A petition is aiming to get one million signatures to support its efforts to make the act of killing always-online games illegal in Europe, following the controversy surrounding Ubisoft's 2014 racing game, The Crew.
The situation began earlier this year when the studio officially shut down the servers for The Crew, making it completely unplayable, even for players who own it. Following that decision, a massive consumer rights campaign was underway.
Shutting Down Always-Online Games
It was asking that publishers should stop "destroying" their games and now, the next step is an effort to gather 1 million signatures to make a change to EU law.
The effort is known as the Stop Killing Games initiative and is spearheaded by YouTuber Ross Scott, according to GamesRadar.
The international campaign is contacting lawmakers from various countries and getting laws on the books preventing publishers from fully cutting access to online-only games that players bought. For a full breakdown of the campaign's goals, the site has a FAQ that can be read through.
The latest effort is a European Citizens' Initiative (ECI) which Scott is calling "the biggest and most ambitious chance to create new law against publishers destroying games they have already sold to you."
It allows grassroots campaigns to put forward their concerns directly to the European Commission.
After the initiative gets 1 million signatures, organizers will meet with Commission representatives. The latter will be the ones to decide on what action to take regarding the matter.
The ECI says that killing games "robs customers, destroys games as an art form, and is unnecessary." Those who joined the campaign are hoping that if enough people support the efforts, the EU will be forced into taking action against the situation, said TheNextWeb.
Petition Against the Practice
The initiative is a mechanism that is intended for citizens of the EU to participate more directly in the development of the bloc's policies by proposing new legislation.
Many policy-savvy gamers have taken the matter into their own hands and are trying to "stop the destruction of video games."
On top of simply removing the always-online games from players' libraries, the shutdown of these titles also has another major negative impact.
This is that the work of programmers, artists, writers, animators, modelers, and other workers who made the games will be gone forever.
Scott also compared the practice of studios shutting down games to movie studios during the silent film era "burning their own films after they were done showing them to recover the silver content," according to PCGamer.
