In December 2023, Ubisoft’s decision to shut down servers for its decade-old racer The Crew ignited a grassroots outcry over the impermanence of today’s online-only games. What began as player frustration morphed into the Stop Killing Games movement—an EU Citizens’ Initiative demanding legal safeguards so titles remain playable even after publishers pull the plug.
The petition argues that treating games as perpetual goods, then rendering them unplayable, amounts to planned obsolescence that throttles cultural preservation and robs consumers of lasting value. As of July 2025, over 1.2 million Europeans have signed on, triggering formal debates in Brussels.
Video Games Europe Pushes Back
Video Games Europe—a major lobbying arm for EU developers and publishers—warns that forcing perpetual support would:
- Dramatically inflate development costs for live-service and online-only titles
- Curtail creative freedom by mandating private-server or single-player fallbacks
- Introduce legal fallout around data protection, moderation, and cybersecurity once official infrastructure closes
Their statement emphasizes that service shutdowns follow careful commercial reviews and come with advance notice to comply with consumer-protection laws.
We appreciate the passion of our community; however, the decision to discontinue online services is multi-faceted, never taken lightly and must be an option for companies when an online experience is no longer commercially viable.
We understand that it can be disappointing for players but, when it does happen, the industry ensures that players are given fair notice of the prospective changes in compliance with local consumer protection laws.
Private servers are not always a viable alternative option for players as the protections we put in place to secure players’ data, remove illegal content, and combat unsafe community content would not exist and would leave rights holders liable.
In addition, many titles are designed from the ground up to be online-only; in effect, these proposals would curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create.
The Core Tension
- Preservation Advocates
- View games as cultural artifacts deserving long-term access
- Demand offline or fan-server alternatives be enshrined in law
- Cite risks of digital vanishing acts for gaming history
- Industry Stakeholders
- Argue that not all games can be decoupled from live-service economies
- Highlight risks and costs of maintaining legacy code and hardware
- Warn of liability for harmful community content on unsupervised fan servers
This clash spotlights a broader question: can we guarantee digital heritage without stifling industry innovation or imposing unsustainable burdens?
Gaming’s future may hinge on hybrid solutions that respect both sides:
- Time-limited Preservation Funds: Subsidies for maintaining key titles for a defined grace period.
- Open-Source SDK Releases: Developers could share tooling to empower secure, community-run servers.
- Tiered Sunset Notices: Graduated shutdown phases, starting with reduced features and ending with full offline executables.
Such ideas aim to safeguard cultural legacy without forcing studios to underwrite perpetual online operations.
As a creator or fan, how would you champion game preservation in a way that’s fair to both players and developers?
Beyond legislative wrangling, independent archivists, emulation communities, and museums are experimenting with hardware preservation and legal-archival licensing. Exploring partnerships between publishers and cultural institutions might be the next frontier for ensuring no digital world ever truly goes dark.