Brussels will not make publishers leave games playable. The useful paragraph in its answer is the one nobody asked for.
1,294,188 verified signatures bought a voluntary code of conduct and an awareness campaign. They also bought the clearest official statement yet on what a buyer is owed when a seller switches off software that was paid for up front.
Draft, not yet edited. Written by Ruben Castellane, and not yet through the desk: nothing here has been checked against the sources listed at the foot of the page. Do not act on it.
The Crew was released on 2 December 2014 and stopped existing on 31 March 2024. Not withdrawn from sale — that had happened the previous December — but switched off. The servers the game needed in order to run were turned off, and every copy anybody had bought, disc or download, became a thing that loads to an error message. I cannot play it in order to write about it. Neither can the people who paid for it.
What that produced, eventually, was 1,294,188 verified signatures across the Union, and what the signatures produced was a fourteen-page Communication adopted in Strasbourg on 16 June, C(2026) 4110 final, in which the Commission declines to do the thing that was asked. It is also, and almost nobody has noticed, the clearest statement any European institution has published on what a buyer is owed when a seller switches off something sold up front. Section 3.2.3. It will be read by people who care about racing games and by nobody who signs software contracts for a living, which is the wrong way round.
What was asked for is not what was reported
The initiative asked that publishers selling or licensing games in the EU be required to leave them in a playable state — specifically, to stop remotely disabling a game before providing some reasonable means for it to keep working without them. Its own text disclaims any claim to ownership of the games, to the intellectual property, or to the monetisation rights, and disclaims any expectation that a publisher keep paying to run a game it has discontinued. At the Parliament's hearing in April and again at the plenary debate on 21 May, the organisers said the thing applied only to games not yet made.
So: not retrospective, not a demand for free servers, not a transfer of anyone's copyright. The Commission reproduces all of that on its second page, and twelve pages later finds it disproportionate.
The refusal is a copyright answer to a contract question
Section 3.1 is about intellectual property and it is the load-bearing part of the no. A game is protected twice, as a computer program and as graphic and sound work, and a rightsholder is free to set the conditions of a licence including the conditions on which it ends. Server authentication and anti-cheat systems may be trade secrets. And games carry third-party marks under time-limited deals — the cars in a racing game, the shirts in a football one — so an obligation to keep a game running can be an obligation to keep using a trademark after permission for it has lapsed.
That last point is real, the initiative never answered it, and it deserves better than the reception it got. The industry's submission is weaker. Video Games Europe and the European Games Developer Federation told the Commission that an obligation to leave games playable would create cybersecurity and safety risks for players, because game environments deteriorate once companies stop supporting them. It is a strange thing to volunteer. The remedy for a product that becomes dangerous when its maker walks away is not to establish a right to walk away faster.
CRDConsumer rights
Were you told the duration and the termination conditions before you paid?
UCPDUnfair commercial practices
Were you told, once they had decided to shut it down?
UCTDUnfair contract terms
Is the termination clause itself fair?
DCDDigital content and services
Is a refund owed for what is left of what you bought?
Nothing here requires the thing to keep working.
The paragraph nobody asked for
Now the part worth the reader's four minutes.
Under the Digital Content Directive, the Commission says, digital content must have the qualities and performance a consumer may reasonably expect for content of that type, and those performance features include accessibility and continuity. From which: a discontinuation "can constitute a lack of conformity with the contract when the trader terminates the supply of the digital content or service sooner than the consumer may reasonably expect."
Then the remedies. A proportionate refund of what was paid in advance. For a fixed-duration contract the Commission works the example — five years bought, supply stopped at four, the fifth year comes back. For an indeterminate contract the refund is assessed against what was reasonable to expect, judged on the nature of the thing, how it was marketed, what is normal for that type, and how long it actually lasted. The refund covers ancillary contracts terminated with the main one. And in any event, the Commission says, unspent in-game currency must be reimbursed, because the point of buying it was to spend it.
Read that back with the words "video game" taken out. A seller withdraws a service sooner than a buyer could reasonably have expected; the shortfall is a conformity failure; the remedy is money back in proportion, prepaid credit included. Nothing in the reasoning is about games. It is the Commission's own working of the question every organisation in this publication's readership has been arguing with a vendor about since roughly 2019, published in the one document their sector will never open.
With one wall in it. The directive governs contracts between a trader and a consumer, and your organisation is not a consumer, so none of this is a remedy you can invoke against your own supplier. What it is, is the Commission's articulated view of what a reasonable expectation of continuity looks like — which is the thing your exit clause was supposed to price, and generally doesn't.
The safeguard has never been to court
And then, at the bottom of page twelve, the sentence that empties the previous four pages by half. The directive, the Commission notes, "applies only since 1 January 2022", and there are so far no rulings from the Court of Justice interpreting it.
In force since the start of 2022. No case law. The entire reason a legislative obligation is unnecessary is a set of rights nobody has yet tested in Luxembourg, and the Commission's proposal for fixing that is to raise awareness of them.
The right that makes legislation unnecessary has been in force since January 2022 and has never been to the Court.
Who has actually done anything
| Date | Body | What it did | What it produced |
|---|---|---|---|
| 31 Mar 2024 | Ubisoft | Shut down The Crew's servers | Purchased copies stop running |
| 19 Jun 2024 | European Commission | Registered the initiative | A twelve-month collection window |
| 31 Jul 2025 | Signatories across the Union | Finished signing | The 14th ECI to clear the thresholds |
| 16 Oct 2025 | Ubisoft | Shipped an offline mode for The Crew 2 | The only thing on this list a player can use |
| 26 Jan 2026 | Member State authorities | Verified the signatures | 1,294,188 confirmed |
| 31 Mar 2026 | Que Choisir Ensemble | Sued Ubisoft at Créteil | Unfair terms, deceptive practice. Undecided |
| 21 May 2026 | European Parliament | Held a plenary debate | A debate |
| 16 Jun 2026 | European Commission | Adopted C(2026) 4110 | A code of conduct, a report and an awareness campaign |
| 29 Jun 2026 | California Senate committee | Declined to pass AB 1921 | Reconsideration granted. Reported, not confirmed here |
The number doing the proportionality work came from a job board
Section 3.3 argues that the obligation would cost money, and adds that this "shall be appreciated in a context where 26% of European game developers were already laid off in the span of 12 months in 2024-2025".
Footnote 42 gives the source. It is the Big Games Industry Employment Survey 2025, run by a games job board and a recruitment agency. I opened it. It is an anonymous online questionnaire, fielded between March and June 2025, sponsored by a games company; 1,650 people in 85 countries answered, and the European sample the report actually analyses is 1,252, of whom 709 sit in the EU, the UK or Switzerland. The 26% is a bullet on the highlights page and it means the share of people who answered and said they had been laid off in the past year. It is not a measure of a workforce and it does not say that a quarter of Europe's developers lost their jobs.
The layoffs are real. That is exactly why this is irritating rather than pedantic: the contraction is well attested, and there was no need to reach for a recruiter's mailing list to establish it. It is the one figure in fourteen pages asked to carry any weight, and it is the only figure in fourteen pages that this publication would refuse from a vendor.
And it is a video game
The other half, which the committee version of this piece always drops.
On 16 October last year Ubisoft shipped an offline mode for The Crew 2, eighteen months after switching off the first one. It works. You can drive badly across a compressed United States with the wifi off, which is a pleasant thing to do on a Tuesday, and several hundred thousand people presumably are. That is precisely the outcome the Commission describes when it says active enforcement of existing rights can incentivise providers to offer longer-lived games — except that nobody enforced anything. What moved Ubisoft was a very large number of irritated people and a consumer association with a lawyer.
The code of conduct talks are supposed to start by the end of this year, and the report on how the directive has been applied is due in the same weeks. Both will produce documents. The tribunal judiciaire de Créteil, where Que Choisir Ensemble filed on 31 March 2026, two years to the day after the servers went dark, will produce a finding.
Everything in the European answer turns on how long a buyer could reasonably expect a thing to last, and no court has ever put a number on that. Anyone who has ever signed for software would like one. It is going to come out of a racing game.
Written from
Primary The document itself. Claims in this piece rest only on these.
- Communication from the Commission on the European Citizens' Initiative 'Stop Destroying Videogames', C(2026) 4110 final, Strasbourg, 16 June 2026Read in full for this piece, all fourteen pages. Source for: the organisers' objectives as reproduced at section 1; registration on 19 June 2024 following a request of 4 May 2024; collection between 31 July 2024 and 31 July 2025; submission on 26 January 2026; the meeting of 23 February 2026, the Parliament hearing of 16 April 2026, the EESC hearing of 19 May 2026 and the plenary debate of 21 May 2026; the statement that the organisers said the initiative targeted only games yet to be developed; the copyright and trade-secret reasoning at 3.1; the stakeholder views at 2.4 including the industry's cybersecurity argument; the conformity and refund analysis at 3.2.3; the sentence that the DCD 'applies only since 1 January 2022' with no CJEU rulings; the 26% layoff sentence and its footnote 42 at 3.3; and the conclusion that the requested obligation 'would not be proportionate'. Also the source for the EUR 170 billion global and EUR 22 billion EU revenue figures for 2023, which the Commission attributes to its own 2025 European Media Industry Outlook, and for the approximately 100,000 employees and 5,500 studios in Europe.
- Stop Destroying Videogames: Commission's reply to the European citizens' initiative, register entry ECI(2024)000007Read for this piece. Source for the figure of 1,294,188 verified statements of support and for the procedural dates, which match the Communication.
- Directive (EU) 2019/770 on certain aspects concerning contracts for the supply of digital content and digital servicesNot opened for this piece, and that matters. Every article number printed here — Articles 7 and 8 on conformity, Articles 14 to 16 on remedies, recital 53 — is the Commission's own citation in C(2026) 4110, reproduced as a location and not independently verified against the consolidated text. The characterisation of what those articles do is the Commission's characterisation. An editor should open the directive before this runs and cut any number that does not check out. The body says nothing about the scope of the directive that the Commission does not say, and the sidenote's point — that it governs trader-to-consumer contracts and is therefore not a remedy an organisation can invoke against its own supplier — follows from Article 3 and the definition of consumer, which this desk has also not reread this month.
- Directive 2011/83/EU on consumer rights; Directive 2005/29/EC on unfair commercial practices; Council Directive 93/13/EEC on unfair terms in consumer contractsNot opened. Cited here only as the Commission cites them at sections 2.2 and 3.2: pre-contract information about contract duration, termination conditions and functionality; the duty not to omit material information during the contract as well as before it; and the unfairness test applied to a term giving the provider a wide right to terminate without clear justification or reasonable notice. The figure comment in the body describes what each instrument catches according to the Communication, not according to a reading of the texts.
- Big Games Industry Employment Survey 2025: salaries, compensation trends and state of the games sector in EuropeRead for this piece, methodology pages included, because the Commission relies on it. Conducted anonymously between March and June 2025; 1,650 respondents from 85 countries; the report analyses only the European region, with a sample of 709 for the EU, the UK and Switzerland and 543 for non-EU Europe. Exclusive sponsor Scorewarrior, with further games-company and recruitment-agency partners named on the acknowledgements page. The 26% appears as a highlights bullet: '26% experienced layoffs in the past year.' It is the share of self-selected respondents, not a measure of a workforce, and this piece says so rather than disputing that European games employment contracted, which is well attested and not in question here.
- Press release: L'UFC-Que Choisir assigne Ubisoft en justice suite à la fermeture du jeu The Crew, 31 March 2026Read for this piece. The association's own statement of its action before the tribunal judiciaire de Créteil, on grounds of deceptive commercial practices and unfair terms, challenging clauses that deny ownership of a purchased copy, permit revocation of access without any alternative, condition use on services the seller may terminate unilaterally, and exclude refunds of wallet credit. It is a party's account of its own claim and nothing in it has been decided. The release gives no figure for the number of consumers affected and none is printed here.
- California Assembly Bill 1921 (2025-2026), 'Digital games: ordinary use', bill text as amended in Senate 23 June 2026Read for this piece. Applies to digital games first made available or re-released on or after 1 January 2028; 60 days' notice before ceasing services necessary for ordinary use; on cessation, one of four options — a standalone playable version, a patch, a refund at the highest price offered in the preceding twelve months, or server software and documentation sufficient for private hosting. 'Ordinary use' is defined by the purchaser's reasonable expectations based on how the game was advertised or described. Exemptions for subscription services advertised as temporary, free games, and games permanently downloadable for offline play.
- Case C-355/12 Nintendo and Others; Case C-128/11 UsedSoft v OracleNot opened. Both appear here only as the Commission's own citations — Nintendo at footnote 14 for the proposition that a video game is protected both as a computer program and as graphic and sound elements, UsedSoft at footnote 17 for exhaustion in relation to digitally distributed computer programs. Neither is relied on for anything the Communication does not say.
Reporting Attributed, not relied on. Where the reporting is the fact, it says so.
- Legislative status of AB 1921 after 29 June 2026The bill is reported to have failed passage in its second Senate committee on 29 June 2026, with reconsideration granted. This desk took that from legislative trackers rather than from the chamber's own journal and it is printed here with that qualification. The body does not say the bill is dead, because reconsideration was granted and this desk has not checked whether the file has since moved.
- California Assembly Bill 2426 (2024), adding Section 17500.6 to the Business and Professions CodeNot opened. Referred to here only because the Commission refers to it, at footnote 9, as a 2024 law requiring traders to tell consumers when a digital purchase confers a licence rather than ownership. Nothing in the body rests on its terms.
- The shutdown of The Crew, and the offline modes for its sequelsThe Crew released 2 December 2014, delisted in December 2023, servers shut down 31 March 2024, after which purchased copies no longer ran. Ubisoft subsequently said it would develop offline modes for The Crew 2 and The Crew Motorfest; The Crew 2's 'Hybrid' offline mode arrived on 16 October 2025. This desk could find no announced date for Motorfest's and the body says so rather than asserting it does not exist. All of this comes from the publisher's announcements as carried by trade coverage, not from a filing or a document this desk opened, and it is attributed accordingly.
Lead Pointed us at the story. Nothing here is cited as authority.
- Stop Killing Games dead game listCited for nothing. The Commission refers to it at footnote 31 as documentation of hundreds of shutdowns; this desk has not audited the list and prints no count from it.
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