Stop Killing Games

[Caffeine]

Some of you are most likely aware about this initiative but I'm pretty sure many aren't yet, specially considering the fact nobody started a thread about this topic here until now, even though I consider this is something that this community will care about.

There's been for the last year an initiative that has been mainly promoted and pushed by Ross Scott, the guy behind a YT channel called Accursed Farms. The premise is simple; he (and many more consumers) want publishers to stop designing and selling games with planned obsolescence, where after a one-time purchase of a copy and an arbitrary amount of time, all copies cease to work because they require connecting to a remote server that only the publisher controls and can host. The initiative seeks to outlaw this practice and ensure that either the game is properly advertised as being what it truly is while selling it, or (preferably) that publishers either release a copy of the server along with the game at time of purchase or after their own servers go offline, so that users can host their own servers and can keep playing these games, many games from the past did work like this with Freelancer being the most obvious example here.

The initiative is called Stop Killing Games, and they're trying to amend this problem on the West through an European Citizens' Initiative, which was started ten months ago. They need at least one million signatures from European citizens to make it relevant (I was among the first to sign it when it showed up a while back), and for the last months the count has been stuck at ~400,000 signatures, recently however getting a steady boost thanks to a couple of youtubers with a high eyeball count.

If you're an European citizen and you care about preserving ownership and culture, you will most likely want to spend a couple minutes to sign this initiative, relevant links below.

Site to the SKG initiative, which contains all info you need about the issue.

"Games as a Service" is fraud, by Accursed Farms, an in-depth analysis about the issue.

"The end of Stop Killing Games", by Accursed Farms, this is the latest update on the initiative published four days ago.

This petition will close on July 31s of this year, if you want to sign then make sure to sign whenever you can as time's running low.