Some of you may have heard about the videogame called The Crew. It was one of those GAAS (game as a service) that came out in 2014, but nearly a decade later in December 2023 it would strike the news when developer Ubisoft announced that, because the game was no longer giving profits to justify maintaining the servers, the game would close altogether in March 2024. And while it's debatable whether this helps the preservation of videogames, the controversy truly arose for the second part of the announcement.

The game would no longer be playable, and so Ubosft wanted to do us a favor and directly remove it from our digital profiles. Yes, something you bought was now to be removed because the company unilaterally decided to do so. And the videogame world exploded under the menace that more GAAS or similar games that require an always online state would follow suit and deprive us of goods we rightfully bought.

The youtuber Ross Scott promoted the Stop Killing Games initiative, by which companies would be instigated to make their games playable offline after the servers were taken down, mainly due to consumer rights (you pay 80$ for a game and you're not guaranteed being able to continue playing it, beautiful) but also for the aforementioned preservation of videogames. The initiative would require citizens from all over Europe and even the world to sign it in support so the European Comission would accept it.

After a year, in summer 2025, the initiative had achieved the necessary support to be considered for presentation, nearly 1.3 million people had signed it and with four countries surpassing 100k signs each. Scott announced they'd be ready to bring the initiative to the authorities during February 2026, but it seems like we got ahead of schedule and just today the Comission has stated it will examine the initiative.

For the next six months, until the 27th July at its latest, we'll be waiting for an answer of the Comission. This could be a trascendental moment in videogame history, much like happened with Sony and the emulators back in time for example. If approved, this initiative could save lots of games doomed for death, the most recent example being Anthem. But the question here is if they will support us gamers or side with the corporations.

The main debate here is if videogames are considered a good (which we would own) or a service (which we'd only have a license to use it, no strings attached), and it currently looks like it's more like the second option in which case we're done for. But should the first option be considered, this could change a lot of things in the industry which is why people is so hyped to receive the answer (and why it got so much support, it's only the 14th initiative altogether to pass the criteria to be elevated to the Comission).

Of course, some people have opposed the initiative. PirateSoftware was probably the most mediatic of them all, and due to his past working on Blizzard (which he has never mentioned, I know) he's majorly seen as a first-party affected since he's still involved in developing videogames. There was also an obscure lobby frontlined by many of the great enterprises which opposed it, not sure what happened to it but surely their neutrality was at the very least questionable. In all, people who prioritize benefits over literally everything else, including the very first purpose of videogames which is to enjoy our leisure time.

Not sure how aware was the rest of the world of this or if there were similar campaigns promoted elsewhere, but I thought it'd be interesting to bring this up because it will certainly be a precedent and will create jurisprudence, whether it's for the best or the worst. Time will tell if gamers win this match or will the final boss pull off a dirty trick to disable us from beating the game (I absolutely had to make that reference).

I have heard about this prior to your post and I do hope that there is some sort of resolution to this. Being able to treat a game like a subscription and then terminate it on a whim is insane. Especially if you had to put money down to buy the game in the first place.

If the developer stops providing an online server to play the game then they should open it up to allow someone else do it, whether that be the players or some other company that wants to provide it.

The other thing that has become more common in recent years that bugs me so much is the need to be online in order to play a game even in single player mode. This seems insane to me. I shouldn't have to be connected to the internet in order to play a game privately. I'm sure this is used as an anti-piracy technique but for anyone that has pirated games knows it doesn't work so why bother?

Well, I'm glad this is going ahead and I hope it puts enough pressure on these companies to make changes that benefit the consumer. I personally haven't bought a new game in years so it won't really affect me but I like the initiative.

Hey, I'm glad to see it actually being looked at! There's still a chance that nobody listens to it, but it's still important nonetheless that they at least hear that people want games that won't become wastes of plastic and storage whenever the game's developer or publisher decides so. The worst cases are the single-player games that still require a server and thus can be shut down despite not even needing the connectivity, but online games being launched without even the ability to run or connect to private servers is a major issue as well. There's tons of excuses, the main one being "well, we can't run servers forever!", but the solution to that is just "let people host their own servers so that you don't have to run the servers forever."

It's clear that the main reason some are against this is simply because it would lead to less games being sold due to older games still existing and being playable. This very well might be the main reason Pirate Software did his thing as well. Whatever the case, though, I hope this can achieve some real traction and make some changes. If this saves even one game, I'd say this was all worth the trouble.

I don't believe I heard of this before your post but I really would like it to be seriously considered I hate how many games want you to pay to play it and then can just shut down later and leave no option to play what you paid for.