The ‘Stop Killing Games’ campaign has revealed the final number of signatures for a European citizen initiative called ‘Stop Destroying Videogames’. Officials behind the campaign said the European Union was able to prove that 1,294,188 of the petition’s roughly 1.5 million signatures were genuine, surpassing the goal of 1 million signatures needed for EU politicians to investigate a server shutdown that has made online-only games unplayable.
“Things are moving so fast right now that we’ve decided to share the final numbers with you all earlier than planned,” volunteer Moritz Kutzner wrote in a Reddit post that included a country-by-country breakdown of verified signatures. “Initially, this was not possible due to certain background restrictions and our plan was to wait until just before the next meeting with the EU Commission.
“At that point, we were going to reveal everything through video, along with a redesigned website, a rebuilt Discord, and a few other updates, but ironically, I can’t talk about it yet. We didn’t want to file a lawsuit unprepared, unintentionally leak information to lobbying groups, or, worst of all, burn out our team.”
According to the breakdown, Germany contributed the most signatures to petitions by a single country at 233,180, followed by France with just over 145,000 and Poland with nearly 144,000. Kutzner elaborated a bit more on the relatively small number of signatures that turned out to be invalid, at least in relation to the overall total.
“I’d say we’re definitely in the top three in terms of low signature failure rates,” he said in a comment on the post. “While we sit at around 10%, the best-performing initiatives tend to be in the 10-15% range, which puts us firmly at the top. Some initiatives have failure rates as high as 20-25%, and we still manage to get over the edge, but it’s worth noting that our overall sample size is quite small, at just 11 initiatives.”
For now, it looks like the campaign will wait for the campaign’s organizers to meet with EU lawmakers to properly begin discussing the issue, but the group has separately announced plans to “take some proactive steps” regarding the recent closure of Bioware’s online-only exoshooter Anthem. These measures took the form of providing instructions to Anthem owners in France and Germany on how to report closures to relevant consumer rights organizations. It is hoped that by contacting the Federal Consumer Union (Que Choisir and Verbraucherzentrale), those who purchased the game may be able to secure a refund, and one of Stop Killing Games’ future goals is to establish a “more generalized international reporting mechanism for canceled games in the future.”
The ‘Stop Killing Games’ campaign was the subject of debate in the UK Parliament late last year. A small number of members of the UK Green Party recently revealed plans to propose a policy amendment that would “force” MPs to support Stop Killing Games if voted through at the party’s next conference.
