Imagine a world where you buy games, enjoy them, then keep them on a shelf to play again later.

Except you can’t, because the publisher shut the game down and turned your copy into a brick.

That’s what the Stop Destroying Videogames Initiative set out to prevent. In a nutshell, it asked for publishers selling games in the EU to leave them in a reasonably playable state when official support ends.

The initiative gathered over 1.2 million verified signatures and was formally submitted to the European Commission.

The movement came off the back of Ubisoft shutting down the servers for a game called “The Crew”, rendering it unplayable even in solo mode. That resulted in Ubisoft being sued and responding that customers had purchased limited access rather than permanent ownership.

So what was the outcome of the movement?

The European Commission decided the best solution was to ask the games industry very nicely not to do it again

Essentially, rather than making it a legal requirement, a “voluntary code of conduct” is being proposed for publishers, which they’ll of course follow when money is involved…

Personally, I agree with the movement. Publishers could:

• Create an offline mode
• Allow private servers
• Remove code that requires authorisation from their servers
• Provide the server software
• Warn buyers that the game carries an expiration risk

So the question now becomes:

When you buy a game, do you actually buy a game?