The ending of support for the 2014 online racing video game The Crew by French developer Ubisoft passed by without much, if any, notice by the wider world.
Hard-core fans who still enjoyed playing the then retro game on their Xbox, PlayStation or computer a decade on, were angry at the 2024 decision. Ending online support for the game rendered it unplayable, even for those who had physical copies of it.
Some gamers decided to do something.
“If you buy a car, you can keep it forever, right?” says Pavel Zálesák (26). It was the same if you bought a book. The publisher wasn’t going to show up at your door several years later and ask for it back to be scrapped.
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Increasingly, though, video gamers can see their purchases become useless several years later, when the developer decides to shut down online servers supporting the game.
A campaign has been put together to petition the European Union for new regulations that would offer better protection of digital products.
The idea is to require game developers to propose some way for consumers to still play the product, perhaps offline, if the company decides to end support, allowing the game to function as originally released.
“We are working to protect digital customers and ensure those who purchase games and digital content, that [cannot] be arbitrarily degraded,” says Zálesák.
A viral call to arms saw more than one million EU citizens sign an online petition objecting to the practice, a process triggering a formal review in Brussels, requiring the union’s powerful executive arm that proposes laws, the European Commission, to consider the petition.
The video gamers’ campaign is seen as a bit of a test case for whether the review, known as a “citizens’ initiative”, is just window dressing to make the EU system seem less disconnected from ordinary people, or a genuine avenue that can influence policymaking in Brussels.
The petition was formally submitted to the commission this week. The EU executive has until the end of July to offer a reply.
Representatives from the Stop Destroying Games campaign recently met officials from EU commissioner for consumer protection Michael McGrath’s team.
The gamers were hopeful their demands could be addressed in the Digital Fairness Act, a new law the Irish commissioner is bringing forward this year. The law will propose stricter regulations of online influencers and addictive practices and tricks employed by social media platforms and apps.
Zálesák, who is from the Czech Republic and studying software development, says they got a sense there might not be much scope to take on video game developers in that legislation.
The campaign has since pivoted to focus on separate EU laws governing consumer protection.
“EU customers are supposed to have protection against unfair terms and contracts already, but it’s overlooked in the video game industry,” says Zálesák.
An organisation representing the industry, Video Games Europe, last year said a decision to discontinue online services “is multifaceted, never taken lightly and must be an option for companies when an online experience is no longer commercially viable”.
The industry body, whose members include game developers such as EA, Ubisoft and Activision, said it knew decisions to effectively shutter a product could be difficult for players.
Moving an old online-only game on to a privately hosted server, not run by the developer, posed problems around data protection and could pose liabilities for companies, it said.
“In addition, many titles are designed from the ground up to be online-only; in effect, these proposals would curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create,” the industry body said.
Ross Scott, a 42-year-old US citizen originally from Virginia, who lives in Poland, says the practice of developers discontinuing support for games has been annoying him for years.
“This is an issue that’s bugged me for a long time, the idea that games or media in general can just be destroyed, effectively destroyed, so that you can never use them again,” he says.
Scott, a YouTuber heavily involved in the campaign, says Ubisoft’s decision to end support for its racing game The Crew was a perfect example of a “black and white” case to challenge the practice, both legally and politically. “I saw this as my one shot to do something on this issue.”
Scott says the campaign seemed to be getting political traction in the EU.
“Can a company sell a copy of a game, give no time frame for how long it lasts, and then, through their own actions, just disable every copy they ever sold? Is that in adherence with current EU laws? That’s the test.”