“Stop destroying video games”: at the end of July, a collective of players launched a European petition, which collected more than 280,000 signatures, asking publishers not to “kill” the titles they no longer want to take care of.
They denounce a practice of certain developers which consists of deactivating the online servers of a game after a certain number of years, which makes it inaccessible to the player and therefore unusable.
“More and more video games are being sold as goods, but are designed to be completely unplayable as soon as the support ends,” the collective believes in its petition, which questions the legality of this process.
“What we are asking is whether, from a consumer point of view, it is normal to remove us from the games,” Daniel Ondruska, a 37-year-old Slovak player and spokesperson for the initiative, told AFP.
If this “European Citizens’ Initiative” (ECI) gathers more than a million signatures by July 31, 2025, the European executive will be obliged to provide a response.
“Demand for accountability”
The practice is not new, but until now it mainly concerned games that were only playable online, whose server closures often resulted in their disappearance, as was the case for titles Star Wars Galaxies (2003-2011) or Warhammer Online (2008-2013).
But what really set the cat among the pigeons was the French publisher Ubisoft’s decision to stop theer April of The Crewa car racing game released in 2014 that had nearly 12 million players two years after its release. It has since had several sequels.
Although playable online, The Crew has a “single player” part that players could play through without needing to be connected.
Since the servers were disabled, the game simply won’t launch anymore.
For the collective “Stop destroying videogames”, the scrapping of The Crew represents “one of the best opportunities to hold a publisher accountable.”
“We’re not asking publishers to maintain their games forever,” says Daniel Ondruska, “but to not intentionally destroy them and to allow those who paid for them to play them or create their own servers.”
But as Geoffray Brunaux, professor of private law in Reims and specialist in digital law, points out, “when a player buys a game, he has the impression that he becomes the owner of it, except that legally this is not at all the case.”
When purchasing, the buyer is the owner of the physical medium (Blu-ray or cartridge for example), but as far as the content is concerned, “it remains a work of the mind, which is therefore not subject to a sale, but to a user license”, states the expert.
Preservation of games
For its part, the Video Games Europe organization, which brings together European developers, including Ubisoft, assures that this kind of decision “is never taken lightly.”
Beyond the simple cost that maintaining these servers would impose on these publishers, it also highlights user security.
“The protections in place to secure player data, remove illegal content and combat dangerous content would not exist if we were forced to run games on private servers,” she told AFP.
In France too, where the petition has collected more than 20,000 signatures, voices are beginning to be raised against this practice.
“The problem that arises today is quite simply that of preserving our media,” says Axel Nizard, better known under the pseudonym “Conkerax”, 440,000 subscribers on YouTube.
For several months, a group of lawyers, academics and content creators has been formed around these questions.
“We don’t want this whole part of culture to disappear,” warns Axel Nizard. “So we’re going to try to shake things up.”
Contacted by AFP, Ubisoft declined to comment.