Episode Transcript
This is a computer-generated transcript. While our team has reviewed it, there may be errors.
Morgan Sung, Host: In 2014, Ubisoft launched a racing game called The Crew.
[Driving sounds from The Crew video game] All units, there’s a dangerous driver in your area.
Morgan Sung: The crew has a real fast and furious vibe to it. You play as a guy who’s been framed for the murder of his brother, who takes a deal with the FBI to infiltrate and take down a corrupt criminal organization.
[Driving sounds from The Crew video game] All units, rollover in place.
Morgan Sung: And to work your way to the top, you have to drive a lot.
Ross Scott, Guest: Driving games, they’re less common as they used to be. So the ones that are good or semi-decent tend to have a lingering fan base now.
Morgan Sung:This is Ross Scott, a filmmaker who runs the YouTube channel Accursed Farms. He’s also a gamer and was a huge fan of The Crew. The game had an intriguing story, cool missions to complete, and all of these ways to customize your car to make it feel like it’s really yours. But what Ross loved most about the game was the driving. The Crew was an open world game and he spent hours exploring.
Ross Scott: I think it still is the second largest driving game ever made and it contains kind of a miniaturized version of the continental United States where you can literally drive for hours in it and see the different landscapes like the Rockies in the west or swamps in the south. They kind of had miniaturized versions of different cities in there too. So you have San Francisco, LA, New York, Miami. Like, you can go by the Pentagon and you can go by Mount Rushmore. It’s exactly the sort of game you would hope to see from a big company with lots of resources to throw at something. It is just so huge.
Morgan Sung: But, there is this one aspect of the game that always bugged Ross. You needed an internet connection to play, which meant that The Crew would only remain playable as long as Ubisoft kept its servers running, even in single player mode. That meant that if the company ever decided to pull the plug, the game would be dead.
Ross Scott: Literally no one can ever play it again. It’s just not even possible no matter how much you do want to play it.
Morgan Sung: And that’s exactly what happened to The Crew. In the spring of 2024, about a decade after launching the game, Ubisoft shut down the crew’s servers. The company said that the shutdown was due to, “upcoming server infrastructure and licensing constraints.” Most of the time, when a product is discontinued, it’s removed from the shelves. But if you already owned that product, you can generally keep using it. But in this case, Ubisoft made it impossible to play The Crew at all. The company even revoked digital licenses for the game, preventing players from setting up private servers, which would have allowed them to continue playing.
As a seasoned gamer, Ross knew that The Crew was fragile and susceptible to game death, but it didn’t make the shutdown any less infuriating.
Ross Scott: The closest real world analogy I can think of would be printers. Say you buy a printer for your computer, but then after two years it just stops. And then you find out, oh, that’s because it was connecting to the server. Well, it still has ink. It can still run, I mean, physically run, but it just won’t print anything because it was depending on that signal from the company. And they just decided to cut it and you can’t use your printer now. That’s essentially what’s happening with these games. And they can say, well, we designed it that way. It’s like, yeah, but you didn’t have to, and it’s still very capable of printing things without you doing this.
Morgan Sung: As someone who started gaming decades ago, Ross has experienced game death over and over again. The Crew was his last straw and spurred him to start the Stop Killing Games movement, which has sparked global debate about the issue.
In today’s episode, we’re exploring what happens when games die, how the industry got here, why gamers are up in arms about it, and whether there’s any right way to let a game die gracefully.
This is Close All Tabs. I’m Morgan Sung, tech journalist and your chronically online friend, here to open as many browser tabs as it takes to help you understand how the digital world affects our real lives. Let’s get into it.
Let’s open a new tab. How do games die?
To get to the bottom of this, we’re calling up an industry expert, Nicole Carpenter. She’s a journalist who’s been covering the games industry for years.
So to start off, like, what goes into the decision to take a game offline?
Nicole Carpenter, Guest: You know, let me take a step back. Because when we’re talking about games that are being taken offline, we’re taking about games that are multiplayer, usually, and online games, so games with an online component. Like, a game that you purchased for the Nintendo 64 back in the day, that game’s always gonna be there. But for a game with an on-line component, it relies on servers that the company controls, and they can take those servers down at any time they want. And usually, it’s related to money. When a game has a player base that is really small or a game that isn’t generating enough money to make it worth it for the corporation that is running this game, that’s often when you will see a game go offline.
Morgan Sung: Yeah, let’s look at one specific game as a case study and it’s one that I really loved like, when it first launched: Kim Kardashian Hollywood. Kim Kardashian Hollywood was a free-to-play mobile game set in a cartoon version of Los Angeles. Once you level up enough and pay real-world money for in-game perks, you could take your private jet around the world, photoshoots in Paris, vacationing in Bora Bora, Fashion Week in New York. You get the idea. It was an animated slice of the real Kim Kardashian’s life.
Nicole Carpenter: This game was about rising through the Hollywood rankings. You’re trying to get to the A list, but you’re like really far down in the alphabet. You meet Kim Kardashian.
[Sounds from Kim Kardashian: Hollywood] I need something cute but super quick. Can you help me find something? I could really use your help.
Nicole Carpenter: And she helps you like rise through the influencer, social media celebrity ranking.
[Sounds from Kim Kardashian: Hollywood]: This is super cute. Thank you so much for your help.
Nicole Carpenter: The game was based around a storyline that follows you throughout that journey, but it was also largely about fashion, collecting fashion items, and building up this amazing library of clothes…
[Sounds from Kim Kardashian: Hollywood]: You look stunning. Welcome to the A-List!
Nicole Carpenter: …doing it you know with Kim Kardashian as your best friend. It was interesting because it was tapping into culture. You could go on dates, photoshoots. You can visit your friends, and it got frequent updates and it referenced things that were happening in the world, both in Kim Kardashian’s life, but also just kind of like cultural moments as as well.
Morgan Sung: I remember they responded like in real time to real-world fashion trends like when off-the-shoulder tops were in they had off- the-shoulders tops in Kim Kardashian Hollywood.
Nicole Carpenter: Yeah. A thing that was also really interesting about this game is that it was funny. It kind of saw how ridiculous, absurd this idea is. You know, you’re Kim Kardashian’s best friend. It’s very self-aware in its humor. And that was another draw for people, is that it was really earnest, but it was also self- aware.
Morgan Sung: Yeah, it was like, playing on this kind of parasocial relationship with like, Kim Kardashian, the real person, and then also Kim Kardashian your in-game friend. Yeah. What was the emotional investment here? Like, why were people so into this game beyond the fashion and the glam of Kim Kardashian?
Nicole Carpenter: For a game that updates so frequently, it becomes like a ritualized experience and you are coming into this day knowing that like, there are going to be things for you to do and to check off on this game. And so it really becomes embedded in a person’s life in a way, because you expect there’s something new to do in that game. And I think that is part of what made this game such a big part of people’s lives is because it became that sort of daily habit.
[Kim Kardashian:Hollywood player 1] When I tell you I am a A plus plus plus member in the top 100 of the game world, number 11, if we want to be exact, 595.7 million fans. Baby, I take this game very seriously.
Nicole Carpenter: There’s also the community around it. Kim Kardashian: Hollywood is not a multiplayer game, but online, a community built around it, people who are sharing the creations that they made, sharing their fashion, talking about the storylines, talking about the characters, and you’re able to build a community from something like, that isn’t multiplayer game.
Morgan Sung: Yeah. Players were, you know, getting emotionally attached to the game, but they also, to get all these outfits, to get these fun little accessories, they had to spend real money. Can you talk about the kind of like monetary investment people were making into this game?
Nicole Carpenter: People were spending a lot of money. People were spending thousands of dollars on this sort of thing. And the fashion was compelling enough that it was worth it for a lot of people and they spent so much. This game generated hundreds of millions of dollars. I believe the total was around $600 million over the course of its lifetime, maybe more.
Morgan Sung: Despite making so much money, in 2024, the studio decided to shut down Kim Kardashian: Hollywood. Nicole said it was a combination of diminishing returns, a complicated licensing agreement with Kim Kardashian herself, and a larger move away from mobile gaming by the parent Studio EA.
Nicole Carpenter: When it was announced that this game was going offline, the community was so, so sad. One of the things that popped up almost instantly was people creating funeral outfits. People were creating like the most fabulous, amazing, all-black, just like, funeral garb to wear to the Kim Kardashian: Hollywood funeral.
[Kim Kardashian:Hollywood player 2] Kim Kardashian, are you okay with this? What is going on? Please do not take this game. What am I supposed to do?
[Kim Kardashian:Hollywood player 3] Because I worked hard to get to level 26 and it’s being ripped away from me.
[Kim Kardashian:Hollywood player 4] When I tell you I have invested so much time and money, it’s ridiculous. I have purchased so many outfits, jewelry, makeup, blemish, all of that. Kim, I need my money back or you can send me my outfits in the mail, whichever one you prefer.
Nicole Carpenter: The community was devastated. They were so devastated that some people immediately started spinning up like, so where are we going next? What game are we moving on to? Some fans are even working on creating a new game to replace Kim Kardashian: Hollywood. I mean, let’s talk about the industry factors here in taking a game offline. Who’s making this decision to pull the plug? I would say it’s a mixture of the publishers and developers that are making these decisions and that for the majority of games, it is largely coming down to: is this making enough money to make the cost of the servers worth it? And a lot of the times they have been running these servers for years, like decades, and the player base has diminished. In other cases, these games have been running for weeks and the players have diminished and they pull the plug.
Morgan Sung: It seems like now a lot of games are taken offline before they even have a chance to like build a fanbase.
Nicole Carpenter:Yeah, yeah. There’s one game that came out recently, it’s called Concord, and it just didn’t hit with people. It was released and it never had that surge of players and just immediately started declining. It was turned off weeks into its release. I’m not sure why you would shut a game down after just weeks, you know, it it’s kind of ridiculous because there isn’t even a chance for the developers to improve a game, to make patches, to keep updating a game. Because there are instances where a game is released, it is released poorly, and then it can gain an audience back. And for a game like Concord, it shut down just weeks after. There isn’t even that chance. Games take a really long time to make, and there’s a lot of money that goes into that as well and for that to get thrown away so quickly without giving it a chance is like, pretty sad.
Morgan Sung: Like Nicole explained, there are a lot of industry factors that affect whether or not a game stays online. And now the odds are stacked against any new game that has to compete in this market. Is game death inevitable? Is there any way to future-proof our favorite online games? We’ll try to answer those questions after the break. Okay, we’re back. So, is game death inevitable? Well, the tides may finally be turning against the practice of pulling the plug on games. Time for a new tab. What is Stop Killing Games? For the most part, the issue of game death boils down to something called digital rights management, or DRM. We don’t technically own digital downloads, and even if you paid for it, your access to this content can be revoked at the whims of publishers. This goes for e-books, digital movies, TV shows, and, of course, games. And this DRM issue really bothers Ross, the YouTuber we heard from earlier. He says it wasn’t always like this.
Ross Scott:So the transition where things really started shifting, in my opinion, I think was around 2004, 2005. That’s when you could buy games as a one-time purchase, but then you would still have to connect to the publisher in order for it to run. You don’t own the contents of what’s on the disk, you just own the piece of plastic. I’d say around the mid-2000s is when you started seeing a shift that, no, even if you bought that game, even if it was a physical copy at some point in the future, it became impossible to play it.
Morgan Sung: Ross was upset when The Crew shut down, but he wasn’t surprised.
Ross Scott: Me liking the game was actually just a coincidence. I would have done this for any game because this issue has bothered me for a long time.
Morgan Sung: He has been sounding the alarm since 2019, when he went viral with a video essay about game ownership.
[Ross Scott in Youtube Speech]: Now I’ll warn you, this video is gonna be long and could get boring in spots, but it’s necessary. See, this is my declaration of war on games as a service.
Morgan Sung: Games as a service, or live service games, are typically online only, include microtransactions or subscription fees, and are continuously updated with new features. But what it really boils down to is the fact that players don’t control their access to the game. They depend on the company to keep it afloat.
Ross posted that video six years ago, and he was already fed up back then. By the time Ubisoft killed The Crew, after years of watching beloved games bite the dust. He was ready to fight back. In April of last year, right after The Crew went down for good, Ross launched a campaign he called Stop Killing Games.
Ross Scott: Stop Killing Games has been me just trying to work backwards from my conclusion, which is, I want to try and stop games being effectively killed this way. This was not hardly the first game that this sort of thing had happened to, but…
Morgan Sung: Earlier this year, Ross and a handful of Stop Killing Games volunteers conducted an informal report on the playability of 731 online-only games. Of those 731 games, nearly 70% were either dead or at risk of game death because publishers had no public plans for preserving them. The Crew is just one of many in a long line of dead and potentially doomed games.
Ross Scott: I realized if we don’t act on this game, yeah, there’s gonna be others, but this is about as good as it gets to try and test this because it was a relatively large game. It had, I think, a maximum of 12 million owners. It was also kind of black and white what happened where no one could run it again. Just the whole thing was gone. And the publisher was located in France, which has many more consumer protection laws than many other countries. So it would kind of maximize our chances that something could be done about it.
Morgan Sung: He posted his campaign manifesto on YouTube.
[Ross Scott in Youtube Speech] Honestly, everything about what I’ve been doing has been an amateur effort. I don’t even want to be doing this. But if you care about this issue, I’m what you’re stuck with, because nobody else has stepped up. And I guess there is one thing that makes me a good candidate for this, and that, at least with me, you’re getting maximum hustle. I have decades worth of resentment on this issue.
Morgan Sung: Stop Killing Games started as a website, guiding gamers on how to petition their local governments and hold game companies to a higher standard. Then it became a movement.
Ross Scott: I realized that we could try to submit this to consumer protection agencies in various countries because it had so many players. We could still get, we did end up getting several thousand complaints sent. That meant a lot of people still had proof of purchase of it. I kind of saw this as my only chance, momentum-wise, to do anything about this.
Morgan Sung: Stop Killing Games organized government petitions and consumer agency complaints in Canada, the UK, Australia, and throughout Europe. They’ve had mixed results introducing legislation, but they might have some actual movement in the EU.
Ross Scott: The big one ended up being a European citizens initiative where if enough people signed it, then that could be brought before the EU commission to create new law on it. I called it the moonshot. I wasn’t sure if it was realistic or not. And we ended up passing the signature threshold and now it’s kind of going through the government procedures. And I’m somewhat optimistic because if this practice of you know selling someone a game, then disabling it at an undisclosed date later, but keeping the money, if that was all completely legal, it’s been over a year since we submitted that. I would think they’d be able to give an answer by now saying, sorry, but this is lawful and you don’t have any case on this. I think what’s happening is this is a giant gray area in the law and they’re trying to unravel it all. If you have no idea how long a game you’re buying is going to last, I think that’s pretty relevant information. Because the span of online-only games, the shortest we’re aware of was a game called The Culling 2. It lasted eight days before shutting down.
Morgan Sung: Oh, wow.
Ross Scott:And the longest that was made as a one-time purchase, so, you know, not a subscription, is Guild Wars, which is still going. So if you bought the disk in 2005 and never got around to playing it, you can still play it now, even though it’s online only. So that’s no standard at all for what consumer expectations are.
Morgan Sung: How did other people respond to you saying like, hey, we should do something about this?
Ross Scott: I think the majority of people thought, yeah, that’s a good idea because it’s kind of common sense that if you buy something, you should be able to keep it. This was never really codified in the laws, whether this was legal. It’s just that it had never been tested.
Morgan Sung: It seems like the most potential for real legislation here is in the EU. Do you think that could work in the US?
Ross Scott: I have talked to some US lawyers on it, they all agree that the only way to fix this is through an act of Congress. So I’m pretty pessimistic about being able to influence anything along those lines. That said, I think most of the world will get the benefits downstream if we win in a big enough country. Like, there’s actually a real world example of this sort of thing. In 2014, Australia’s consumer protection agency sued Valve for not allowing refunds of games people bought on Steam.
Morgan Sung: Valve started as a game developer and now owns Steam, the biggest digital platform for PC games. It’s where the majority of PC games are bought and sold, all digitally.
Ross Scott: Valve lost that case so afterwards, rather than just allowing Australians to refund their games, they just made that global policy because I think they just didn’t want to deal with this in more countries and have more legal fees. And now that’s kind of common practice that you can refund a game if you only played a five minutes or something like that. The cost of basically not destroying a game and having some sort of end of life plan for it once the company’s done does not have to be that much if it’s planned for from the beginning. It’s just one step out of hundreds of making a game.
So I think what would happen is if they realize that there’s gonna be fines or some penalty for not having that, if they wanna sell in the EU, which has something like 450 million people. It’s a sizable market. We’ll decide, okay, when we shut down the game, we’ll release an end of life patch so people can keep playing it, but we don’t have to support anything. They may as well roll it out globally afterwards. So just because they’ll have already done the work on it.
Morgan Sung: It doesn’t always have to be this way. Since Ross and the Stop Killing Games volunteers put together that playability report, they found that over 250 games survived after publishers took them offline. Let’s talk about these possible solutions in a new tab. Is there life after game death? That playability report from Ross and the Stop Killing Games volunteers, they found that over 230 games survived because of fan preservation projects. Another 30 are still playable thanks to their developers making end-of-life plans. What does that really mean? What does end- of-life care for a game look like?
Ross Scott: Our initiative is structured this way in that we’re actually trying to leave maximum flexibility to publishers and developers and how they solve it. Every game is different. If there’s just one thing to do, it’s have an end-of-life plan for when you have to end support to the game so that it’s not impossible to play it.
Now, the most common way to do that might be to just, if it’s a single-player one, have an offline mode. If it’s smaller scale game, maybe allow like, private servers that people can host. If it was a big complex one, like an MMO, then maybe having something where they release like a version of the server software that customers can maybe run separately. But we’re not mandating any one solution, but just realize that you won’t be able to support your game forever. That’s kind of inevitable. And as long as that’s planned for, it really doesn’t become a problem.
Most games are already compliant with what we’re asking for. And ironically, a lot of online multiplayer games from the late 90s, early 2000s are still playable today, even if the companies don’t exist anymore, because they planned ahead for that. This is not some undiscovered formula for how to do this.
Morgan Sung: Gamers get a bad rap for being reactive and angry and complaining all the time. Sometimes it’s deserved. They can be annoying. And sometimes all that complaining can be channeled into something actually productive, like changing the games industry. In the meantime, there are some smaller efforts underway to make it more clear to customers whether the game they’re buying could eventually go away, like The Crew did. Here’s Nicole again.
Nicole Carpenter: If you’re playing a game that has a single player component, usually if the multiplayer component goes away, you can still access the single player. The Crew didn’t have that at all. So for people who purchased this game after it was released in 2014, there’s no more access there. This comes down to a problem with the idea of licensing versus ownership. So when you are buying a game with an online component, you are licensing the game and you are not outright purchasing it. So you are paying the company for access and they can take that away at any time. And so there has been a movement to change some laws, specifically in California, when you’re buying a game there has to be some kind of like a label that’s like you don’t own this you’re licensing it.
Morgan Sung:As of January this year, California law requires digital stores, like game platforms such as Steam, to disclose what the buyer is really getting when they pay for something. They can’t prompt you to buy or purchase a game if you’re only getting a license that can be yanked back at any time. Do you think a, like, “you don’t own this” kind of label on a game is satisfying to players?
Nicole Carpenter:Oh, absolutely not. Like it’s not satisfying to players at all. Like, people want it to be like it used to be like, when you buy something, you own it. It’s a problem with ebooks. It’s a problem with music. It’s problem with the games collectively, like in your Steam library. I wrote a story about, you know, where do your Steam games go when you die because of these licensing issues. That you’d like legally can’t pass those games down to anyone, you know, they’re just like stuck in your account because they’re yours, not theirs.
Morgan Sung: That’s bleak.
Nicole Carpenter: I know.
Morgan Sung: Is there any way for companies to let games die gracefully?
Nicole Carpenter: I do think there is. I don’t know, however, if big corporations are willing to do the things necessary to allow this to happen. Some players are hoping that studios and developers could go open source and so like, hand over some of the file’s code arts to the player base because if they’re not going to invest into it anymore, you know, they’re necessarily like, losing out on money by going open source, um, and so handing it over to like, a dedicated fan base could be a way to keep those servers running at like no additional cost to the developer. And that is a possibility.
Morgan Sung: But if fans are crafty enough, they might be able to figure out how to keep playing their favorite games, even if publishers aren’t cooperating. And that’s what happened with The Crew. Players have recently reverse engineered the digital key that unlocks the game. As of September this year, the game is back. It’s not exactly the same, but this fan effort managed to breathe new life into a game that was previously dead.
Ross Scott:This is the exception to the rule, and I’m thankful it has happened. What’s really going on with most of these games is a whole lot of the content is on the customer system or their disk or, you know, like the textures, models, sounds, and everything. And usually the part that’s held by the company is code for kind of managing how that all connects and it’s runs. So it’s kind of like having a locked car in your garage and you can’t get open, but they have the keys.
Morgan Sung: Yeah.
Ross Scott: And what will happen sometimes is you have these, honestly, geniuses reverse engineering how that game worked and trying to take their best guess at figuring it out. This almost always takes years of work with people who really know what they’re doing, they’re experts in the field. I’ve compared it to like reconstructing a photograph from the ashes that has been burned. But sometimes with enough time and effort, they can do it. In fact, in one video, I compared it to trying to crack the code the Germans were doing at World War II in terms of complexity, only to have people comment saying, no, it’s more complicated than that. A group that’s been working on it a little under two years managed to do that for The Crew, and now it is back. If you bought the original for PC, you can run it again now, offline and online. It’s the sort of thing where it took them a little over two years, and that’s honestly a best-case scenario. If they had access to the relevant code, they probably could have done it in a day or two.
Morgan Sung: I mean, it’s incredible that they were able to reverse engineer this.
Ross Scott: Honestly, I think it’s gonna be an even better experience than when it was being supported because now it also allows for lots of modifications to it. And there were things I wanted like adjusting the field of view or brighter headlights in the game. Whereas if you were to do that when it’s being supported, that would be detected as a hack because it is.
Morgan Sung: Is there still more work left to be done in keeping games alive?
Ross Scott: I never really wanted to be doing any of this. I’m just trying to do as much as I can to try to stop this practice and then just kind of be done with it. I guess I am glad that it seems like we’re not in the minority that people don’t like seeing things they’ve bought destroyed. It can feel like a Twilight Zone episode sometimes where you have to convince people that no, maybe this isn’t a good practice to just destroy things that you pay for when we can prevent it.
Morgan Sung: In some rare cases, there is life after death, game death, at least. But for the majority of online games that shut down without an end of life plan, the best we can do is mourn them. Sometimes that looks like fondly watching old gameplay footage on YouTube. Or it might look like slaying a funeral fit and sharing screenshots with other players on Reddit.
Today, it’s a memorial segment at the end of your favorite podcast. Let’s take a moment to remember a few of the games that didn’t survive and the games that are on their way out: The Sims Mobile, Anthem, Battleborn, Concord, Babylon’s Fall, Dear Hunter Classic, House of Newerth, Overwatch 1, MapleStory 2, Skyforge, and the one and only Kim Kardashian: Hollywood.
Let’s close all these tabs.
Close All Tabs is a production of KQED Studios and is reported and hosted by me, Morgan Sung. This episode was produced by Francesca Fenzi and edited by Chris Egusa. Close All tabs producer is Maya Cueva. Chris Hambrick is our editor. Chris Egusa is our senior editor and composed our theme song and credits music. Additional music by APM. Brendan Willard is our audio engineer. Audience engagement support from Maha Sanad. Jen Chien is KQED’s Director of Podcasts. Katie Springer is our podcast operations manager, and Ethan Toven-Lindsey is our editor-in-chief.
Some members of the KQED podcast team are represented by the Screen Actors Guild, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, San Francisco, Northern California Local.
Keyboard sounds were recorded on my purple and pink dust silver K84 wired mechanical keyboard with Gateron red switches.
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