It is at 361,826 out of 1,000,000 signatures with the remaining trickle after the initial spike nowhere near the pace needed to hit the mark before the 31st of July 2025.
I interpret the state of Ross Scott’s SKG campaign like this:
It’s pretty clear that democratically speaking, we do not object to companies arbitrarily removing access to purchased video games. Only a minority objects to it.
While it will stay up and get more signatures, there will ultimately be no follow-through to this campaign. The reality is that it’s not politically sound, it’s not built on a foundation of a real public desire for change. In other words, voters don’t want it. You might, but most of your family and friends don’t want it.
In my opinion, where this “movement” failed was in the messaging.
“Stop Killing Games” is a great slogan written by a young person without much experience.
No company or government will pass a law that says, “you must indefinitely support every game you ever release”. Now, I understand that this isn’t what the group was calling for, but this is the message that comes across. Because of that, it immediately loses support from anyone in any type of software industry and likely many other industries as we know it isn’t realistic.
The movement is two months in to a year-long campaign, and that’s just the EU. Ross Scott’s also likely pushing 40, if I had to guess. The clearest messaging of what they’re asking for is to prevent remote disabling of games, which is right in the petition.
Percentage wise, I’m sure support is very high. But for a petition like this, I’d be shocked if even 0.01% percent of people have even heard of it.
Personally, I support the petition (obviously) and wish it could have succeeded. But even I think that in the grand scheme of all the problems in the world, this is very far down my wishlist.
That said, it’s very close to other, higher-ticket items. For example:
- cloud service support for older cars
- digital purchases on platforms that go bankrupt (e.g. Redbox)
A mechanism for transitioning a service to user/community support when a company is no longer commercially interested is a common issue across sectors.
It’s pretty clear that democratically speaking, we do not object to companies arbitrarily removing access to purchased video games. Only a minority objects to it.
It’s more like “people don’t know about the issue, or how it affects them, as they’re busier with their everyday lives”. This happens a fair bit.
Additionally, the graph shows that the movement had huge fervour at the start but then lost steam. So:
- Is the movement well organised?
- Are there people actively asking others for new signatures?
- Is the movement able to recruit more people to proselytise it?
- Which areas of the EU have proportionally less signatures? And why?
- What’s the public image of the movement? And what about the cause itself? (People do realise that legislation to not kill games makes it easier to pass legislation to not screw with customer goods after they were bought, right?)
- What caused that peak in the 7th of September, and how to replicate it on purpose?
EDIT: can someone convince PewDiePie to at least talk about the campaign?
That’s a bit doomerist of you. Why leap to the assumption that voters are against it rather than the far simpler explanation that people are unaware of its existence, or don’t feel they understand it well enough to have an opinion?
In which case what’s needed is a much stronger social media effort, preferably headed up by the organisers themselves, or someone else who can make it their entire thing, from where it can hopefully radiate out to other interested parties.
You’re the one making people leave with your stupid spam.
Well spotted, a bit late though. I’ve personally labored to undermine a campaign expected to be very popular, destined for success, hadn’t it been for my devilish trolling. And now it’s too late.
You desperately wanted the changes to legislation that were proposed, but I killed it, just like we kill games.* Get outplayed and outwitted, nerds.
*(I have no affiliations with Ubisoft Entertainment SA.)
Well I can’t do anything because it’s EU only. I did do the France thing in the beginning which any person could do, but this is a situation for those outside of the EU only being able to watch.
Or maybe the vast majority don’t even know this campaign exists
You’re being ridiculous. It’s not a far strech to think that most people would believe that a company shouldn’t be able to take back something you bought from them. This has implications with digital content in general.
The issue is that you’re looking at group that shrinks at every step.
How many people own digital copies of things? How many of them have been through a situation where a company removes their access to that digital copy? How many of them actually noticed? How many of them had that experience with a videogame? How many of them got upset enough that it stuck with them rather than moving on? How many of them even know this movement exists?
If you get the word out, and frame it as the first step in a fight for improved digital ownership rights for all digital media, you increase your base of potential joiners.
The biggest thing is that you need to get the word out even further about it. I’m subscribed to a ton of gaming youtube channels and the only coverage of this that I’ve seen is from Ross and one other channel. Get bigger youtube names in on this.
Reach out to individual indie developers to ask them to sign a charter to support the movement and spread the word. Run a game jam on itch.io to start making it cool to support it and spread the word. For very small devs that are just putting the game files for single player games out there with no drm applied, it’s literally free to throw in behind this and could be free extra marketing for both parties.
Without a counter movement, or some way for people to register that you are against this movement, you have incomplete info and cannot assume that people not supporting this are actively against it.
It would be just as foolish to say that everyone supports it because 361,826 of 361,826 who spoke up said that they support it, right?
Movements like this live and die on awareness.
This has implications with digital content in general
Not even just digital content. This is only half a step removed from right to repair campaigns, and that’s all about physical hardware, ranging from mobile phones to tractors on farms.
From what I remember of the past posts about this I did not sign it because it had some stupidly amateurish phrasing in there that did not make any distinctions between companies doing something actively to sabotage continued use (e.g. DRM), simply not selling it while copyright prevents anyone else from archiving it, simply turning off the servers for some multiplayer title, forcing always online for singleplayer titles and companies not doing something actively to change it to run on new hardware and operating systems. The way it read it was basically demanding companies do the last one forever which is never going to happen.
So you didn’t sign it because you have no idea what it actually says and didn’t look into it at all?
I love democracy
What I read was the actual statement on the EU petition site. If that is not representative of the actual demands of the lawmakers maybe they should have iterated a few more times before posting it there.
There’s a whole FAQ which I’m sure also clarifies your problems with the initiative.
Is there a way without watching a 40 minute video?
39 questions sounds like a 5 minute read at best.
There’s also FAQ that on the initiative page but the video is more comprehensive (43 questions instead of the 17 on the site) because it’s made after the initiative FAQ and goes more in-depth concerning the specific grievances people brought up. And I didn’t expect anyone to listen to the whole video, the video is timestamped so you could find whatever specific grievance you might have.
Forcing companies to do what forever? The scope of what the petition can ask for is limited, and it’s up to EU parliament to find a solution. The problem statement is that you bought a game that can be remotely disabled. If you agree that that’s a problem, I’d encourage you to sign it.
Forcing companies to update their games for any new OS or hardware forever. Which would be an insane demand, thus, no signature from me. If you want support, spend some effort phrasing it properly before you present it to non-experts in the field.
I agree that that is a problem but unfortunately this petition wasn’t phrased in a way to deal with that problem.
No, that is not something the petition aims to do, stated clearly in their FAQ, and I don’t think I could arrive at that interpretation even without it. From the petition:
Specifically, the initiative seeks to prevent the remote disabling of videogames by the publishers, before providing reasonable means to continue functioning of said videogames without the involvement from the side of the publisher. The initiative does not seek to acquire ownership of said videogames, associated intellectual rights or monetization rights, neither does it expect the publisher to provide resources for the said videogame once they discontinue it while leaving it in a reasonably functional (playable) state.
And in the FAQ on the Stop Killing Games site:
Q: Aren’t you asking companies to support games forever? Isn’t that unrealistic?
A: No, we are not asking that at all. We are in favor of publishers ending support for a game whenever they choose. What we are asking for is that they implement an end-of-life plan to modify or patch the game so that it can run on customer systems with no further support from the company being necessary. We agree it is unrealistic to expect companies to support games indefinitely and do not advocate for that in any way. Additionally, there are already real-world examples of publishers ending support for online-only games in a responsible way, such as:
‘Gran Turismo Sport’ published by Sony
‘Knockout City’ published by Velan Studios
‘Mega Man X DiVE’ published by Capcom
‘Scrolls / Caller’s Bane’ published by Mojang AB
‘Duelyst’ published by Bandai Namco Entertainment
etc.
while leaving it in a reasonably functional (playable) state.
This, right here, is the insane bit that shows no understanding for the complexities of either hosting servers or programming. Now if they had limited that in any way to games that require the online component only for some sort of license check that would make sense but they haven’t. They expect the publisher to somehow turn a game from a state that requires online servers into one that does not and 99% of the comments in this thread and others on the initiative show that gamers do not understand the amount of effort that requires.
Now if they had demanded a removal of any online license check/DRM mechanism from games that only require the online connection for that, sure, that would have been fine.
Or, more aimed at the cultural preservation aspect, if they had demanded that game publishers should release all source code and assets before killing off a game so the community can develop some solution to keep it running, that would have made sense, even if it would have been hard to achieve politically.
However none of that nuance is in there, the whole initiative seems to be developed and supported by gamers who have never written a line of code or run a server that wasn’t specifically designed to be run by laymen.
This is a completely different position than saying that it expects games to be forced to be updated forever, so I’m not sure why you said that unless you heard someone else summarizing it incorrectly, like Thor, and didn’t verify it yourself.
First off, this is not a piece of legislation. They’re not allowed to do that. They’re petitioning for legislation and stating the problem. More specificity is for parliament to decide.
Second, legislation like this is basically never retroactive. If it does apply to games that have already been made, there would be a grace period for actively supported games. There always is.
Third, Ubisoft sure seems to find it to be worth the effort for The Crew games they haven’t killed yet, as they’re staring down the barrel of this potential legislation. And if you’re building a game with this requirement in mind from the beginning, it’s substantially less work. This used to be how more or less all online games worked, until they found out that a dependence on their servers was potentially more lucrative.
And that’s fair. If we can’t figure out how to write this regulation properly, people shouldn’t sign it.
It sure looks properly written to me, and I’m struggling to figure out how this person misinterpreted it.
Y’all have to push and campaign for this.
I don’t think so. It’s dead.
Even in the opening pitch, Ross acknowledges that things like this come in waves. The first wave was his call to action. The next ones, if we’re so lucky, will come from other influencers giving it a bump. And honestly, 1M is an absurd benchmark to clear. That’s one signature out of every 450 citizens. They need to know this campaign exists in the first place and care about it.
They should have made it a bit more broad.
Yeah, game preservation is important, but there are so many other services that have similar issues. What happens when your phone drops out of support? Should you be able to find an alternative OS instead of just tossing it out as e-waste? What about your car’s cloud services? Farming equipment repair for older equipment? Digital purchases when the provider goes bankrupt?
There’s a broader movement here, and they can probably keep the focus pretty narrow, but they do need to appeal to that broader market so they can demonstrate that this is a foot in the door for future legislation. Right to Repair is a very related movement in the US, and they’ve been targeting medical and farming devices because those have broader appeal than laptops and phones, and the important thing is to get that foot in the door.
It’s sad, but I think the only way to preserve video games is through piracy and emulation. The companies do not care, states do not care, and most people do not care until it’s too late (and the games are seen as consumables by most people, which imo explains why they are « happy » to buy the same games again and again).
If California can pass their law about what counts as “buying” a digital good, then I hope we can take that as motivation here in the US to try for similar. I wrote my representative about it (she’s an R, so she didn’t care), and I’ll see who I can write at the state level.
