An initiative has been launched in the hope that the French government, for example, will start to look into stopping and making inaccessible games using the live service model.

Ubisoft recently made The Crew, which was released ten years ago, unplayable due to server infrastructure and licensing restrictions. This is not the first time an online game has disappeared completely, and one YouTuber, Ross Scott, who started the Stop Killing Games website, has had enough. According to Scott, killing games can be seen as an attack on consumer rights and media preservation (or archiving). He is asking supporters to sign petitions and file complaints with consumer protection agencies (in the case of Ubisoft, the French consumer protection agency would be the DGCCRF) because he believes that games are products, not services, regardless of the term used by publishers, and that games should not be rendered inoperable once we have purchased them.

The defense would be that when you buy a game digitally, you are paying for the right to play it under certain conditions. One of those conditions is that they can take that right away for any reason, and Steam is open about that. But Scott believes that judges everywhere might not agree with that and he wants to see a turnaround in the gaming industry based on the ruling of judges in Europe, for example, who might think differently. Scott would like to see that when a game is no longer supported, developers should somehow ensure that players can continue to play the game (e.g. by supporting private servers), even if this means losing certain features. For example, NCsoft has granted an official license to a fan-made City of Heroes server to continue the closed MMO, and in March, Velan Studios marketing director Josh Harrison said at GDC that developers should plan ahead in case their game is no longer supported. So their game, Knockout City, has survived with the help of private servers, keeping the dodgeball game playable despite the end of official support.

Scott says that Stop Killing Games is not yet fully successful: he has seen the number of complaints he has received about The Crew, and not a single government petition has been approved, even though he started them three weeks ago. In addition to France, he is hopeful about Germany and Australia. He denounced the Games-as-a-Service (GaaS) model five years ago because it allows developers to escape responsibility when official support ends because they no longer have to deal with it.

Ubisoft has not responded to the campaign…

Source: PCGamer, Stop Killing Games