cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/28425976
Sign here to support the EU's "STOP destroying videogames"
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.
That's a bit reductive. Perhaps plenty care but don't know to even look for this thing to sign, or are too young to know how games used to be made, or didn't get the message about this petition in their own language. 1M signatures is an absurdly high threshold to clear; that's one out of every 450 people in the EU.
I think that reframing it in the context of consumer protection for digital planned obsolescence might benefit this campaign. Ultimately, this is bigger than games and I think it could benefit from a broader appeal
Exactly.
And it's something that only applies to a fairly small subset of people. If we look at Steam users (decent indicator of people passionate about games), Germany has the highest in the EU at 3.6M. 3.6M is ~4.3% of the German population, so if we extrapolate to the EU, that's ~19M Steam users.
If we assume that's an accurate measurement of people who would be interested in this petition, you'd need 1/20 of them to sign. I'm not in the EU, so I don't know how popular these petitions are or what the requirements are (do you need to be voting age?), but if I assume a lot of people who play games are young, and that young people tend to be fairly uninterested in politics, getting 1M signatures would be incredibly difficult even if it's something that all games agree with (and I would imagine most would care about this at some level).
So yeah, getting >400k signatures for something like this sounds like amazing success.