In a nutshell, this is a European Citizens' Initiative aimed at the future preservation of video games, especially always-online games, so that they can be available after the end of publishers' support.
In order for a petition to be discussed in the European Parliament, it must first reach the minimum threshold of signatures in 7 countries and a total of 1 million signatures. Where are we one month after the start of the collection? It looks like the a very promising situation, as we are now over 330,000 signatures.
Currently, the threshold has been exceeded in Finland (124%), Germany (113%), Poland (122%) and Sweden (109%), while Denmark (98%) and Netherlands (97%) are very close to achieve it. At the bottom of the list we find Malta (10%), Cyprus (10%) and Luxembourg (15%).
Focusing on the 3 largest European countries, excluding Germany, the situation is quite positive in France (63%) and Spain (59%), while Italy (30%) is the sixth-last nation in terms of percentage of signatures collected.
To find out more, I'll leave you with a video by Louis Rossman where he thoroughly explains the current situation and addreses some of the criticism towards this initiative.
If you are an EU citizen and want to support the initiative, you can sign it here.
35 Comments
Hopefully enough people will realize how weird it is that we don’t let book publishers come and burn the books we bought from them, but don’t have a problem letting game publishers do exactly that with our games.
Damn, only 30% for italy?? Our community is doing nothing lol, but I’m not surprised, people just don’t care about it for some unknown reasons
still better than concord
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Forcing a studio to maintain a server for a handful of gamers seems like a waste of resources. Can we make them available offline instead?
Really recommend signing it, even if you are not intrested in games. This is an important step into actually owning software you bought, if its a game or not
I did my part from Spain
If i use a vpn could i sign ot as a EU citzin?
I would support it if I was old enough to be allowed to😔
As someone who played danganronpa I really misunderstood the title. Like “wait wtf killing games are a thing now? How did I missed that?”
baltics what are you doing, lets go
I am bamboozled by how many people seem to misunderstand what the initiative calls for. Many games let you host your own dedicated servers already (Counter-Strike), even old abandonware games do. These games can live past official support, and we can have the same for future live-service games.
If a law is made and companies have to keep an end-of-life plan in mind from the beginning of development, I don’t see how this will ruin them.
Damn it. One more reason to hate Brexit. I can’t leave my signature for this.
One more vote here for Italy
although Germany Hit it already when i signed it but well…
Why should you care about games being taken offline when Steam only supports the last two Windows versions?
Plenty of games don´t work on Win 10, so I would have to resort to unofficial ways (which can be closed any day) to access them.
This is an insanely narrow proposal only focused on live service games, while my whole library lives on a “trust me bro” unofficial Steam backdoor.
A better execution of ideas would get a better response. It’s always better to take time and be careful with these things as to not hurt the industry.
FU BREXIT
Cheering from the sidelines in the US.
Seeming that Netherlands is 97% I’ll jump in
I did m, part
I did my part (Netherlands)
One problem with this campaign is that “reasonably playable state” as a metric is extremely vague and open to interpretation. Anybody who’s been in the gaming community for three minutes knows that the definition of “reasonably playable” will vary widely from person to person, so this is the first thing you’d have to clarify.
What’s “reasonable”?
Some day AAA games will become like old mobile games are right now. Lost media, you once bought the game for couple of bucks but since the stores aren’t there anymore nor any servers to connect to, you can NEVER launch them again, until you find a phone that has the game, dumb it to your pc (which is very hard) and optimize the game for an emulator or port it to an older phone.
We need a way to play these games after the servers are shut down. Let’s say some MMO got shut down, they could just release the game for free for those who has played it the past couple of months (or for 30 bucks) as a standalone singleplayer game with p2p servers (or non at all, since we know people will mod servers into them). At least the game is still fully playable and all the money you have sunken into the customization are still yours to keep and use.
Can’t do jack from UK. But I send my support.
PirateSoftware made a video or two on this movement as a dev in the Games Industry. Please give it a watch.
It’s such a poorly thought out concept, and it’s telling that pretty much anyone who has ever worked in the tech industry has come out about how stupid the idea is.
Does my vote still count towards the overall even if Germany has already surpassed the threshold?
I did my part in france!
This is kind of interesting in light of the recent Concord news. If this were law, would Sony be required to provide anyone who has bought a copy with the full workable code of a game they released a couple of weeks ago?
That seems like an intellectual property rights nightmare.
I’m italian and when I tried to give my signature, around last month or so, the system was quite bad and asked for a lot of documents and I wasn’t that willing to lose so much time, but this time it was pretty quick because I could use an eID, maybe a lot of people didn’t sign because of that.
The website for the people who haven’t signt yet
[https://www.stopkillinggames.com/](https://www.stopkillinggames.com/)
I was unaware of this, from Spain. Otherwise I would have vote.
Great, I was one of the first signing this. I’m glad it’s going good so far, hopefully we can reach more people with this, we need this in gaming.
When was the last time a major petition actually did anything?