Stacy Boit,

Can a company take away something you’ve already paid for?

In the world of online video games, some already do. Publishers can decide to switch off a game’s servers, often leaving it effectively unplayable.

Stop Killing Games, a growing consumer rights campaign started by American YouTuber Ross Scott in 2024, is challenging that practice.

In January, the group submitted a petition featuring nearly 1.3 million signatures to the European Commission, triggering a public hearing in the European Parliament in April. What began as an online campaign is now awaiting a decision from one of the EU’s most powerful institutions.

Scott’s campaign began following an announcement from the major studio Ubisoft, saying it would shut down the online-only racing game The Crew in 2024.

The French company said it was taking the game, which attracted more than 12 million players during its lifetime, offline, citing “upcoming server infrastructure and licensing constraints”.

For players such as Chemicalflood, who told me he had been playing The Crew for nearly a decade, the move – which left the game unplayable – felt personal.

“I was around 18 at the time of the launch – it was a big part of my adult life growing up,” he said. “It was a great escape from hardship at the time, so it has always been something special to me.”

Over the years, he said, the game became something he shared with his children, who enjoyed exploring its virtual recreation of the United States.

“The shutdown itself wasn’t upsetting,” he explained. “But how they handled it was the kick in the teeth.”

For Chemicalflood and many fans like him, the issue was not that Ubisoft ended support. It was that players lost access altogether.

The announcement from Ubisoft caught the attention of Scott, also known online as Accursed Farms, who had already been creating content around the issue of ownership around games for several years.

“I just hate seeing creative works effectively destroyed,” he told me.

He quickly decided to start a campaign, naming it Stop Killing Games – the killing referring to when “every copy of that game that’s ever been sold has been disabled, and no one on the planet can run it”.

Whammy4, a gamer who founded the fan community The Crew Unlimited and helped lead efforts to preserve the game after its shutdown, likened it to “someone just breaking into your home and stealing your bike or your car”.

“You buy a physical copy of a game, you bring it home and install the game, you play it for some amount of time. Then all of a sudden the publisher completely destroys all copies of the game worldwide, including yours.”

“No refunds, no actual heads-up at the time of purchase, and nothing you can do to keep it at all,” he said.