Game publishers want to end preservation. But we have a chance to stop them. 

Game publishers do garbage like this and then complain why piracy is at an all time high.

Ubisoft have specifically said that people should just get used to not owning games, so I consider it a moral obligation to pirate every one of their titles.

A consideration I'd like to reiterate is that this will erase a new generation of gamers' childhoods. A lot of us grew up with the 8-bit games, shareware stuff, et cetera, and we can go back and play those, and show our children and peers 'hey, this is our gaming history'. We can learn from them, build on them, et cetera. If this practice keeps going, the current generation will have NOTHING to look back on. No memories. No history. 'What did you do as a kid?' 'Well, I can't show you without getting into legal trouble.' Harrowing.

Imagine dollar stores taking things off your house because they decided it's not yours anymore.

Remember guys this all started because of these words: "It doesn't affect me". It might not affect you right now but it WILL in the future

If buying games doesn't mean owning them, then piracy doesn't mean they're stolen either 🤷

You should probably put this on the main channel too for maximum exposure

Okay, own nothing?! Then we'll pay nothing!

I like how Ubisoft says they had to shut down The Crew servers, meanwhile TrackMania servers seem to be immortal

Publishers: Piracy is ruining this industry Also publishers: Let's give those pirates more reason to pirate our stuffs

If a game company want to stop their official support to an online-only game, best just make the game's infrastructure open source so anyone who cared more with the game than them can continue the legacy.

1:33 YES!! SOMEONE FINALLY SAID IT!!! Campaigning for physical media is a representation of a sentiment, but NOT THE ANSWER.

2:53 Wrong. They did breaks laws. The end user license agreements are invalid if it conflicts with the law (no company is above the law). Here in Germany there are at least 1-2 paragraphs they did break with this, confirmed (see WBS Legal), and I think I heard in another video, that they also broke the law in the US as well, with this shady practice

I purchased a used game from an estate sale, and I can't run it without access to servers. This game released in '06. This problem has persisted for FAR TOO LONG!

It's important to note the job in the UK is NOT done. It needs another 80k signatures to reach a parliament debate. At that stage you then need to contact your local MP and explain to them in simple terms what is the issue and why it is an issue for you and what the solution is. Without that MPs will just read ubisofts statements and say current legislation doesn't prevent them from doing this.

GIven they way the EU has been going with customer-protection lately with Apple, Google, etc. I'd say pressuring them isn't the worst idea.

Sadly, no matter how many times people complain and we say to "vote with your wallet", there's always a group who ignore that and still buys into Ubis BS, and then complains abut getting screwed over.

If Buying is not owning, Pirating is not stealing.

We don't need more plastic discs with incomplete builds of games. We need better consumer protection laws for digital media.

Nintendo isn't out here breaking into my house to steal my old copies of Clubhouse games, Big brain academy, or Brain age, just because there's a switch release now, and Microsoft isn't preventing my dad from opening the 2007 office sweet that's installed on what used to be my mom's computer just because Office 365 is a thing, so then Ubisoft shouldn't be able to prevent people from playing the copies of their games that they bought with their own money.

The anti consumer bullshit keeps poping up in mega corporations Worldwide i hate this

It should be illegal for companies to use the term "buy" for something that's not permanent ownership.

If a company is not capable of engineering a product without a dead man's switch, then those products shouldn't be allowed to be sold at all.

I'm ok with companies taking down multi-player servers (it sucks and they should allow people to host servers once they take them down, but it's a reasonable thing to do if your game doesn't get enough players to justify the cost.), but preventing a single player game from being played because it relied on servers that had no actual gameplay purpose and only existed for DRM is fucking stupid. also preventing people from downloading games they bought is also bullshit, but that's a different discussion entirely. EDIT: EULAs aren't necessarily legally binding. If they got sued the courts could possibly determine that it's null and void.

"What can we do about it?" Don't buy their games.

Remember If there’s no legal way to get a product Don’t be surprised when people start singing sea shanties

Another issue I think should be highlighted is a lot of modern multiplayer games aren’t built to last these days. They release with a price tag, expect you to pay for some season pass or founders bundle when the gameplay isn’t even tried and tested yet. Recently multiversus had a season pass while in its *BETA* . The crew shutting down is another example of an online, potentially live service game failing to meet expectations.

I did my part! I filed a complaint to the verbraucherzentrale here in Germany. What Ubisoft's doing is just insane

Signed the au petition digitally. Glad I'm making a difference. FOR PRESERVATION!

"It's only a matter of time before it happens to a game you *do* care about" hello from the now-underground Echo VR community lmao

This is why I laugh at people who say “physical or nothing”. People clearly don’t see where the industry is heading.

Hell yea! Matt shining a light on Ross's campaign. As if this guy couldn't get any cooler.

When I was younger I thought piracy was wrong, but now it seems to be the only way to raise the middle finger towards big companies in a way that actually makes them take notice.

Imagine Ronald McDonald going to your table and taking away your half eaten Big Mac that you paid for that is expensive in 2024 and said "sorry, you do not own this".

What we need is to throw EULAs into the same category as those "warranty void if broken" stickers, make them unenforceable and non-legally binding. I get not keeping a server online for a game that isn't making money, but if it's not a multi-player experience and the server is only used to authenticate the game there should be a legal obligation for the company to make it playable offline.

to sum it up with an analogy: its like buying a house, and having the financial responsibilities of a homeowner (mortgage/insurance/taxes/utility bills), but the restrictions and limitations of a renter (cant modify the structure/only leasing/appliance restrictions/can have lease terminated at any time and evicted for any reason outside of repo) and nobody will see through this UNTIL it both starts affecting them AND affecting anything near this analogy and its too late

I added my signature to the Australian petition a couple of weeks ago, so all I can do now is leave a comment here in the hopes the algorithm continues to spread this message to more people! This is our one shot, our one opportunity, to make sure the law is on our side. I hope we can capture it and not let it slip. Mom Spaghetti.

Signed for Australia!

Canada's petition is up too! Really easy and quick to sign.

Nothing is owned, Everything is permitted.

One of my greatest fears is Microsoft buying Valve/Steam because of things like this, and the inevitable forced Microsoft account integration.

And then they cry about piracy

If Ubisoft didn't have a government-enforced monopoly over The Crew IP, none of this "online only" bs would've happened

I hope we can extend this petitions to any kind of digital or physical licenses that were previously purchased by a consumer and not just games. Any media that is not suscription based, one purchased must remain in some working capacity because I feel like if we our goal is just games, companies will try to find loopholes and say "wel our product is not a game, is an art engine that may have progression and other things" God I hope that this goes somewhere and we actually make a change

Reminds me of Minecrafts account migration. YES, you were warned about your account being deleted by microsoft however that does not justify that your paid ownership was revoked.

Companies should be legally required to open source servers and any additional tooling/data for a game when the game reaches end of life. As soon as the company decides it's not worth it to continue to provide service, the community should have the opportunity to run that service themselves. Fuck corporate greed. Most AAA games suck compared to games released by small teams that actually care anyway.

When Ubisoft was talking about licenses I believe they were talking about car licenses so they can use real life cars, this is the number 1 reason why racing games get pulled from storefronts, though their license for using a car brand running out doesn't justify taking away people's copies, they could have just stopped selling the game and let existing owners play offline

As an Australian gamer, I've already done my part and signed the petition.

"You no longer have access to this game. Why not check the Store to pursue your adventures?" is as corporate and anti-consumer as it gets. That should be grounds for an instant lawsuit.

Companies say games on how to move, and piracy says companies on how to prove.

This has been a problem for decades, I have physical copies of games from the early 2000s that I can't play anymore because of the drm.

I have shared the petition with my local member of parliament and signed. I urge all UK citizens who are eligible to vote to do so.

Glad you made this video, wouldn't have known about the campaign otherwise. Just signed the Canadian petition, hopefully it gets attention in parliament. Canada being home to quite a lot of game studios (including Ubisoft's biggest), it could have a big impact.

The EU consumer protection and DGCCRF are gonna have a field day on this one

I wish the best for us, and the possible worst for publishers.😊

You need to post this on your main channel it's way to important to be stuck on here.

I've been thinking about this sentiment for a while, for a lot of games, and it's starting to make my blood boil. Ownership and preservation are big reasons, but it also just feels like a lack of faith in the game itself. If a company makes an online-only live service game, and they don't take _any_ measures to keep those games accessible in the future, it feels like an explicit statement to consumers: "We do not value our product as an artwork or experience. Its only purpose is money." They don't believe their game has _any_ value as a game. This just makes me feel like Ubisoft _hates_ The Crew 1 and wants you to forget it ever existed. Why should I expect a game to be good if even the company doesn't have any faith in its quality? It's just something to squeeze money out of gamers for a couple months or years, then the game is totally worthless to them. In the past, a game might flop commercially, but unless something goes seriously wrong, you'd be able to buy it and experience it for all of the work and effort put into it. Even bad games had value, not just monetarily, but intrinsically. Now, a game only has to be "mid" or "a couple years old" or "not a breakaway hit" before the company scraps the _entire_ thing, doing everything they can to make sure nobody can ever experience the game again. Obviously there are some games where making an offline mode doesn't make a ton of sense, like MMOs, but the vast majority of games make a piss-poor excuse for why they should be treated like a centralized online-only game. Just giving people a means to continue playing is enough to show consumers that, even if it's a commercial failure, your game is still _a game._

Finally a campaign that actually took off and is getting a lot of publicity. I hope it all goes through

i'm a uk citizen and i signed the petiton very early on. i was told by someone i knew through discord. the government response isn't really much of a response, essentially saying that because there isn't any laws currently requiring game publishers to keep their games in working state, there's nothing that they can do to stop said publishers from pulling support, because naturally certain tech will be outdated and will be a waste of resources to keep them going. it's a massive none answer (which in my opinion is pretty typical for the uk government), and the only thing that we can do is hope that the petition reaches 100,000 signatures so that it can be discussed in parliament, which then again i wouldn't be surprised if it gets shut down there, but it's worth a shot. uk petitions last for 6 months, and the deadline for this one is in october. as of now it's 1/5 of the way there in just under two months, but there hasn't been much activity. hopefully that could change if more people talk about it, because it's not even just about games either, like what about films and music? this could easily happen to those mediums as well. part of the reason why i want this discussion to be had. that being said, thank you matt for bringing awareness. i've tried myself but i'm an internet lurker and don't have the platform or following to make any sort of impact.

Thank you! We need more people to be aware of this. The Crew was a part of my childhood, and it was taken away from me. And yes, an offline mode would have been easy. The actual multiplayer part isn’t server-based, it’s peer to peer, and when your router doesn’t support that, it’s just off. The servers are only for tracking stats and connecting players with each other.

The Crew was the first game I ever bought a physical copy of. (though technically it's not an actual physical copy of it, just a disk with a license key so you can download it) This was a punch in the gut for me, and I didn't even play it that often. So it must have been a lot worse for those who played it a lot more than I did.

You uploaded this basically while I was holding an argumentative speech against Ubisoft in school. More specifically, in Swedish class, we had to do an argumentative speech about words and expressions, and I chose to talk about how companies use vague or misleading expressions to trick consumers, and The Crew was one of my main examples.

I'm a big Hitman fan, but the modern Hitman games put a huge amount of the game behind the online servers, despite the games being 100% single player gameplay. They even released Hitman 2016 on GOG with the online DRM still intact (It got removed quickly after fan backlash). And yeah, this is a real problem. Big Assassin's Creed fan too, is Ubisoft gonna take my AC from me at some point too? I know it's easy to hate on Ubisoft specifically, but this is far from just a Ubisoft problem. It's a real industry-wide problem. Don't expect those petitions to do anything though. Especially right now, the UK Government is currently focused on looting as much as they can before they're voted out of power in a few months. The last thing they care about right now is consumer protection.

meanwhile in the United States I guarantee nothing will change...

I'm an acadrmic researcher studying the relationship between video games and wellbeing. It's going to be a massive hyperbole, but if this will become the norm within the gaming industry, then at some point in my career I won't have anything to do reseafch on.

"Server costs and licensing constraints" is just a sugar-coated way of saying "we didn't want to spend any money to fix the game because we are greedy". Ubisoft is not poor, they have no excuse 😭

Thanks for promoting this!!!

Signed the UK petition. We’re at 26K+ Let’s crack 100K like a can of cola!

If buying isn’t owning, the piracy isn’t stealing.

I think its not even only bad for players but dont forget: Many people worked on that game and surly where proud of their work, and now? Nobody can enjoy that pice of art anymore...

Thumbs up for spreading the message. We need everyone who could help to stop this!

The main problem here is needless connection to the internet, because yeah as he said I expect companies will shut down servers ultimately

I don’t have anything to say but I’m commenting so the algorithm will show this to more people. Please do not like this comment but instead do the same

This is why I personally will never buy any game from Ubisoft out of principle, and I hope all of you do the same. Unless it's something like a used copy of a Nintendo DS cartridge, I can't be certain that Ubisoft will try to take games I've purchased away from me.

It's not just games. Every product you purchase and relies on digital infrastructure needs to be open-soured if the developer decides to discontinue it.

Coming back to watch this, this really is one of the best summary videos on the situation to share with others. You hit all the most important points clearly and compellingly within only 5 mins, which means it can be sent to those with no prior familiarity to help convince them to take action. Great work, Matt, and I do hope you think to put this on your main channel, either copy pasted directly or at least linked from a community post! More people need to see this so they can more easily share the campaign with their friends and networks

I neither played nor even knew this game existed before now, but I now have the strange desire to don a pirate's hat and sail the seas-

YARRRRRRRRR!!! Let the Jolly Roger wave high in the skies!!! FUCK OFF greedy and capitalistic corporations!!!

"Own nothing and be happy" - someone who'd really love the magog cartel from oddworld and think they should emulate them.

Definitely going to follow these steps! I don't want to lose access to my games.... that'd be a bad precedent. Thanks MattKC!

Rockstar did it first and multiple times (GTA Trilogy, removing Red Dead Online from the game people paid full price for, made it a buyable standalone and cancelled it after people rebought the content they paid for) and no one batted an eye, [unpopular publisher X] did it once (The Crew) and became the face of it. Ubisoft have definitely fallen off since they ditched Rayman, but as bad as they are, they're still not the worst for this.

“Honey, why are the fbi and media outside our door? Did you cause a huge uproar that will result in the setting of an important precedent for the industry again”

But I don't buy them . If paying isn't owning , pirating isn't stealing .

Until it's addressed and resolved, we should boycott Ubisoft games as a whole.

Similar situation could also occur with Steam because you don't actually own any of your Steam games, you only have a license to play them through the Steam.

So... for the minimal amount of overhead that a fraction of a server is per region the game was sold in around the world... I 100% actually do expect a company to continue supporting it forever with one get out of jail free card. They can "support" it by distributing the server software when they are no longer willing to run the servers.

"Yea you're right, its your car but after 5 years it wont drive anymore no matter what you do but you can keep it yes." lmao

Ubisoft could have also released the server backend code if they wanted and allowed players to self-host third-party servers to allow multiplayer still.

Nintendo isn't anti-preservation, they have a lot of content preserved, it is part of the reason they hired an iNes dev back in the 90s, who helped them to dump their NES games. That is why there was an iNes header in earlier collections of NES games. Nintendo just doesn't want public archival or "preservation" by means of having 1000s of ROMs of Games you never owned.

It's happening to horse games too. Riding Club Championships. Horse Star. Mission Equitation Online. So many old horse riding MMOs nearly lost to time, CDs for Horse Star and MEO rendered EWaste because the CDs had a website link to where you downloaded these games. Riding Club Championships cheaply remade in Unity for Facebook. So I'm leading a group that preserves old horse riding games. Because horse games are games too. Please don't exclude them from preservation. They're real games that real children grew up playing.

These "game publishers" will literally sell their own mothers for money 💰

This is why the love of money is evil, because people do things for money instead of for love, and they slowly but surely destroy themselves.

Thats why Piracy and secondary backups are a duty, not a crime. If buying is not owning, piracy is not stealing. We sail the 7 seas, and dont look back.

Last! :)

Thank you for talking about this!

Leaving this here, for the engagement.

How to fix: stop buying games from Ubisoft, Activision, and EA. Stop it. Stop buying from them.

It is a pretty simple problem: If a game REQUIRES an online connection and some remote server to play, you need to understand and accept that it will not last forever. Servers aren't free, maintaining them and keeping them online isn't free, and unless the games have a constant flow of new players coming in to pay the bills, this isn't going to work out. You can say "well, Ubisoft is rich!" but it doesn't excuse a basic business situation that they would be looking at long term losses with no hope of ever getting back. Most new games have an online component are are entirely depending on online systems to run. This can be anywhere from player info and stats to full on server only games. Many games require way too much horsepower to actually run properly on a PC and also run the server required on the same PC. Many AAA online titles are already stressing out your system just running a client, and not everyone has a selection of network devices in their home that they can fire a server up on for game. For me, what needs to happen is a few fold. First off, online games should by nature be "free to download". Notice I am not saying "free to play" but the software itself, sort of like Fortnite, should be free to download. Then the gaming companies should be allowed to see access passes, seasons passes, or whatever you like to grant access to the games. So the gamer didn't buy a game, they bought a specifically limited pass / access with a given expiry. No more problem. As long as enough people are buying limited time access or season passes, it's all good. They can also go Fortnite on it, make the game free and make billions selling in game trash. I know it works, I have to listen to my son going on about it all the time. The "battlepass" is perhaps the greatest piece of marketing doo-doo ever made, it's an endless way to keep milking your players over and over. It is perfect, and it resolves any legal issues. They only assure the game is playable until the end of your pass, and nothing more. Single player games should not require online access. if they do, then they should be sold under the marketing system above. Nothing is forever, Ubisoft is proving it. They made an extremely bad design choice in how they made these games work, a very bad business model. Not sure there is any way to get back from where they are now.

This is just like all other forms off media. Such as shows, movies, and music. You might've "bought it", but you're gonna loose it when the company decides to shut it down.

were gonna be going back to the Amiga days of cracks if nothing changes