Hello all,
Some of you may be aware but I believe many are not. There is for some time ongoing a petition towards the EU and UK governments called “Stop Killing Games”.
This movement was started in regards of game preservation and malicious practices of publishers.
Objectives
This initiative calls to require publishers that sell or license videogames to consumers in the European Union (or related features and assets sold for videogames they operate) to leave said videogames in a functional (playable) state.
Specifically, the initiative seeks to prevent the remote disabling of videogames by the publishers, before providing reasonable means to continue functioning of said videogames without the involvement from the side of the publisher.
The initiative does not seek to acquire ownership of said videogames, associated intellectual rights or monetization rights, neither does it expect the publisher to provide resources for the said videogame once they discontinue it while leaving it in a reasonably functional (playable) state.
In simple term, the main points of these petition is to standardize game preservation. Basically to make publishers preserve their game in a workable state.
Example;
Games like Crew or any other games that have Single player often rely on always online component. When its online competent is removed e.g publisher decides to close down the servers the single player stops working as well. This doesn’t give any sense from perspective of the customer ~ gamers.
Games are not being sold as products but as services, which is inherently flawed and bad for game preservation.
More about this in detail
There are currently two petitions running for EU and UK. These will end in a month.
Thus I would like to raise awareness, if you are a citizen of EU or UK consider to sign the petition. IT will give law makers the precedence or at least initialization to standardize game preservation as such.
Link to European Citizens’ Initiative:
https://eci.ec.europa.eu/045/public/#/screen/home
Link to UK Government Petition: