Hey, I hope this doesn't come across like a shill, although it kind of is.

YouTube guy Accursed Farms (and many others) have worked to organise a large protest/legal action in an attempt to change the way that games as a service end.

The live service game The Crew being shut down is the catalyst. The game is being shut down and will be unavailable due to its server requirement, despite being a primarily single player game.

There is a site that has a good FAQ and instructions for your respective country on how you can best participate. USA has the least they can do due to the strength of EULAs.

stopkillinggames.com

Here is an excerpt from the site:

An increasing number of videogames are sold as goods, but designed to be completely unplayable for everyone as soon as support ends. The legality of this practice is untested worldwide, and many governments do not have clear laws regarding these actions. It is our goal to have authorities examine this behavior and hopefully end it, as it is an assault on both consumer rights and preservation of media. We are pursuing this in two ways:

30 minute video by Accursed Farms on the subject

    Just get rid of constant online connection DRM stuff. Ta-da, problem solved. You do not need half an hour long video for the obvious take. Besides, everyone who thought online-only approach will be bad already said it when Diablo 3 came out. It changed nothing, so I doubt anything will change now.

    Also, I do know some people found something like "Offline mode = 0" line in the exe of the Crew, but they fail to activate it properly. So far, at least. They say they are working on it, so perhaps The Crew will be restored via the efforts of the community. It is not that far-fetched, NFS World had gone offline successfully enough.

      Ross_R It's not about an obvious take, its about a legal precedent to force companies to do something over nothing.
      In the case of The Crew, there is the supposed offline mode that should be available, which is part of why legal action is actually something that might have some legs.
      You can always watch the video at a higher speed, then its not 30 mins 😉

        There was never any official talk about offline mode, guys just found some related code in the exe of the file. Ubisoft probably thought about it at some point, but then decided against it, therefore legal action has no legs: once again, Ubisoft never said the game will ever have offline mode.
        Anyway, I really have better things to do then spend even 10 minutes on that stuff.. I have even less power than the USA at the moment anyway. Godspeed though, I definitely root against Ubisoft in this case. I just do not hold high hopes. Or any other hopes.

        6 days later

        I doubt anything will come of it but it would be a nice requirement. I'm guessing it would apply to MMOs too and that's a huge chunk of what my game time goes to. I've even played a few MMOs on local servers just for me. It's an addiction I'll never break but I love them and get a lot of joy from them.
        It hurts when the few I truly love die and my friends slowly drift apart. At least playing offline by myself I can sort of relive memories or do the stuff I never got to do.
        Other than MMOs I don't think I've ever bought a game that required an online connection expecting it to last forever.

          11 days later

          I try to stay away from DRM games, but nonetheless I fully support Ross in his endeavors here. Though ironically, the one game that I both care about and is at risk of dying, Wizard101, might actually BENEFIT from having the game made unplayable, because it has a big community to this day that is very frustrated at how Kingsisle's been handling the game, and would ABSOLUTELY find a way to crack it and run it privately if it ever died.

          24 days later

          Never got why games can't just be Peer to Peer. Would cost the companies less money for upkeep and they can still charge their pay to win bullshit all the same.

            online only games will die if their online only. seems companies still dont care. I think there'll be multiple games that die cause of this, its already been going on for quite a while.

            Ragingether a lot of companies who run live service games want the playerbase to be completely dependent on them. E.G., why pay for microtransactions if you could just wait until the game expires and then get everything for free? It's part of the 'you'll own nothing' push that a lot of new money elites really want to see manifested.

                6 days later

                Ragingether There is what Jade said, but also business concerns about "community" that is more common these days. Every internet place now is itself a community, I imagine it is part of the same dumbing down/simplifying of everything culturally.
                There should be an update from the European union soon on this.

                Fantasy This mostly applies to games where they are mostly single player but for some reason have some always online component or requirement. The Crew is a good case because it was sold as a normal game to the average consumer and has no reason to not function solo. We will have to wait and see what the outcome is but I think its a battle worth fighting.

                      If Ubisoft were calmly notified that this game they saw as a limited life service that would only be appealing while novel and shared with other people, in fact has fans who would enjoy it simply reworked into a solo experience, who would pay for that, they would probably have done so by now.

                      But this is being treated like a fight because the gamer rabble (with the exception of Ross) are retards who love to fight, saw this as a pretext for a fight, and are now waging a fight. Because degenerate retards love to go moral crusading more than anything else in the world. The language being thrown at Ubisoft is conspiratorial and psychotic. Charges rooted in some kind of moral failure are flying around all over the place. GREED being the big one. Nobody can explain how or why this is GREEDY, and every proposed explanation I've seen is absurd.

                      Making games unplayable is perhaps a shame in theory, but have we lost any seriously interesting games to this process so far? Ross thinks every game is interesting because he is an autistic sigma male who enjoys looking at the video game equivalents to old chuck e cheese attractions gathering dust in a warehouse. This is not most people. Most people need to be beaten over the head and told that they'll have a hand chopped off next time they try to accuse productive people of moral error for fun.

                        MrBanana
                        />Buying Ubislop
                        />Buying live service games
                        I can't imagine buying games from a company that hates you.
                        Instead of coming to a conclusion that it would be better that Ubisoft should go bankrupt for their anticonsumer practices, you petition them to allow you to consume their product and keep them in business.

                            2 months later

                            There has been developments on this since the last time I was here.
                            There is a petition for the European Union member states where people can sign to get this considered for debate and law.
                            https://eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home
                            The petition represents the main avenue for pursuing this campaign.

                            HugoD The Crew in particular was a fun game and wasn't advertised as live service.
                            I have not bought another Ubisoft game new since, aside from the odd sale on older games without launcher.

                                MrBanana I saw this and it just passed 200k signatures
                                I think they have to hit one million for it to be properly considered
                                I saw louis rossmans video on the subject that I think answered some questions and queries i've seen

                                I wish all eurobros a good luck 🙂

                                  His new video goes over a lot of details and questions that people might get wrong. I'm definitely a fan of Ross and hope his attempts have at least some kind of success.
                                  [

                                  15 days later

                                  Bumped and signed, godspeed.

                                  Sheepishpatio.net is a forum running on the Flarum software, use of the forum is free. Please enjoy your time.

                                  Friends of the site Here

                                  If you are interested in creating imagery for the site, the resource page is Here