When Ubisoft announced it would shut down the online-only racing game The Crew in 2024, players lost more than a game. For Chemicalflood, who had played for nearly a decade, the move 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, the game became something he shared with his children, who enjoyed 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.” The French company cited “upcoming server infrastructure and licensing constraints” for taking the game, which attracted more than 12 million players during its lifetime, offline – leaving it unplayable.
The announcement caught the attention of American YouTuber Ross Scott, also known as Accursed Farms, who had already been creating content around ownership of games. “I just hate seeing creative works effectively destroyed,” he told the BBC. 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”. In January 2024, 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.
“Stop Killing Games campaign challenges publishers disabling online-only games after Ubisoft shut down The Crew.”
Whammy4, a gamer who founded the fan community The Crew Unlimited and helped lead efforts to preserve the game after its shutdown, likened the practice 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.