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After 10 years, Ubisoft's always-online racing game The Crew has snowballed into a massive consumer rights campaign that's now looking for 1 million EU signatures
The Stop Killing Games initiative, led by YouTuber Ross Scott, aims to prevent publishers from disabling access to purchased online-only games. An ongoing campaign seeks 1 million signatures to trigger EU law changes.
Earlier this year, Ubisoft shut down the servers for 2014's The Crew, rendering the always-online racing game completely unplayable, even to users who own it. In the wake of that shutdown, a massive consumer rights campaign got underway to stop publishers from "destroying" their games, and the next step is an effort to gather 1 million signatures in an effort to change EU law.
The Stop Killing Games initiative, spearheaded by YouTuber Ross Scott, is an international campaign to contact lawmakers in various countries and get laws on the books preventing publishers from disabling access to the online-only games players have purchased. If you want a full breakdown of Stop Killing Games' goals - including what action they expect from publishers who've decided supporting a given game is no longer financially viable - you can check out the site's FAQ.
The group's latest effort is a European Citizens' Initiative, which Scott calls "the biggest and most ambitious chance to create new law against publishers destroying games they have already sold to you." An ECI allows grassroots campaigns to bring their concerns directly to the European Commission - once something reaches 1 million signatures, organizers meet with Commission representatives who'll then decide what action to take.
Of course, 1 million signatures is a lot, and there's a one-year time limit to getting this campaign over the finish line. But the campaign has already achieved 47,615 signatures, and while that's well short of the ultimate goal, it's not a bad start for a campaign that got underway just this week.
"If we can get enough signatures then I think we end this and change gaming history," Scott says in the video above. "Or we can't get our act together and the problem gets worse and worse, then in the future we really don't own anything, and we're charged a lot FOR not owning anything."