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
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.
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?
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.
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.
