A petition to stop video game publishers operating in the European Union from remotely disabling their games and rendering them unplayable after official support ends is gaining momentum.
Launched at the end of July as a European Citizens’ Initiative, it must gather one million signatures from at least seven EU countries in one year in order to be considered by the European Commission as the basis for new legislation.
In just one month, the Stop Destroying Videogames petition has collected more than 327,000 signatures, therefore it appears well on track to achieve its goal.
What’s the fuss all about? In the past few years, the video game industry has been moving away from selling games on physical discs or cartridges. Instead, they are now focusing on a digital model where you buy games online and play them through the internet, using servers run by the publisher.
This is certainly very convenient and potentially allows reaching a much wider audience, but this dependency also means that when publishers decide to shut down servers, consumers are essentially cut off despite having paid for the game.
This has recently happened, for instance, to owners of old Call of Duty editions, and to Battlefield and Spellbreak players, to name just a few cases.
Although most publishers stress that they are not selling a good, but a license which can be revoked, activists believe that the situation is not clearly covered under existing laws, and that consumer protections should supersede any end-user license agreements.
The above-mentioned closures caused outrage among gamers, but the real turning point came when Ubisoft decided to shut down the servers for The Crew, a popular racing game that had amassed a player base of over 12 million, mentioning "server infrastructure and licensing constraints" as the primary reasons for decommissioning the game.
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