Stop Killing Games (which just under a month ago was all doom and gloom) has soared past its prior goals—not only garnering enough attention to have Ubisoft’s CEO sweating during a shareholder meeting, but now soaring past 1.4 million signatories on the European Citizens’ Initiative.
“Stop Killing Games” is a movement started by YouTuber of Freeman’s Mind fame Ross Scott who, after seeing The Crew shut down by Ubisoft with nary a scrap of after-life support in sight, wanted to make sure it didn’t happen again.
To clarify (per the initiative’s site) the goal isn’t to force companies to support their games in perpetuity, but to “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.”
Late June, Scott was about ready to tap out, given the UK’s prior responses and the initiative being half a million signatures off the bare minimum when it came to the European Commission. Fast-forward a month (and some YouTube drama I shan’t bog down this article with) and the movement’s gained a huge amount of momentum.
The European Citizens’ Initiative technically met its goals a while ago, though not without a heavy hanging asterisk of Damocles looming over the whole thing. As explained by Scott to PC Gamer earlier this month, there’s been potential whispers of a signature-spoofing campaign that’s put him “more on guard.”
We’re talking about EU law here, so any spoofed signatures—or even just people messing up bureaucracy—would be struck from the record. The solution to this is, naturally, to get so many signatures you’ve got a buffer against potential buffoonery, whether well-intentioned and stupid or a deliberate sabotage.
Per the initiative’s page, Stop Killing Games now has a buffer 400,000 people strong, exceeding its stated targets. Unless said spoofing campaigns have really outdone themselves, the initiative’s been (fingers crossed) successful. So, what happens now?
According to the European Citizen’s Initiative’s FAQ, as long as at least one million signatures have been validated (alongside a minimum number of signatories in at least seven countries) it’s off to the European Commission. That means, after validation, the Commission has at most six months to publicly reply to the initiative’s demands.
This doesn’t mean the EU must enshrine Stop Killing Games’ desires into law, but it’s a huge step forward—requiring the commission to state “the measures it plans to take, if any, as well as justifications, and an envisaged timeline for implementing the measures.” If that succeeds, it’ll go to the EU parliament to be discussed like any other proposal or law.
A massive turnaround, all told—going from struggling at 500,000 signatures to far surpassing its goals, even getting support from one of the EU parliament’s vice presidents. While I’m sure game publishers might have a vested interest in stopping these discussions—they said so themselves—the future’s looking promising for Stop Killing Games.