'Stop Killing Games' campaign demands end to live service shutdowns: 'It is an assault on both consumer rights and preservation of media'

pcgamer.com:

Ubisoft pulled the plug on The Crew this month, rendering the 10-year-old racing game unplayable due, it said, to «server infrastructure and licensing constraints.» It's hardly the first time an online game has been sent to a farm upstate by a publisher that neither wants to continue supporting it nor offer players a way to play it offline or on private servers, but rather than accept the status quo, YouTuber Ross Scott is putting up a fight.

Scott has launched a new website, Stop Killing Games, to rally opposition to the games industry's «assault on both consumer rights and preservation of media,» as he puts it.

With The Crew as its prime example, the campaign directs consumers from around the world to sign petitions and submit complaints to regulatory bodies such as the DGCCRF, France's consumer protection agency. The basic legal argument is that videogames are «goods» rather than «services»—regardless of the terminology game publishers may use—and goods shouldn't be rendered inoperable by the seller after we buy them.

The most obvious legal defense for publishers is that when we buy games digitally these days, we're buying a conditional license to play the game—with the main condition being that the license can be revoked whenever, for whatever reason. Steam's subscriber agreement is explicit about this, saying that the games we buy «are licensed, not sold.»

But if put in front of a judge, those agreements won't necessarily hold up in every country, argues Scott. It'd be hard to get a favorable judgment in the US, but the hope of the campaign is that if one country, such as France, decides that publishers have to find a way to keep their games playable indefinitely, the industry will adopt new practices globally.

Scott isn't asking developers to operate game servers until the heat death of the universe, suggesting a compromise: When a developer has decided to stop supporting a game, it should furnish owners with some way to keep playing—usually that'd be private