Despite a very unstable European Citizens’ Initiative website today, Ross Scott’s ‘Stop Killing Games‘ initiative has reached one million signatures as of this writing, meaning that is now eligible for verification by each of the responsible authorities in each European country and therefore the initiative can now move on and eventually be up for debate to the European Commission and Parliament. On top of this, yesterday at around 5PM BST, the United Kingdom-equivalent Parliament petition exceeded its 100K signature goal and now currently sits at 132K writings (nearing 133K!) as of this article’s publication. A debate date for that has yet to be announced.
It is important to note that signature collection doesn’t stop here—Ross Scott estimates that at least 1,2M signatures may be required as part of the verification process. You can head over to the Initiative site yourself to take a look and put your name in if you’re a European citizen. If you’re a United Kingdom citizen, head over to the Parliament petition page to sign and learn more about the petition as well.
If you’re new to the ‘Stop Killing Games’ campaign, it is a consumer movement started by Ross Scott of Accursed Farms fame meant to rally for a collective agreement to pass legislation that preserves games and their playability once a publisher shuts down their services. A significant chunk of games across the industry are shuttered every year and with those shutdowns means that games consumers have invested time and money in effectively become unplayable with no recourse beyond potential reverse-engineering solutions. A great video from Gamers Nexus and Ross Scott can shine more light on this as well as our prior article on the matter:
