(Text below written by @treasure@feddit.org. Hope you don't mind me yoinking it for here!)
The European Citizens' Initiative 'Stop Destroying Videogames' is nearing its deadline on July 31st and is still missing quite a lot of signatures. To be precise, at the time of writing this post, only 560.000 of the required 1.000.000 signatures have been reached.
Another requirement has already been fulfilled: The minimum signature threshold has been reached in 10 countries, 7 were required.
If this is the first time of you hearing about this initiative, here's a short TL;DR for you (more detailed information can be found here):
- Publishers that sell or license videogames should have to leave their videogames in a functional (playable) state.
- This means: Remote disabling of video games (such as live service titles) without providing means of keeping the game functional without the involvement of the publisher should be illegal.
- This does NOT mean that publishers should support their games forever, but rather that they provide tools (such as server binaries) to enable others to keep the game playable.
The initiative is slowly picking up speed again recently after its creator published a video explaining some of the background and why he doesn't want to continue after the initiative is over. The video has been well-received by the community and some big influencers have reported on the topic.
If you are an EU citizen and have not signed yet, THIS IS THE TIME! The month until the deadline is met will pass quickly. Use two minutes of your time to influence something that may improve your life forever!
CLICK HERE TO SIGN. (or click here for a guide on how to sign in your language)
Also, if you are a UK citizen, you can sign a UK specific legal petition that also carries legal weight (forces parliament to investigate the issue). You can sign that here: https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/702074/
Its not a meaningless web petition.
It's a formal, direct democracy style legal process in the EU, to get the relevant legal authorities to review and revise the laws that currently allow gaming companies to be greedy fucks.
A similar concept exists in many US states amd cities:
If enough signatures can be gathered in a defined amount of time, then the proposed legal concept that has been directly endorsed by enough citizens then is automatically either pushed to the legislators and courts to review, or to be included for broader democratic voting up or down on by the next local election.
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You apparently have no idea that initiatives and petitons can be more than just a legally non binding, essentially useless virtue signals on some random website.
In many, many parts of the world, something like an initiative serves as a way for the citizens of an area to bypass their own representatives and force them to directly engage with an issue.
If this initiative crosses the threshold, it stands s good chance at reforming the laws around games as a consumer product, from a consumer rights point of view.
Governments do actually have the ability to restrain and modify the actions and practices of corporations, by altering the laws that define what they are and are not allowed to do.
Further, because the EU has so many people, is such a large market for games... there is a good chance that if the EU reforms what game companies are allowed to do within the EU... well, developing an entirely different game for the EU and the US, totally different in the underlying internal design, more than just translstion/localization... from a business POV, it may end up making more financial sense to not essentially develop two games at once, and instead just develop a single, global game, that is compliant with with EU laws.
Go look into how digital privacy laws being different between the EU and US and other parts of the world are currently, right now, forcing many US based tech firms to alter their practices within the EU, and sometimes even in the US and elsewhere, due to the propagation effect of a huge market altering its laws.
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Another example of something like this is firearms in the US: California, and now several other US states, have passed laws stating that for certain kinds of guns, a magazine can hold no more than 10 rounds.
Prior to this, when such laws did not exist... not many firearm companies made and sold guns with only 10 round mags. Now, many of them actually do.
This has also occured at a Federal level with barrel length restrictions: Basically, you cannot sell a civillian a short barelled rifle, something that has a barrel less than 16 inches in length, or a total butt stock to tip of barrel length less than 26 inchds.
Before those laws were passed... you could buy those, companies could sell those.
But because a compact, higher powered rifle is the easiest thing to use in a confined space, for something like a school shooting... well, now all the guns have to be at least a bit bigger, so that they're more difficult to use in a 'moving from room to hallway to room' kind of scenario.
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Laws passed by governments can alter industry practices, thats the entire concept of regulation.
Laws and legal review processes can be formally initiated within a government by formal, legal, citizens initiatives, that's the entire point of them.