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- The above cannot be superseded by end user license agreements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.
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