Stop Killing Games petition passes threshold for a UK parliament debate

A petition to the UK government by the Stop Killing Games initiative has passed the 100,000 signatures threshold to be considered for a debate in parliament. A similar petition in the European Citizens’ Initiative is also nearing its 1 million signature threshold to be considered by the European Commission.

The UK government already responded to the petition after it passed the 10,000 signature threshold in February, saying “We are aware of issues relating to the life-span of digital content, including video games, and we appreciate the concerns of players of some games that have been discontinued. We have no plans to amend existing consumer law on digital obsolescence, but we will monitor this issue and consider the relevant work of the Competition and Market Authority (CMA) on consumer rights and consumer detriment.”

However, a debate in parliament is always good, and UK residents will be able to have their voices heard on the matter through their local MP – if this matters to you, then firstly the petition remains open until 14th July to add your signature and receive notifications, and you should try to get in touch with your MP to add weight to this argument. EU residents have until 31st July to help this petition cross the line.

Stop Killing Games is a consumer movement that came into being after Ubisoft’s announced shutdown of The Crew’s online servers last year, arguing that many modern games “are sold effectively as goods – with no stated expiration date – but designed to be completely unplayable as soon as support from the publisher ends.”

In the interests of game preservation and of simply letting people continue to play the games that they have paid for, SKG hopes to petition lawmakers to implement rules to prevent publishers from effectively killing games. This is not a call to for publishers to support games and host servers indefinitely, or even to release source code, but rather to provide an end-of-life plan for titles with core online components that ensure that the game remains playable in some state. In SKG’s proposal, this would still enable subscription-based games, MMORPGs, free-to-play titles and the many business models and styles of game that publishers have created, and existing games would not be affected, but plans would need to be put in place for future games to have this end-of-life version to ensure an offline mode.

For more on this, and the various edge cases and counterarguments that have to be catered to, please see the Stop Killing Games FAQ, because there’s some frankly bizarre and prehaps wilfully misconstrued pushback which was recently addressed by SKG’s founder Ross Scott – this video arguably spurred these two petitions on to some semblance of plausibility.

And the thing is, we already have a practical example of how this is possible for publishers to do in the modern games industry, let alone with historical examples. Following the public backlash to The Crew’s server shutdown, Ubisoft pledged to update both The Crew 2 and The Crew Motorsport to ensure that they have offline modes, ready for whenever it is that the online servers are shutdown. While multiplayer is a key component in these games, they can also be played as purely single player experiences.

There’s further examples, such as Gran Turismo Sport having online-only progression at launch, but Polyphony switching this to local progression for single player for the server shutdown. Velan Studios made Knockout City private servers available to the public, and more.

This should be the default course of action for companies to take, and we would encourage you to sign and follow these petitions, if you’re in the UK or EU.

Source: UK Parliament, ECI, Stop Killing Games