Stop Killing Games Gets Over 1 Million Petition Signatures Verified By EU
from the inch-by-inch dept
I’ve been talking about the Stop Killing Games movement for some time now, so important is its mission to me. This collection of volunteers focused on video game and cultural preservation is attempting to whip up public support for legislation to achieve those goals. Currently focused in the EU, the campaign is built primarily on legislating the following rules:
- Games sold must be left in a functional state
- Games sold must require no further connection to the publisher or affiliated parties to function
- The above also applies to games that have sold microtransactions to customers
- The above cannot be superseded by end user license agreements
If you can find fault in any of the above, tell me what that would be in the comments. I personally see no such flaws. I particularly can’t find them in the context of a present reality in which games that people paid very real money for are ripped from their digital hands because publishers simply stop supporting them (online games) or because they were designed with planned obsolescence included (single player games that sunset when they can’t check in with servers (hi there, NBA2K games!)).
In order to compel the EU Parliament to take up the issue in session, the petition needed to achieve 1 million signatures. That happened last summer. Step 2 in the process is a review by the EU to validate those signatures, to be sure there is no shady fuckery in them. And that just happened, with the petition boasting one of the smallest percentage of invalidated signatures in memory.
Stop Killing Games volunteer Moritz Katzner has shared an update on the popular European Union Citizens’ Initiative to its official subreddit. The EU has successfully verified 1,294,188 of Stop Killing Games’ 1,448,270 signatures, easily clearing the one million minimum count it needed to move forward in the process.
In the comments, user MikeyIfYouWanna calculated that about 89% of the submitted signatures were legitimate. Katzner agreed, estimating that Stop Killing Games has one of the top three lowest failed signature rates among EU Citizens’ Initiatives.
“We’re sitting at around 10%, while the best-performing initiatives tend to fall in the 10–15% range, which puts us firmly in the upper bracket,” Katzner wrote. “Some initiatives see failure rates as high as 20–25% and still manage to get over the line, but it’s worth noting that the overall sample size is quite small, only 11 initiatives.”
Now, I will admit that I am no expert in how the EU legislative process works, nor how it interacts with the laws of its member countries. Over on the Stop Killing Games subreddit, where this signature achievement was announced, several commenters appeared aligned on how this works moving forward. Here is the best of them, from user AShortUsernameIndeed.
There’s a few steps. The EU issues regulations (which are EU-wide laws) and directives (which are guidelines for national legislation). Since this initiative is framed as a consumer rights issue, the most that can come out of it on the EU level is a directive (because the EU does not have direct legislative powers on consumer rights). The actual laws will then be written by the legislatures of each member country, separately. So the steps are:
- get the EU commission and parliament to decide to legislate, then
- lobby them to get a directive that actually does what the initiative wants, then
- lobby the parliaments of all 27 member states to get the directive transformed into laws that actually do what the initiative wants.
That’s a few years of work ahead, in the best case. We’ll see what happens.
That looks correct, from my own poking around. And it does indeed mean that there are both years of work ahead before this turns into actual European laws and there are millions of lobbying dollars to overcome. But it’s progress, if only incremental.
And while video game preservation has long been important to me, I will admit I never thought I’d see the day when a governmental body such as the EU Parliament would actually take up the issue. Through the power of the internet, a collective appreciation for the preservation of culture, and volunteer work, however, it appears that will happen at the very least.
Filed Under: eu, stop killing games, video game preservation, video games
Comments on “Stop Killing Games Gets Over 1 Million Petition Signatures Verified By EU”
I think that you are wrong on this point:
This point conflicts with a publisher who decides to leave the servers on permanently and requiring that copies of the game connect to them. Which has never been something that Stop Killing Games opposes.
The movement is focused on making sure that games remain playable if the server is shut down.
Re:
It is unreasonable for anyone to promise the ability to permanently operate a server. Eventually the server will be shut down (whether the current operators are willing, unwilling, or long dead) and at that point either the game doesn’t require connection with the publisher, or it’s unplayable.
Even should, for example, the publisher claim to currently have in their possession a version of the game which does not require that connection, and promise to release that version for free to all owners if the servers go down, that is still insufficient. That version must be stored somewhere and be accessible to someone who is able to distribute it, and there is no way to guarantee that said storage will permanently exist or that someone will permanently know how to locate said storage in the event of a server problem.
You could set up a dead man’s switch to “unlock” the game if it cannot communicate with the server… but that is identical to just not requiring the server at all, as anyone can just block their game from accessing the server to unlock it immediatly.
Re: Re:
You didn’t understand what Bilateralrope said, probably because you didn’t like it.
If the publisher wants to keep a server open indefinitely they can and would never require them to make the game usable outside of it if this passes.
It also doesn’t require the publisher to keep such servers open. But if they do. The game must stop requiring such to start, or an option for non-publisher authentication.
Should apply to everything
I’ve long thought that this should be the rule for all software, not just games. I don’t care if it’s a paid up front or subscription model. If you’ve paid any amount at all for software and some network dependency can no longer be satisfied then the rest of it should remain in a functional state – including when you naturally migrate to newer machines etc.
Over the years I’ve bought very useful apps from the App store which function across any number of OS upgrades. And they seem to make the journey to upgraded equipment but as soon as you tap on the icon you’re told “no longer available” and the icon vanishes. No advance warning at new equipment purchase time that some apps will be nuked (and they definitely have the data to do that). And no mention of a refund either. Bait ‘n switch.
Or some other organisation that used to charge five arms and three legs upfront for every software upgrade – everything locked down with licence servers – then went “subscription”, shortly after which they just switched off the licence servers. Lost me as a customer forever.
About the EU legislative process
When an EU directive gets issued, member states get an amount of time (generally two years) to create their “implementation laws”.
I expect that heavy lobbying will take place in Brussels as the directive that the EU issues determines the direction the implementation laws take. Member states only have a little bit of wiggle room to make the new law fit their other legislation.
To clear some things up, the campaign is not about instating new European laws, but about asking the parliament to tackle as to in what capacity existing consumer rights law in the EU apply to situations such as with The Crew, where the game was made completely unavailable to people who bought a copy. The core of the campaign was asking whether why or why not said consumer rights law applies to other forms of media, but not videogames.
“…games sold, OR LICENSED…”
When I first read the title of this post, I misread it as “Stop Killer Games”, and thought it was about some anti-gaming thing.
If you exchange games for cars, home appliances an virtually anything else with internet connections it would have positive and lasting impacts.
This is very simple and useful. But I’d add that efforts to reverse engineer stuff to make it compatible with latest hardware OR emulate it as possible should be included as exempt from copyright prosecution shifting the burden to the end user. If they have acquired the thing they can do whatever they want including downloading to emulate it in other hardware.
Many years, surely, then the EU might decide to do something, and than would only apply to new games sold in EU (and some publishers will certainly refuse selling in EU).
So if something ever happen, it won’t be before 5-10 years, and certainly not for games published before 10-15 years. Also, they will only run on PlayStation 7 and Windows 13, that will require permanent internet (because of AI, VR or anything else) and might be broken by design.
Because no games could run on its own, they’re heavily dependent of platforms. So yes, we may also need a “Stop Killing Game Consoles”.
Here’s the major problem that will never be fixed no matter how many signatures you get: You can’t legislate that a defunct company with no employees do software development. The end result isn’t that games must be “left” in that state so much as they must “initially” be in that state before they can legally be sold because after that point, at virtually a moments notice, the developer can cease to be. Further, the penalties are absolutely toothless. You can’t extract penalties from a defunct company.
So what is it going to be? Is there going to be a demand that games sold in Europe must conform to a set of rules before sale and then never release patches which may fundamentally alter the state of that already sold game? Or is there going to be some kind of financial “bond” that must be secured by the state to preemptively account for penalties which might be paid in the future if the developer at some point violates the rules before (or after) going out of business?
This is some prime grade “we must do something, this is something, ergo we must do this“.
Re:
Yeah, I need to see more specificity on what exactly this means.
If it means that, say, if an MMORPG’s servers go down then I can still play the game single-player with the files I’ve already downloaded to my hard drive, that seems reasonable. I wouldn’t actually want to play an MMORPG that way, but it’s useful for preservation purposes.
I’d also like to see regulation saying that if a company isn’t providing commercial servers to play an online game, it can’t pursue legal action against third-party servers (or at least not ones that are free).
There are ways that rules like these could be implemented without forcing additional software development — or perhaps only forcing companies that release games with always-online DRM to release a patch that removes it when they shut the authentication servers down.
So there are some implementation questions. The wording is broad and can use some refinement, but it’s a start.
Re:
The wording in the initiative is intentionally vague because if this actually gets off the ground, the specifics should be worked out between politicians and industry people.
This isn’t just about doing something to preserve games; it’s about working with the relevant people to find out what that something is.
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How often do you see AAA publishers going bankrupt ?
Because the EU has one trick they use to enforce the GDPR and other laws: They don’t just go after the subsidiary that violated the law. They look at the entire structure of linked companies and treat them all as a single entity.
To use a gaming example, if Blizzard broke this law by killing a game, the EU would be able to go after Activision. Maybe even Microsoft.
My guess is that games prices in EU will go up to cover this new cost of doing business in EU. If we ever get there that is.
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I can’t see anyone making two different versions of a game, one that complies with this and one that doesn’t. So I’d expect a price increase worldwide.
Though it will be tricky to separate this price increase from prices going up for other reasons.