Stop Killing Games, the consumer campaign designed to put a stop to publishers rendering their software unplayable once support has been terminated, has really picked up pace over the past week.
You may recall we reported on the campaign surpassing one million signatures, which if legitimate would force the topic to be examined by the European Commission, potentially resulting in new laws.
At the time of writing, an incredible 1.2 million people have signed the petition, with that surplus being necessary in case any of the signatures turn out to be invalid.
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Perhaps feeling the pressure, industry body Video Games Europe – which represents many of the major publishers, including platform holders like PlayStation and Nintendo – has released a statement, arguing the proposals in the campaign would render some games “prohibitively expensive to create”.
Here’s its letter, in full:
We appreciate the passion of our community; however, the decision to discontinue online services is multi-faceted, never taken lightly and must be an option for companies when an online experience is no longer commercially viable. We understand that it can be disappointing for players but, when it does happen, the industry ensures that players are given fair notice of the prospective changes in compliance with local consumer protection laws.
Private servers are not always a viable alternative option for players as the protections we put in place to secure players’ data, remove illegal content, and combat unsafe community content would not exist and would leave rights holders liable. In addition, many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only; in effect, these proposals would curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create.
We welcome the opportunity to discuss our position with policy makers and those who have led the European Citizens Initiative in the coming months.
Ross Scott, the YouTuber who started the campaign a year ago, has since responded to say “the arguments against allowing you to keep your purchase are flimsy”.
Meanwhile, the campaign continues to attract interest.
In the UK, the petition is now approaching 200,000 signatures. A preliminary response was released by the British government in February of this year, in which it said there were “no plans to amend UK consumer law on disabling video games”, but the scale of the current petition means it’ll now need to be discussed in parliament.
For those who haven’t been following this story closely, it all started with The Crew, an online-only game which was rendered unplayable when Ubisoft took its servers offline. The publisher later started revoking access to digital copies of the title, preventing any hope of private servers ever resurrecting the release.