Stop Killing Games movement heads to the EU - do you actually own your digital games

[Sharp Shannon]

The BBC has covered the Stop Killing Games movement, started in 2024 by YouTuber Ross Scott following Ubisoft shutting down The Crew - a racing game that attracted over 12 million players across its lifetime. When Ubisoft pulled the servers in March 2024, the game became completely unplayable. They then revoked licences from players who had bought it. No refund. No offline mode. Just gone.

The campaign has now gathered nearly 1.5 million signatures and triggered a formal public hearing in the European Parliament in April 2026. An MEP floated the concept of a 'right to resurrect' - giving players or communities the legal right to bring a shut-down game back in some form via private servers or offline modes. Ubisoft's defence is that customers purchased a licence, not ownership rights, and a California class-action was dismissed in June 2025.

Stop Killing Games: The fight over who owns the games you buywww.bbc.co.uk

[BretHart88]

The Crew being shut down was the moment a lot of people realised they had been operating under a completely false assumption about what digital purchases meant. You did not buy a game. You rented access to it for an unspecified period at the publisher's discretion

[Zach72]

Scott's core ask is actually very reasonable and his framing of it matters: he is not asking publishers to keep servers running forever. He is asking that when a publisher walks away they leave the game in a playable state. That is not a radical demand

[Midnight Wolf]

Video Games Europe warning that the campaign could make online-only games significantly more expensive to develop is the industry argument that deserves serious examination rather than dismissal. If publishers cannot sunset old products freely the cost structure of live service games changes

[Clever Wrench]

Ubisoft's argument that a licence was purchased rather than ownership is legally accurate and that is the problem. The consumer expectation at the point of sale was ownership. The legal small print said otherwise. That gap between expectation and legal reality is where the harm lives

[Gary98]

The 'right to resurrect' concept from the MEP is the most interesting legal idea to come out of gaming regulation in years. Treating games as cultural works worth preserving rather than products with a commercial lifecycle is a genuinely different philosophical framing

[Louise82]

90% of classic games released before 2010 are now completely unavailable according to preservation research. The Stop Killing Games movement is a consumer rights issue today but it is also a cultural preservation issue for future generations