Regardless of FDev's intentions (as future ones coudl easily be scuppered - they could be bought out by Tencent for example, and then what!)
So,
sign the EU petition. It'll help other games too.
Just to highlight this:
If you are an EU citizen and have a slight interest in videogames, you should absolutely sign this petition.
I have been following this campaign since before it was launched, and it is honestly the best shot we have at changing things if you don't like how companies can just arbitrarily decide you don't get to play the game you paid for anymore.
Brief summary for some common misconceptions I see often: this isn't about forcing companies to support games forever. On the contrary, companies can run a game however they like and drop support at any time. But when they do, they should leave the game you bought in a playable state.
The best example of this is a game called The Crew. It was (past tense) a primarily single-player game that regardless required you to connect to Ubisoft's servers to boot the game. You can't officially play it anymore because Ubisoft released The Crew 2, and decided to render all copies of The Crew unplayable by shutting down that server. Evidence of an offline mode existed in the files, but turning that on would probably be effort. Not like there are any laws stopping them from arbitrarily destroying a game to push the sequel.
The campaign has examined every method of changing that, most of which are now out of our hands. Every functional consumer protection agency has had the issue raised to them, one in particular has escalated the issue to be given their highest level of focus. That's all ongoing, we can't affect that anymore, and it could take years.
The EU Citizen's Initiative is one of the last things left to do, and has a real chance of just ending the issue on its own. Its not some Change.Org petition, don't worry, its an actual legal mechanism to introduce new law with the EU Comission. It needs one million signatures by the end of July, we are 67% of the way there.
Go sign it, it takes like two minutes. Go tell people and communities you know in the EU to sign it. Best chance we've got, then it's all out of our hands.
Some other common questions: no, not every game is like The Crew and can be made offline with the flick of a switch. This is why the initiative calls for the game to be "reasonably" playable, there is a word limit and they can't include every edge case. It also applies only to new games going forward, and there's no reason why 99% of games can't be reasonably run by releasing the means for players to run their own servers, like games used to do. It could even be as basic as just making it easier for players to create their own server software, or not suing those who try. I'll take 99% over the 5-10% of online games that survive today.
There's also a British government initiative, but frankly, our government doesn't really seem to know what a videogame is. It hit the minimum for a response, and they gave a response that was so bad and confused it got referred to their own internal watchdog who told them to do it again.
Then the entire government shut down for an election, and the same response got slightly reworded. Like, switching the order of paragraphs.
It is still open for votes to force a debate in Parliament, for which like six guys will probably show up and decide nothing needs to be done, but if you got Brexit'd then this is kind of your only option at this point. Move to the EU and sign that petition.
No, there's nothing for Americans. You do not have consumer rights. You have to hope the EU initiative succeeds (spread the word) so that game companies don't want the bad press of shutting down a game but only for America.
