The words “game preservation” are holy words here on MOP and in the MMORPG genre beyond, as few gaming communities understand the pain of the loss of an online game as we do. So naturally, we were pretty bummed in December when Ubisoft announced that it would be sunsetting The Crew 1, presumably part of its push to drive players to The Crew 3 aka The Crew Motorfest, followed by the maintenance-moding of The Crew 2 for similar reasons a few months later. It was shitty, and Ubisoft was shitty for doing it, but there wasn’t anything for it, just like all the other games killed off before it. Right?
Maybe not. YouTube channel Accursed Farms, run by Ross Scott, is trying to kick off a broad-scale effort to fight these types of sunsets that could potentially violate consumer law in different countries – like Ubisoft’s own home country of France. Scott says the goal is “to find a weak link in the industry so governments can examine this practice” and put an end to the totally unnecessary gaming graveyard.
The initiative, dubbed Stop Killing Games, would help not just the 12M people who bought the original The Crew but future gamers too; he outlines concrete steps gamers can take in their countries, like contacting government bureaus in charge of consumer policy and fraud. The hope is that regulators and legislators can be convinced to crack down on games companies to ensure that abandoned and deprecated games are still at least functional on players’ own devices without the studio’s involvement or services.
“If we lose, we’ll at least get told straight to our faces that, in a democracy, you can never own video games that you pay for, no matter how many people want that to happen,” he says.
As Kotaku points out, Ubisoft is an easy and deserving villain here; back in January, Ubisoft’s Philippe Tremblay said point-blank that the company wants a consumer shift in gaming where gamers are OK with not owning the games they buy, the same way “they got comfortable not owning their CD collection or DVD collection.” Of course, he said all that while explaining the way to instill player faith that the games services will continue accessibly is to keep those games services online – which is exactly the thing that isn’t happening in the online games industry when companies like Ubisoft leave abandonware by the side of the road every year.
50 second explanation of the game campaign!https://t.co/Y6324HBcpv
— Accursed Farms (@accursedfarms) April 3, 2024
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