Campaign to stop online games becoming unplayable still wants more eligible signatures
The Stop Killing Games campaign’s petition to the European Commission has hit a major milestone, surpassing a million signatures. However, the YouTuber behind this effort to stop companies from rendering games unplayable by shutting down their servers is still asking for more folks to get their pens out and sign, due to concerns about fakery.
If you’re out of the loop, Ross Scott originally launched Stop Killing Games back in 2024, after Ubisoft pulled racing game The Crew offline. Cue a lot of debates about terms of service which tell folks that when you buy a game, you’re not buying permanent access to it, but rather a license to play it for as long as it exists.
“The European Citizens’ Initiative has crossed 1 million signatures. Except it hasn’t,” Scott announced in a video update uploaded to his channel Accursed Farms yesterday.
“This is going to kill morale, but there are two things going on here. The first we knew was coming. Every time somebody makes a mistake when they sign the Initiative, their signature gets invalidated. So that means we need more signatures to make up for everybody’s mistakes.”
“That could be a lot,” he continued, “I’ve heard 10% minimum, 20% is better, 40% should be really safe.” The second issue is that Scott says he’s “received several reports of people claiming to [have spoofed] signatures on the initiative site.”
“First off, I want to say that this is not a Change.org petition. This is a government process,” Scott continues. “Spoofing signatures on it is a crime. Please do not do this.”
It’s unclear at this point whether any folks spoofing signatures on the EU petition might end up being prosecuted for doing so, but it won’t invalidate the campaign as a whole. However, the fact Scott’s even heard talk of such a thing has left him unsure of exactly how many real signatures he’s got. He reckons there are “at least 600–700k” at current.
Hence him asking for EU citizens to keep on signing legitimately. As of writing, the EU petition is at 1,091,165 signatures, with a million having been the goal that would lead the European Commission to at least look into the issue.
It’s worth noting that Stop Killing Games also has a UK petition, which currently has just over 150k signatures, and looks set to receive a date when it’ll be debated in parliament soon. That said, the UK Government have already issued a response to that petition back in February, which reads: “There are no plans to amend UK consumer law on disabling video games. Those selling games must comply with existing requirements in consumer law and we will continue to monitor this issue.”
“I would bet money on the EU initiative delivering something good if it passes, but the UK has been more about exhausting all options,” Scott says in the video. He adds regarding that previous response from UK politicians: “A member of Parliament could sneeze on the petition, and that would not be a worse answer.”
