Gamers push EU to curb server shutdowns for online-only games, Ubisoft The Crew case exposes license-not-ownership doctrine, consumer petitions collide with publisher cost warnings

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The Crew was released by Ubisoft in 2014, and discontinued in 2024 bbc.com

Ross Scott is the founder of the Stop Killing Games initiative, which he started in 2024 bbc.com

Ubisoft’s 2014 online-only racing game The Crew became effectively unplayable after the company shut down its servers in 2024, a move Ubisoft attributed to “upcoming server infrastructure and licensing constraints,” according to the BBC. The game drew more than 12 million players during its lifetime, and the shutdown has since become a rallying point for a consumer campaign aimed at preserving access to purchased games. The dispute now sits in the open: players say they paid for a product; publishers say they sold a revocable license.

The immediate consequence of an online-only design is that the end of service is also the end of the game. A player who goes by Chemicalflood told the BBC he had played The Crew for nearly a decade and shared it with his children, who explored its virtual recreation of the United States; what stung was not the shutdown itself but how it was handled. Another player, Whammy4, who founded a fan community called The Crew Unlimited, likened the practice to having a physical possession taken away, pointing to the lack of refunds and the absence of clear warnings at purchase that the game could later be rendered unusable.

That frustration has been organised by Stop Killing Games, a campaign started in 2024 by American YouTuber Ross Scott (Accursed Farms). In January 2024, the group submitted a petition with nearly 1.3 million signatures to the European Commission, triggering a public hearing in the European Parliament in April 2024. Scott argues that “killing” a game means disabling every copy sold so that no one can run it at all, even if they are willing to host their own servers or accept reduced functionality.

Publishers have been testing how far the license framing can go in court. Ubisoft fought a proposed class-action lawsuit in California by two The Crew players by arguing that customers had bought a license to use the game, not ownership rights; the case was dismissed without prejudice in June 2025 after the plaintiffs voluntarily withdrew it. Industry group Video Games Europe has defended shutdowns as sometimes necessary when services are no longer commercially viable, and warned that some proposals could raise development costs for online-only titles.

Stop Killing Games says it is not demanding that companies keep servers running indefinitely. It is demanding that when the servers go dark, the game does not have to go with them.

The Crew’s servers are already offline. The argument over what, exactly, was sold is still running.