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It’s a sad day when a publisher stops supporting a popular online video game, but a new campaign is trying to stop the practice by urging regulators to get involved.
This week, a YouTuber and video game fan named Ross Scott launched the “Stop Killing Games” campaign to rally support to the cause. One of his major concerns is that consumers are losing access to games they’ve paid for when a publisher shuts down the servers for an online game—a problem he says has worsened over time.
“From my perspective, this has felt like a slow moving coup to take away ownership from more and more people over time,” Scott says in a YouTube video announcing the campaign.
Although the issue has existed for years, Scott decided to take action after Ubisoft announced it was ending support for an online game called The Crew on March 31, despite it having millions of players. Gamers may have assumed they were powerless to stop Ubisoft from doing so, but Scott is asking if killing off a game actually violates law or regulations.
“No matter how you look at it, this is such an obvious assault on consumer rights,” he adds in his video. “In any other industry, a company destroying what they sold to you would be illegal.”
To launch his campaign, Scott created stopkillingames.com, which points out the actions gamers can take, such as asking regulators like the US Federal Trade Commission to get involved.
“The legality of this practice is untested worldwide, and many governments do not have clear laws regarding these actions. It is our goal to have authorities examine this behavior and hopefully end it, as it is an assault on both consumer rights and preservation of media,” Scott says on the site.
The challenge here is that US law has mostly “settled” the issue, and allows publishers to shut down a game without penalty, according to Scott. However, he’s still hopeful stronger consumer protection laws in other countries, like those in Europe, can be used to crack down on the practice here. As a result, his website asks consumers to contact French regulators about intervening in Ubisoft's shutdown of The Crew since the company is based in Paris.
“If we can find even one major country to penalize this practice, that might fix everything,” he adds. “If a company knows they have to let you keep your game in one country, they may as well make it a global policy."
In the UK, the campaign has also started a formal petition, asking the country’s government “to prohibit video game publishers from leaving games in an inoperable state for all customers once they end support.” In a FAQ, Scott adds he isn’t calling for publishers to support a game indefinitely, but to implement “an end-of-life plan to modify or patch the game so that it can run on customer systems with no further support from the company being necessary.”