (Score:2)
Always open a new numbered LLc for a build/game. Shutter the company and walk away when the inflows stop and the outflows continue.
Why are they playing soft ball? (Score:2)
Assuming you live in a functioning democracy, and can get enough political clout to move the needle on the issue at all, the opening bid should be "our society does not owe you a living, therefore, the day you stop supporting a piece of software is the day copyright expires."
If your leadership is, like mine, so corrupt that there's nothing you can do, then I'm sorry, that's no fun. But it makes absolutely no sense to have video game companies dictating what peoples' rights are or what counts as property.
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Assuming you live in a functioning democracy, and can get enough political clout to move the needle on the issue at all, the opening bid should be "our society does not owe you a living, therefore, the day you stop supporting a piece of software is the day copyright expires."
If your leadership is, like mine, so corrupt that there's nothing you can do, then I'm sorry, that's no fun. But it makes absolutely no sense to have video game companies dictating what peoples' rights are or what counts as property.
Extend it to "the day you announce you will never publish a copyrighted work (that you own the rights to) that copyright expires".
What if Steam shutdown ??? Massively screwed ! (Score:2)
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Last I checked there were several organizations working hard to ensure that people can play Steam games without Steam - and from what I understand to great success. Even king Denuvo has been fully dethroned.
Sure, right now they're being demonized by fools who buy into copyright, but they're doing God's work keeping art accessible to all.
battlefield heroes (Score:2)
Too little too late (Score:2)
I appreciate the sentiment, but have a feeling this will just motivate companies like Ubisoft to eliminate all game purchases entirely, and replace them with a subscription-only model instead. We're almost at that point anyways, so this might be the final nail in the coffin of the concept of "game ownership."