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.
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.
