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How Gamers Just Forced the EU to STOP Corporate Theft.
How Gamers Just Forced the EU to STOP Corporate Theft.
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0:00
When you buy a digital game, you assume you own it. But right now,
0:03
sitting on a server in Montreal, is a 'Kill Switch' - a piece of code specifically designed
0:08
to wipe a game you paid for like it never existed. No warning. No refund. Just… gone.
0:15
The gaming industry told the European Union that stopping this switch is a
0:19
'technical impossibility' that would cost millions. That’s not just wrong. It’s a lie.
0:24
And a small group of rogue engineers just proved you can save these games
0:28
for almost nothing. So why won’t the industry do it?
0:32
Like every good mystery, this one starts with a murder…
0:35
Chapter One - The Execution of “The Crew”
0:38
Ubisoft revealed exactly how they feel about their players on March 31st, 2024. That was
0:44
the day they flicked the Kill Switch on The Crew, an online-only competitive racing game that had
0:50
been running for almost a decade. Just like that… it was gone.
0:53
Millions of players were suddenly locked out with no way back in. The reason?
0:58
“Upcoming server infrastructure and licensing constraints”. It was typical vague corporate
1:03
talk. And that might have held water if Ubisoft had just shut down the servers.
1:08
They kept going. In April of that same year, Ubisoft began
1:11
revoking player licenses via their Ubisoft Connect service. They used Digital Rights Management - or
1:17
DRM - to prevent gamers from downloading or keeping any of the game files, sometimes without
1:22
providing any kind of refund. For people who don’t play as many online games, think of it like going
1:27
to a restaurant and ordering a sandwich. You take a bite, you’re halfway through enjoying
1:32
it when the chef walks out of the kitchen. He grabs the sandwich and eats it in front of you.
1:36
And even more insane, this is somehow happening to everyone in the restaurant at the same time.
1:41
But this is more than a company with a questionable history scamming their customers out
1:46
of $60 to $80 apiece. It’s an extremely dangerous precedent to set for the entire gaming industry.
1:53
One fan on reddit said, “This was the saddest and most ruthless decision I've ever seen in
1:58
gaming history.” Another called it “abhorrent behavior that needs to stop being legal.” And
2:02
as Engadget put it, it’s a reminder that we as consumers own nothing. We’re living
2:07
in a world where streaming services can just remove a beloved series because it’s
2:11
taking too much attention away from their expensive new releases.. Or a
2:15
studio executive can snap his fingers and make a movie disappear for a tax write-off.
2:20
Could a move like this push video games down the same slippery slope?
2:24
This isn’t internet paranoia. Earlier in 2024, Philippe Tremblay,
2:29
director of subscriptions at Ubisoft, said in a public statement: “...we saw… gamers are used
2:34
to… having and owning their games. That's the consumer shift that needs to happen. They got
2:39
comfortable not owning their CD collection or DVD collection. That's a transformation that's been a
2:44
bit slower to happen [in games]... So it's about feeling comfortable with not owning your game.”
2:49
After all, subscription services make a lot more money for companies than a one-off payment. If
2:54
they decide they don’t want you to play that game anymore, or even have access to its files, well…
3:00
that’s a you problem. What are you going to do? Take to the forums, review bomb their Steam pages?
3:06
It’s not like they care.
3:07
But this time was different.
3:09
Ubisoft annihilating The Crew was the straw that broke the camel’s back. This time,
3:13
gamers were going to actually do something about it. Enter Ross Scott,
3:17
a lifelong gamer and Machinimator from Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He’s spent most of his adult
3:22
life being an outspoken champion of artistic preservation in gaming. In 2019, he called the
3:27
concept of “games as a service” rather than a product “fraud.” And in the fallout of Ubisoft
3:33
flicking the Kill Switch on The Crew, he was one of the most outspoken voices against it,
3:37
describing it, quote, an “assault on both consumer rights and preservation of media.”
3:42
It makes sense that he’d be the one to start “Stop Killing Games”,
3:46
a movement with a specific, actionable goal in mind: To take this issue into the courts,
3:51
and push for real laws that stop video game publishers from destroying games
3:55
and leaving customers behind in the name of pure profit. And if there was ever going to
4:00
be the perfect inflection point, it would be The Crew. It largely functioned as a
4:04
single-player experience that only had online functionality to preserve its Always-On DRM.
4:09
If the slide couldn’t be stopped here, it couldn’t be stopped at all.
4:13
The battleground for the future of gaming would be the European Parliament. It seemed that Stop
4:18
Killing Games had a bulletproof case, with millions of signatures from online supporters
4:23
and a real groundswell of momentum. But the gaming industry had an ace up its sleeve, too…
4:29
Chapter Two - Inside The EU Hearing
4:31
On April 16th, 2026, Ross Scott and Moritz Katzner took the fight directly to an EU
4:37
Parliament Hearing, where they had a once in a lifetime opportunity to present their
4:41
case. In just 2 years, it’d gathered up an unprecedented level of grass roots
4:45
support from consumers who’d had enough of being treated like pay pigs by the
4:49
gaming industry. As a European Citizens’ Initiative, it had already reached 1.25
4:54
million signatures by mid-2025 - enough to fill the Roman colosseum 25 times over - and
5:00
despite some naysayers in the online community, there was no slowing it.
5:05
And even though there was a barrier between the technical understanding of the campaigners and
5:09
that of the EU Legislators, it seemed like Ross and Moritz were successfully arguing their case.
5:14
Consultant Daniel Ondruška said, “Games that were developed 20 years ago still function. Games that
5:20
were developed three years ago… don't. It's a design decision. It's a business decision.”
5:24
In one sentence, Ondruška cut to the core of the dark truth here.
5:28
It’s not about inherent limitations in running certain kinds of games, it’s about the looming
5:33
specter of planned obsolescence. Ross touched on the tiny portion of a game’s budget that’s
5:38
designated for “end of life planning”. But that these numbers are often inaccurate,
5:43
due to factoring in features that aren’t applicable to offline games.
5:47
But while the Stop Killing Games movement has the human numbers to make lawmakers sit up and take
5:51
notice, any fight against multi-million dollar corporations is going to be an uphill battle. The
5:57
question is what kind of justification could they possibly give for their anti-consumer practices?
6:02
The answer is a crafty one. Using an avalanche of technical justifications to
6:07
overwhelm the conversation, not clarify it. If the language is complex enough,
6:11
the lawmakers - and the public - might not be tech literate enough to understand it.
6:16
The official statement of Video Games Europe read, in part, “Private servers are not always
6:21
a viable alternative option for players as the protections… to secure players’ data, remove
6:26
illegal content, and combat unsafe community content would not exist and would leave rights
6:31
holders liable… many titles are designed… to be online-only; in effect, these proposals
6:37
would curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create.”
6:42
There’s a lot that’s wrong with this, which we’ll be able to thoroughly dissect with the
6:47
secrets we’ve been able to dig up. But one part stands out as especially weak.
6:51
Because at the core of the issue is a simple idea: games shouldn’t
6:55
be abandoned without an end-of-life plan to replace DRM online-only functionality.
7:00
The danger here is that the knowledge imbalance would shake out in favor of
7:04
the corporate lobbyists. Politicians are skittish and change-averse by nature. If companies can use
7:10
the idea of an entanglement between the gaming industry and these toxic systems,
7:14
they might just be able to pull the wool over their political eyes. Nobody wants to be the
7:18
politician who signed off on an act that ended up collapsing a sector of the economy. That’s
7:23
exactly the fear that they want to instill in everyone’s minds with this kind of rhetoric.
7:27
If we want to see the truth hidden inside all the self-serving corporate spin,
7:31
we need to look at the code inside the games…
7:34
Chapter Three - The Anatomy of a Kill Switch
7:37
Switching off a game and its servers isn’t like packing it up in a box and going home.
7:41
It’s more like trying to cut the right wires while defusing an active bomb. One wrong move,
7:46
and you can compromise a number of games that you still want to suck money out
7:50
of. The average online live service game is running a little over 500 microservices and
7:55
heartbeat pings. Ubisoft alone has data centers around the world with central servers based in
8:00
Montreal. These carry every active release on Ubisoft’s roster and they’re all linked.
8:06
What does this mean?
8:07
Simply put, that the “kill switch” is a lot more complicated for these companies than
8:11
they’d ever let on. And a lot more expensive. We’re talking hundreds of thousands of dollars.
8:17
Untangling this dense web of microservers is the equivalent of knocking down the bottom
8:22
20 floors of a skyscraper while hoping that the top 40 remain standing. One wrong move
8:27
could compromise multiple servers and put millions of dollars in jeopardy.
8:31
So… why take the risk?
8:32
The servers, especially with microtransactions,
8:35
can still be profit-generating ventures. Shutter a live-service game and revoking
8:39
all the licenses will alienate paying customers in the process. Is it worth it?
8:44
Clearly, there are forces at work here that we don’t understand. Motivations and
8:48
incentives hidden behind the classic excuse: it’s just too expensive to keep a system like
8:53
this running. Still, the Stop Killing Games movement isn’t even asking the games industry
8:57
to provide server support in perpetuity. One of Stop Killing Games’ requests is that every live
9:03
service game has an “End of Life” plan. It means a game could be patched to be enjoyed offline,
9:08
or independent developers can have the tools to open their own servers.
9:12
This is yet another thing that every company seems to have a thousand excuses
9:16
for. Adding functionality like this will fundamentally alter the development process,
9:21
not to mention add millions to the cost of development.
9:24
And we might be sympathetic to that… if we didn’t
9:27
already have the ultimate evidence to the contrary.
9:30
Chapter Four - The Velan Blueprint
9:32
All the arguments about it being “impossible” for major publishers
9:35
like Ubisoft to release open-source tools start to fall apart the moment you look
9:40
at what’s already been done. Because a far smaller studio, Velan Studios,
9:44
has already done it. And they won the hearts of gamers everywhere.
9:48
When their beloved cult multiplayer Knockout City closed its servers in June, 2023, players assumed
9:53
that this would be yet another promising live service experience getting the sunset treatment.
9:59
But this time, things were going to be different. Very different.
10:02
Rather than making the sunset event a quiet, solemn piece of small print,
10:06
Velan decided to make the whole thing a huge blowout dedicated to thanking their
10:11
fans. As part of their sendoff, they even did a closing competition with a
10:15
$25,000 prize. That in and of itself would be a pleasant gesture, but they were about to take
10:21
it a step even further… and blow companies 10 times their size out of the water in the process.
10:26
Before the game was sunsetted, they released it as a standalone Windows
10:30
executable with private server support. That meant
10:33
anyone with the know-how could make their own server for free… forever.
10:38
It’s enough to give a high level gaming executive a panic attack. Velan assigned a team of
10:44
developers to modify the game into its privately hosted version. They removed licensed content,
10:49
stripped out monetization systems, and reshaped it into something that could live independently.
10:54
And according to reports, the cost was only around 0.5% of the game’s total development
11:00
budget. The whole process took 3 months, but in the process, it bought the game immortality.
11:05
Velan Studios director of marketing Josh Harrison thinks it was a worthy investment. He said,
11:10
“It is the single biggest thing that we did to impact the positive reception of the sunset.
11:15
It got great press, got great reactions from players, and ultimately, it keeps the game that
11:20
everybody at the studio worked so hard on alive forever, even with the live servers offline.”
11:26
If an indie development studio could create a sunset patch like this,
11:30
why can’t a billion dollar company like Ubisoft? When this question is posed,
11:35
they rarely actually answer. Instead, they change tactics.
11:39
Chapter Five - The Security Myth
11:41
One of the weaker arguments against the Stop Killing Games movement is the claim that
11:45
releasing open-source patches for sunsetted games would open the door to massive security risks
11:50
and give hackers a major advantage. One of the leading proponents for this is the controversial
11:55
game developer and internet personality Jason “Thor” Hall, otherwise known as PirateSoftware.
12:01
While private servers built from this source code would inevitably have to deal with bad actors,
12:06
using that as a justification to deny post-sunset patches altogether doesn’t
12:10
hold up. Given the consistent evolution of anti-cheating software between games,
12:15
it’s unlikely that hackers would be able to use it as a road map to interfere with games
12:19
that have active server support. While keeping the code under wraps follows
12:23
the “Security Through Obscurity” Doctrine, it’s often been pointed out that this is
12:27
actually more the illusion of security than any active measure towards it.
12:31
The fact is, one of the biggest traps for game developers might just be
12:35
something that they’re embarrassed to even admit.
12:38
Chapter Six - The Middleware Trap
12:40
There’s an extremely important part of modern
12:42
gaming development that we’ve been tiptoeing around here.
12:45
And it might just be the key to cracking this whole thing open: Middleware.
12:49
It’s like a kind of bespoke, pre-made bridge between the gaming engine and
12:54
some of its connected digital features, from animation and sound. Some programmers even
12:59
compare Middleware to a kind of “Software Glue.” Think Havok, Wwise, Autodesk,
13:04
and Nvidia. And this is no small part of the overall pie, either. Middleware, licensed by
13:10
all these external companies, can sometimes make up 15 to 20% of a live service game’s codebase.
13:16
It’s where the utopian ideas of the Stop Killing Games movement begin to hit an immovable wall.
13:21
When it comes to proprietary Middleware embedded in the server-side code,
13:25
not only do the developers not own it, they also don’t have the legal right to redistribute it.
13:31
It’s the poisoned pill hiding inside live service code. That means, in the truest sense, not only
13:37
do you not own the game, the people who sold it to you don’t fully own it. These business to business
13:43
contracts are choking out everything, and crushing consumer purchasing rights in the process.
13:49
This practice, inherent in the industry these days,
13:51
is what’s making the state of the live service industry so dire for gamers these days.
13:56
But we really should ask… how bad is it?
13:59
Chapter Seven - The Survival Rate
14:01
As it currently stands, live service games are a bubble caught in mid pop.
14:06
83% of the live service games that have launched since 2020 have shut down within
14:11
3 years. Stop Killing Games actually keeps a living record of dead games. As of April 2026,
14:17
the current tally of games that can’t be played in any way sits at 441.
14:22
In 2026, Sony has severely scaled back its current live service plans,
14:26
thanks to poor returns. How severe? They actually
14:29
canceled 8 of the promised 12 live service games they were slated to release by 2025.
14:35
And it isn't just Sony.
14:37
Across the industry, imploded games that’ve made headlines include The Cube Save Us,
14:42
Highguard, Concord, and 2018’s Radical Heights. What unites all
14:46
of these? Despite budgets in the millions, none of them lasted more than 6 months.
14:51
These games are in the middle of a legitimate existential crisis, a game apocalypse,
14:56
which will leave years of work from thousands of developers essentially wiped out. Right now,
15:01
the EU seems like it might be the last line of defense for a generation of digital media.
15:06
But just how much is really at stake here?
15:08
Chapter Eight - The Final Patch
15:10
Right now, we’re at a crossroads. Not just for the future of gaming,
15:13
but for digital media as a whole. Are we moving toward a world where paying for
15:18
something actually means you own it for life? Or one where “buying” is really just renting…
15:23
with extra steps? Because under the current model, every game, movie, eBook, or piece of
15:28
software can come with a hidden string attached. And at any point, that string can be pulled.
15:33
We'll have a good idea which future we’re gonna be entering by mid-2026. According
15:37
to a preliminary agenda published not long after the hearing, July 27th will be the day
15:42
the Commission officially responds to the legislative proposal. The time between now
15:47
and then is shaping up to be a real nail-biter. Not just for gaming fans, but for digital rights
15:52
advocates, media preservationists, and the companies trying to maximise their profits.
15:56
The hearing was stronger than many expected, with Ross and the rest of the team articulating a good
16:01
case for the moral principles behind the movement. But fate still very much hangs in the balance.
16:06
If things go well for Stop Killing Games and for gamers in general, it’s possible the movement
16:10
could help push a sunset Standard provision into the upcoming Digital Fairness Act. This
16:16
is a consumer rights bill designed specifically to protect people in the online space. Under
16:21
that kind of framework, games released after a certain point wouldn’t just launch and vanish
16:26
into uncertainty. They’d be required to ship with a proper end-of-life plan. Even if server
16:31
support did end, gamers would continue to own the games they bought in some form.
16:36
There’s another side to this coin, too.
16:38
There have been some whispers in the Commission about making cuts to the DFA.
16:42
The worry is that too much regulation would make them less economically competitive with
16:46
their overseas counterparts. This is a pretty seductive ideology for large corporations,
16:51
and it’s actually responsible for a lot of the erosion of consumer rights stateside. If this
16:56
philosophy wins out, all of the hard work of Stop Killing Games will come to very little.
17:01
Ross has said he thinks he has a much better chance with the EU than with courts in the US.
17:06
Which way will the pendulum swing? Only time will tell.
17:10
Our future is still in our hands… for now. What happens next may decide what owning
17:15
anything in the digital world even means. This is just the tip of the video game
17:19
industry's nefarious activities. Find out how sleazy video game companies really are
17:24
in “Why EA Is TERRIFIED To Release A New Sims Game”. Or watch this instead!
How Gamers Just Forced the EU to STOP Corporate Theft. - Video học tiếng Anh
