When Chemicalflood bought The Crew in 2014, the online racing game became a fixture of his adult life – a great escape from hardship, later something he shared with his children as they explored its virtual United States together. Nearly a decade later, Ubisoft pulled the plug. The French studio cited "upcoming server infrastructure and licensing constraints" and shut down the servers in 2024, leaving the game, which had attracted more than 12 million players, completely unplayable.
"The shutdown itself wasn't upsetting," Chemicalflood said. "But how they handled it was the kick in the teeth." For him and countless fans, the issue was not that Ubisoft ended support – it was that players lost access altogether.
“Gamers challenge publishers after Ubisoft shut down The Crew, leaving it unplayable.”
That announcement caught the attention of American YouTuber Ross Scott, known online as Accursed Farms, who had already spent years creating content about digital ownership. "I just hate seeing creative works effectively destroyed," he said. In 2024 he launched a campaign he called Stop Killing Games – defining "killing" as when "every copy of that game that's ever been sold has been disabled, and no one on the planet can run it."
What began as an online campaign quickly snowballed. In January, the group submitted a petition bearing nearly 1.3 million signatures to the European Commission, triggering a public hearing in the European Parliament in April. The campaign is now awaiting a decision from one of the EU's most powerful institutions.
Whammy4, a gamer who founded the fan community The Crew Unlimited and helped lead preservation efforts after the shutdown, compared 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."
The campaign challenges the idea that a publisher can simply switch off a game without making sure it remains playable. Whether the European Commission will force changes remains to be seen – but for the millions who invested time and money in titles like The Crew, the stakes could not be higher.