The EU consumer rights campaign Stop Killing Games reached its 1 million signature goal earlier this month, snowballing out from Ubisoft's shutdown of racing game The Crew in 2024. Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot was asked to respond to the movement at a recent shareholders meeting, and while that response was tentative, it wasn't a complete dismissal.
"Regarding the petition, we operate in a market," Guillemot said, as noted by Game File (paywalled). "And, whenever we release a game, we provide a lot of support for that game. We also provide a lot of services to make sure that the game is accessible and remains playable 24/7."
Guillemot says that the company provides "information regarding the game and how long the game can be played," though he doesn't go into specifics about how those notices work. The Crew did have a badge on its front box noting "online connection required," and a notice in the fine print on the back that "Ubisoft may cancel access to one or more specific online features upon a 30-day prior notice." Whether those sorts of notices are legally sufficient will likely be put to the test, in the EU at least, after the Stop Killing Games petition passes its final deadline at the end of the month.
Additionally, Guillemot cites "a one-Euro fee proposed to all buyers of the game. For just one Euro they got to buy the next version." As Game File notes, this appears to be in reference to a big sale on The Crew 2 which ran across digital marketplaces in 2024, bringing the price down to €1/$1.
"It’s not a whole lot of money to be able to continue playing a game," Guillemot says, though whether he omitted the detail or this is an issue with Ubisoft's official translation, buying a sequel at a discount is not the same thing as being allowed to continue accessing your own copy of the original.
"But this kind of issue is not specific to Ubisoft," Guillemot continues. "All video game publishers are faced with that issue. You provide a service, but nothing is written in stone and at some point the service may be discontinued. Nothing is eternal. And we are doing our best to make sure that things go well for all players and buyers, because obviously support for all games cannot last forever."
It is, of course, true that no game can be supported forever, but forcing companies into perpetual updates isn't what Stop Killing Games is trying to do. As the campaign's FAQ notes, the goal is to get publishers to "implement an end-of-life plan to modify or patch the game so that it can run on customer systems" even after a server shutdown. That notion is at least somewhat sympathetic to Ubisoft, since the company has already announced plans to introduce an offline mode for The Crew 2. That doesn't help the original Crew, though, or other dead Ubisoft games including XDefiant.
"The lifespan of a piece of software, whenever there’s a service component, eventually services may be discontinued, because eventually the software may become obsolete over time," Guillemot explains. "A lot of tools become obsolete 10 or 15 years down the line. They’re no longer available. And that is why we release a new version. And so we have version two and then version three. But clearly this is a far-reaching issue, and we're working on it."
