Games as a service

❗Article Status Notice: This Article is a stub

Notice: This Article Requires Additional Expansion

---

This article is underdeveloped, and needs additional work to meet the wiki's Content Guidelines and be in line with our Mission Statement for comprehensive coverage of consumer protection issues. Issues may include:

• This article needs to be expanded to provide meaningful information
• This article requires additional verifiable evidence to demonstrate systemic impact
• More documentation is needed to establish how this reflects broader consumer protection concerns
• The connection between individual incidents and company-wide practices needs to be better established
• The article is simply too short, and lacks sufficient content

How You Can Help:

• Add documented examples with verifiable sources
• Provide evidence of similar incidents affecting other consumers
• Include relevant company policies or communications that demonstrate systemic practices
• Link to credible reporting that covers these issues
• Flesh out the article with relevant information

This notice will be removed once the article is sufficiently developed. Once you believe the article is ready to have its notice removed, visit the Discord (join here) and post to the #appeals channel, or mention its status on the article's talk page.

Games as a service (also known as live-service games) is a business model designed to continuously monetize games after they are initially sold (or offered for free), typically through new updates, DLC, and microtransactions. A common practice in this model is allowing players to pre-purchase content with the promise that it will be released at a specified time, and will include all features advertised in the product's listing. Games as a service also typically has a premium currency, which players purchase with real-world currency to acquire in-game items.

Issues

While GaaS incentivizes developers to keep producing content for their game, the game often risks becoming completely unplayable once support is discontinued. There is very little legal recourse for the user to recoup the cost of purchasing the game or its in-game content. The End-User License Agreement (EULA) typically disclaims the publisher's obligation to refund or compensate users, as it clarifies that they are purchasing a license rather than actually owning the software.

Additionally in some scenarios, content offered and even sold on GaaS may also be discontinued or revoked from consumers while the service continues.

Examples

Ubisoft

Main article: Ubisoft

XDefiant, developed by Ubisoft, is an example of a game as a service. On December 3rd, 2024, the game announced the shutdown of its servers on June 3rd, 2025. 49 days before the shutdown announcement, executive producer of XDefiant, Mark Rubin posted online that the game had no plans of shutting down after season 4, while the game was still in season 2, and they had recently discussed their plans internally for the second year of content. The shutdown post announced that the last 30 days of purchases would be fully refunded.

The shutdown of The Crew is one of the central issues of the Stop Killing Games campaign. Despite the game containing some code for an offline mode from the start, it was not made accessible to the user due to the game's digital-rights-management (DRM), leaving the game in a completely unplayable state.

EA

Main article: EA

In recent years, EA has garnered a reputation for being a company involved in these sorts of practices, and has received criticism for over-reliance on microtransactions and DLC.

Bungie

Main article: Bungie

The Destiny franchise is Bungie's primary source of revenue, and its current title, Destiny 2, has had a significant amount of content offered in the game that has been forcibly vaulted by the company. Most notably, player-purchased content, including singleplayer content that shouldn't necessitate access to a server, has been removed from the game. In mid 2022, Bungie did promise to stop removing content from the game, but not all legacy content has been reintroduced to the game.

Bungie's previous GaaS title, Destiny, requires an always-online connection, and while the company has stated that they will maintain legacy support for both modern platforms, and legacy console editions, it is plausible due to software degradation for the servers though, that the title could eventually become unplayable for consumers, especially as error frequency grows more common over time.

Bungie has also announced Marathon, a reboot for their older franchise. This game has the plausibility to release as a live service title as well considering Bungie's recent history with their games.