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.
Or maybe the vast majority don’t even know this campaign exists
Y’all have to push and campaign for this.
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.
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 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.
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.
