Last year, content creator Ross Scott (goes by the alias Accursed Farms on YouTube) launched the “Stop Killing Games” campaign in hopes of prompting regulators around the world – particularly ones in the European Union – to take a close look at the gaming industry’s practice of revoking game access from the paying consumer once a game’s support period ends. Since then, the petition has achieved one million signatures, a crucial threshold that mandates regulators to weigh in on the issue.
Major Milestone For Stop Killing Games Campaign
Here’s the backstory of how this petition came about. At the end of March 2024, Ubisoft shut down its servers for The Crew, a racing game released in 2014 that required constant internet connection despite most of its content are strictly for single-player. Once the server was shut down, the game is permanently inaccessible; as a matter of fact, the company doubled down on this idea by telling players to get ‘comfortable’ not owning games in general.
Scott proposes several solutions, which includes developers providing an offline mode patch for games nearing end-of-life, or providing tools to the game’s community to set up third-party or private servers post-support. Ultimately, the key is to allow gamers to keep what they paid for (which often aren’t cheap), and it’ll be a major turning point for game preservation efforts.
The petition initially attracted some attention but ran out of steam nearing the end of the petition period, which ends this July 31st; Scott later published an hour-long explainer to clarify some of the misconceptions around this consumer movement and to once again raise the awareness of the issue. This time, big-name content creators – think the names like Jacksepticeye, MoistCr1TiKaL (also known as penguinz0), PewDiePie, and more – has helped spreading the message and massively propelled the petition to reach its one million signature target.
Still, this is far from over, Scott said. To account for erroneous or outright fake signatures inflating the numbers, the creator is asking for 1.4 million signatures just to be on the safe side. He also pointed out another important number: roughly 70% of 700 games that require constant internet connection will become unplayable if the plug is pulled. That’s hundreds of games that will cease to exist when the time comes, and a movement like Stop Killing Games, if successful, will keep many games away from the proverbial junkyards.
Pokdepinion: Good luck to the efforts!
