We just talked about Ross Scott’s Stop Killing Games initiative, started last year, which has found new life recently due to an online back and forth with some gaming industry veterans. As a short primer, Scott’s campaign centers around game preservation and ownership, two topics we discuss here regularly. It’s not a complicated set of rules that he’s advocating for. In fact, when viewed from the standpoint of the public, I’m surprised that there is as much pushback from the industry as there’s been so far.
The Stop Killing Games’ end goal is that governments will implement legislation to ensure the following:
- 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- The above cannot be superseded by end user license agreements
Simple. If you sell a game, you can’t unilaterally rip it away from your customers just because you designed it such that the company has to provide ongoing support and you don’t want to provide ongoing support. The technicals for gaming companies to make the above work are obviously more complicated to work out than four bullet points, but it’s certainly not impossible to do.
Well, Scott’s website included a petition for a law to be created to protect customers in the EU for all of this, and it managed to gather over a million signatures. That is the first hurdle to getting the issue discussed in the EU Parliament. And it seems like that debate might actually be one more giant step closer to happening, as a V.P. of Parliament has publicly signed onto the petition.
One of the Vice Presidents of the European Parliament, Nicolae Ștefănuță, publicly voiced his support for Stop Killing Games in a major win for the newly-minted EU Citizens’ Initiative. On July 12, Ștefănuță posted a video on his Instagram story announcing that he had signed the Stop Killing Games petition and plans to continue helping the movement.
Ștefănuță said in the video, “I stand with the people who started this citizen initiative. I signed and will continue to help them. A game, once sold, belongs to the customer, not the company.”
While Ștefănuță can only do so much for the Stop Killing Games movement at the moment, his support could be crucial if (or, rather, when) Stop Killing Games reaches the Parliament floor.
As PC Gamer goes on to note, it is very likely that most EU politicians haven’t even heard about Stop Killing Games, and they may not even have considered this to be an issue at all. But with Ștefănuță on board, and if the petition clears another hurdle of scrubbing and validating its signatures to make sure they’re legit, it’s likely this will make it to the floor for debate. And if that debate opens with Ștefănuță talking about the campaign and what it is seeking to accomplish, that will educate other members of Parliament and put a potential law to a vote. And, again, it’s quite hard to argue with the broad strokes of the campaign if you have any interest in the rights of the consuming public.
We’re a long way off from any actual vote on an actual law at this point, but it seems like this second bite of the apple for Ross Scott is beginning to bear some fruit.