PC Gamer reports that, in response to Ubisoft’s recent shutdown of The Crew, an organization by the name of “Stop Killing Games” has launched a campaign pushing game preservation. Specifically, they are urging gamers around the world to sign petitions and send them to their respective governments, urging them to look into rendering games inoperable.

The goal is to get these governments to put legal pressure on game developers and publishers to provide players with some means of being able to play once the companies supporting their games. Solutions include allowing private servers and removing the online requirements for campaigns and single player content.

I honestly don’t understand why this isn’t already standard practice. Seriously, it’s a pretty cruddy deal having to pay $70 for a product you’re (currently) guaranteed to lose access to after a few years, and it wouldn’t take that much extra work to deal with that. Also, online requirements have gotten rather ridiculous over the past several years. Single player games have absolutely no business requiring online connections, yet it’s practically standard practice now. So, given a few years time, we’re on track to lose a lot of games forever for no good reason.

So yeah, I’m really hoping this campaign succeeds, because this practice is absolutely a massive rip-off for for gamers.

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What’s your take on this? Would you sign onto such a petition?

Image from the Ubisoft press site