The button says buy, but it means something else

The Crew is a racing game released in 2014. On 14 December 2023 Ubisoft announced the servers would be shut down, and on 31 March 2024 shut them down. The game required a constant connection even in single player, so it stopped launching for everyone — including anyone who had bought a boxed copy ten years earlier.

What came next turned a routine service closure into a precedent. In April 2024 licences began disappearing from purchasers' libraries. The game was delisted. No refunds were offered. And then enthusiasts found unused offline code in the files — meaning the technical option of leaving the game playable had existed.

For ten years we have been pressing a button marked buy while acquiring a revocable permission to use. Normally the difference is invisible. The Crew displayed it in pure form.

That same week Ross Scott launched the Stop Killing Games campaign. It does not demand servers forever; the demand is more modest — that a publisher closing a game should leave it in a state where it keeps working without them. In July 2024 the campaign became a European Citizens' Initiative, by February 2026 it had gathered over 1.3 million verified signatures, and it reached the European Commission. The Commission declined to impose an obligation to keep games playable, but promised to bring industry and consumer organisations to one table before the year was out.

That is less than the signatories wanted. It is also more than has happened before: until now no regulator had considered it worth discussing what becomes of a game once it has been switched off. The complaint turned out to be simple enough that it could not be waved away: if the button says buy, buying has to mean something.