A campaign to take action again against game publishers whose games become completely unplayable after support ends has been gaining traction over the last couple of months. The “Stop Killing Games” campaign, run by Ross Scott of Accursed Farms, is looking to challenge publisher Ubisoft for shuttering the online services of ‘The Crew’ and, if successful, can have a ripple effect across the video game industry in terms of how always online software can be preserved post end-of-life.
The details of the campaign can be found on the Stop Killing Games’ website, particularly the FAQ section. Note that this campaign is not demanding that game publishers continue support for an online services for an indefinite amount of time but rather plan for a game’s end-of-life so that it remains playable even after its services are shuttered. Gamers of yore long remember the days of self-hosted servers, but I think we are all well-aware of the pains of a game’s shuttering—especially those you’ve spent a considerable penny on. PC, console, mobile games, paid and the free-to-start—they all apply here.
Once a game is no longer playable, players are left with a non-functional game that they paid for and there’s nothing they can do about it. While some games eventually see private servers from fellow fans (after potentially thousands of hours of reverse engineering), most games are simply lost to time.
The campaign has launched a European Citizens’ Initiative last week and since then has gained the support of over two hundred thousand. Once an Initiative has reached one million signatures along with meeting the threshold of seven European countries, it will be brought before the European Commission so that action may be taken. While still a ways off from the million required signatures, gaining 200K in the span of just a week is still quite the feat.
If you’d like to sign for the Initiative, visit the page here to do so and for more information. Obviously, you’ll need to be an EU citizen to sign—but if you’re not, spreading the word to help the campaign get the signatures it needs will help. You can visit this page to see how you can help in your specific country. UK citizens in particular can sign the Parliament petition once it has been resubmitted.
