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.
Goal: one million signatures by July 31
If this “European Citizens’ Initiative” (ECI) collects more than a million signatures by July 31, 2025, the European executive will be obliged to provide a response.
The practice is not new, but until now it mainly concerned games that were only playable online, whose server closures often marked their disappearance, as was the case for the titles “Star Wars Galaxies” (2003-2011) or “Warhammer Online” (2008-2013).
But what really set the cat among the pigeons was the April 1st shutdown by French publisher Ubisoft of “The Crew,” a 2014 racing game 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” section that players could play without needing to be connected. However, since the servers were deactivated, the game simply won’t launch anymore.
“Demand for accountability”
For the collective “Stop destroying videogames”, the scrapping of “The Crew” represents “one of the best opportunities to demand accountability from a publisher”.
“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”, says the expert.
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.
Ubisoft has not commented.
“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 said.
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.”
