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.
What a silly take.
Ignoring the issue, or not even being aware of it, does not mean that people don’t want to fix the problem.
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.
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.
And that’s fair. If we can’t figure out how to write this regulation properly, people shouldn’t sign it.
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.
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.
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?
