Stop Killing Games. Endineer them.
Way back in the Ends book, I talked about computer games and the sophisticated endings they construct. Games create built-in closures to bring satisfaction, emotional resolution, and reflection. These are carefully crafted narrative experiences designed directly into the arc of play. So why do developers, product managers, and software architects, of those games, fail to see the end of the consumer relationship in similarly respectful, sophisticated, and rewarding ways?
Ubisoft Fallout & The "Stop Killing Games" Movement
In late 2023, Ubisoft announced it was shutting down the central servers for its 2014 racing title. Even though the game had robust single-player modes that could technically run locally on a player's machine, turning off the central authentication servers rendered the title completely unplayable.
In response, YouTuber Ross Scott launched the Stop Killing Games campaign. It escalated rapidly from a gaming grievance into a global consumer rights movement, culminating in a European Citizens' Initiative (ECI) that gathered over 1.29 million verified signatures across EU member states, alongside major parliamentary petitions in the UK.
What the Ross and the campaign is asking for—and what it isn't—is vital to understand:
What it is NOT asking for: They aren't demanding developers host servers forever, maintain games endlessly, or spend money updating dead software.
What it IS asking for: They are demanding that when a publisher decides to end official support, they leave the game in a functionally playable state—whether through a final offline patch, releasing server binaries for private community hosting, or providing a clear End of Life (EOL) plan.
Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot addressed the backlash by leaning into a service defense: "You provide a service, but nothing is written in stone... Nothing is eternal." Major trade bodies like Video Games Europe and the ESA lobbied hard against binding legislation, citing complex microservice architectures, third-party IP licensing traps, and threats to creative freedom. Yet under immense PR pressure and a California class-action lawsuit, Ubisoft quietly pledged that future titles like The Crew 2 would include offline modes at their End-of-Life—a quiet admission that offline sunsetting is technically viable when forced by customer pressure. Yay!
Blind Spot: Narrative Endings vs. Product Endings
What is surprising here is the total blind spot around the ending. With so many people building an experience that arcs from beginning to end, grounded in mechanisms of emotion, pacing, and storytelling. It is hard to understand why the off-boarding of the customer relationship is so completely ignored. Unlike many physical industries where I can excuse companies due to their ignorance of the Hero’s Journey or narrative structure. Gaming is the one industry where you would expect a sophisticated conversation about endings given the amount of boss fights.
As gaming has grown, it has become deeply networked, relying on remote back-end infrastructure. No one is questioning that evolution. But we have been here before across other sectors.
Insteon (2022): The smart-home company abruptly shut down its servers without warning, leaving thousands of users with unresponsive smart switches and hubs.
Google / Nest Cam & Dropcam: Google officially turned off support for older Dropcam devices, offering discounts on new hardware rather than local offline fallbacks.
Microsoft E-Books (2019): Microsoft closed its e-book store and wiped all purchased books from users' devices (though they issued full refunds).
Discovery Content on PlayStation (2023): Sony announced it would remove purchased Discovery TV shows from users' libraries due to licensing expirations, before walking it back after public outcry.
All of those businesses failed to see the ending as a problem to their own customers.
Onboarding Ownership Illusion in Digital Products
There is a fundamental structural flaw in how we sell these digital products.
If we look at the transaction model, games are sold using a Synchronous Payment model. The transaction happens instantly. Payment and the perception of ownership are exchanged in a single flash. A consumer’s mental model assumes ownership similar to a suit, a pair of shoes, or a bicycle. Standalone objects that operate independently of the manufacturer.
Yet the technical architecture treats the product as a Continuous Observation / Revocable License model.
We saw this exact same friction in streaming media. Apple and other digital storefronts push films as a purchase experience: "Buy this movie." Yet the system architecture cannot fulfil an actual ownership experience. If licensing expires or a user moves regions, access vanishes.
This was the route California lawmakers went in attempting to solve the Stop Killing Games complaint. Passing an Assembly Bill 2426, which forces digital storefronts to explicitly disclose that consumers are purchasing a limited license rather than owning the digital product.
When digital products sell the illusion of ownership at onboarding, they break trust at the finish line. Designing a true end-to-end customer journey requires alignment between the business model, legal terms, and off-boarding experience.
A Rule: Don't sell an ownership experience at onboarding if your technical architecture cannot honor it long-term.
Building a "Definition of Sunset" into Product Architecture
Off-boarding cannot be an invisible light switch flipped in a boardroom. It must be a planned, transparent narrative.
The first message about an ending needs to happen at the beginning. If a product relies on remote servers that will eventually be decommissioned, state the potential of an ending during onboarding. Businesses will argue they already do this in their Terms and Conditions. While legally true, hiding an expiration trigger in 20,000 words of legal jargon is not an experience—it is a dark pattern designed to shield the business from off-boarding responsibility.
When we build tech products, we create a Definition of Done for our sprints. We need to start building a Definition of Sunset into our product architecture:
Decouple the Architecture: Build client software so it can be unhooked from central authentication servers when live operations end.
Automate an EOL Script: Allocate engineering resources for a final offline patch or server binary release as a standard phase of the product lifecycle.
Make an End an Experience: Treat off-boarding as a core part of the product journey that builds long-term brand equity, rather than a toxic cliff edge.
If you want to integrate a graceful EOL framework into your digital products or SaaS architecture, explore our product off-boarding audits and consulting.
