AAA Publishers Speak Out Against the Stop Killing Games Initiative

In case you missed out on all the fun, Ross Scott’s Stop Killing Games petition finally passed 1 million signatures last week, and as regular gamers and video game preservationists popped champagne and continued adding signatures – over 1.2 million at the time of writing – to account for fake entries and those from non-EU residents, an organization called Video Games Europe issued a statement disapproving of the initiative.

In its write-up, VGE opposed the movement by arguing that keeping video games players have purchased accessible at all times would “curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create.”

The organization claimed that private servers are not always a viable alternative for players, “as the protections we put in place to secure players’ data, remove illegal content, and combat unsafe community content would not exist and would leave rights holders liable,” further noting that many games are designed specifically to be online-only from the get-go.

In defense of game studios, Video Games Europe stated that whenever a game is delisted, developers and publishers ensure players are given fair notice of the upcoming changes, describing the decision to discontinue online services as “multi-faceted” and one “never taken lightly,” and because of this, VGE believes companies must retain the option to discontinue online experiences when they are no longer commercially viable.

Additionally, the organization issued a five-page document reaffirming its previous arguments with paragraphs upon paragraphs of corporate lingo and attempts to argue that allowing players to run non-commercially viable games on private servers is somehow bad for the players themselves. You can check out the full document over here.

Following the statement’s publication, many in the gaming community asked an obvious question: “What is Video Games Europe anyway?” And it didn’t take long for that question to receive an equally obvious answer: “Why, an entity financially interested in preserving the status quo, of course!”

It was quickly discovered that VGE is not part of the EU’s government, nor is it an organization with any direct say over whether the proposals outlined by Stop Killing Games would become law.

Instead, Video Games Europe is a lobbying group representing the interests of big-league, AAA publishers, with members including Activision Blizzard, Bandai Namco, Electronic Arts, Epic Games, Microsoft, Nintendo, Ubisoft, and around a dozen others, as well as numerous trade associations – in other words, everyone except the regular gamers, making their disapproval of the initiative, while frustrating for those who actually play and pay for games, at the very least understandable.

Here’s the full list of VGE’s members, according to their website:

If anything, this statement shows that even with more than 1.2 million signatures already collected – and the rest of July still ahead – industry top-dogs won’t back down without a fight. So, if you’re from the EU and support stopping game studios from delisting products players have paid for on a whim, you can add your signature by clicking this link.