Game over: Players press EU to ban ‘destroying’ video titles

It’s a bitter pill for video gamers: a growing number of older but still-popular titles are being dropped by publishers — with servers going dark overnight — in a practice the EU is being urged to outlaw. More than a million people from across Europe have backed a citizens’ petition called “Stop Destroying Videogames”, and are now pressing for action in Brussels.

At the heart of the issue: in the past decade, hundreds of video titles have been rendered unplayable at the whim of their publishers, for a variety of reasons ranging from profitability to changes in strategy. A significant part of popular culture is being wiped out in the process, with no compensation for gamers who in many cases have invested substantial sums, notably on microtransactions inside the playing environment. Video games are Europe’s largest cultural industry, generating billions of euros in revenue each year.

The phenomenon has concerned older versions of hugely popular franchises such as the FIFA football simulation series. “It’s a bit like buying a book from a publisher and then suddenly opening it to find the pages have gone blank because they’ve decided you can’t play your game anymore,” Brendan Fourdan, organiser of the French chapter of the petition, told AFP.
Buoyed by the success of the citizens’ initiative, gamers’ rights campaigners have been lining up meetings to persuade the EU’s different institutions to step in.

After meeting in Feb with the European Commission’s digital chief Henna Virkkunen and consumer protection head Michael McGrath, they made their case to members of the European Parliament at a hearing on Thursday.

Campaigners are calling for existing consumer protection rules to be enforced when it comes to gaming — but also for EU legislation to be updated, a far bigger challenge. “What we want is simply that when they shut down a game, they leave it in a state where it can still be played,” for example on private servers run by volunteers.

Failing that, the idea is to require publishers to systematically refund players.

Gaming companies, for their part, have rejected the solutions proposed by campaigners. “Private servers are not always a viable alternative option for players,” industry group Video Games Europe said in a statement.

It argues that without the protections publishers put in place to secure players’ data, remove illegal content, and combat unsafe community content, such a system would “leave rights holders liable” for abuses.