The initiative has reached the required signature threshold in 15 countries, with Germany and France – the two largest – expected to follow suit.
How are people in a gaming community on lemmy unaware of what this is? These comments are ridiculous.
This is the first I’ve heard of it 🤷
Awww, we found a child who has never seen the xkcd
What’s xdkc?!
My favourite thing about this post is that it doesn’t explain what Stop Killing Games is, and links to an article which also doesn’t explain what Stop Killing Games is.
It took me 5 or so clicks to get to a faq on their website which vaguely talks about it: this is about games that rely on servers which get shut down.
Until I read the article I thought this was about making it illegal for games to Include killing. Couldn’t they have come up with a better name?

whats stop killing games?
oh i dont have that problem
Does this mean that over half of the signatures were from people not living in the EU?
No, the rest are a combination of ones not been verified yet and ones been proven false.
Gotta give it to that annoying guy with the fake voice and the greasy hair, I wouldn’t have known about this if not for him.
Do you mean Blizzard®'s first nepo baby?
I regret that after Ross’s stepping back, I didn’t give this issue much attention. I suppose we have to trust that it’s sifting through the slow gears of politics, but with so many “bull” responses to petitions it’s likely worth keeping public attention on it.
Let’s fucking go!
Why is this so important? First world problems… Why don’t you guys make signatures to improve the life of homeless people? Stop putting ads everywhere? Privacy invasive companies? Free food for the needed?
This is bullshit, honestly. I hate AAA companies in general, but this is nonsense. It feels like a bunch of teenagers signed it.
EDIT: Let me help ya, I’ll down vote my own comment too. Together we can!
I signed this petition. I’ve also signed other petitions over the years, I regularly donate to WWF and do other activities that I deem worthy of my time and money.
Caring about games preservation doesn’t mean that I only care about games preservation.
Also, why is it that games preservation is a first world problem, but “stop putting ads everywhere” isn’t? Where do you draw the line?
They renamed themselves to WWE in the 2000s :(
You do realize you’re perfectly free to start your own initiative about whatever you want, then submit it to the European Council, reach out to influencers, etc.? Instead of complaining about other positive initiatives online.
What a idiotic take.
Firstly its not like this is only petition people can sign.
Secondly this mighy very well be first petition for many young people. Its good stepping stone for them to get knowledge how these work and sign other things in the future. Also this is something imoortant for young people and its important they can get their voice out there.
Thirdly. Even if gaming might not be the most importand thing in the world, this is good thing to sign to fight for consumers. Companies have allready much power over what we consume and what services we use and this is step on the right way.
Fourthly. Many other problems have already large goodwill organisations working on them, like red cross, doctors without borders, oxfam etc etc. These organisations already lobby for new laws and are active politicaly. Consunerr rights are also important for everyone who consume and this is goes under that umbrella.
Fiftly. Its not about hating AAA game studios. Its pretty big thing regarding ever growing digital products and what consumer buys when they buy thise digital products.
If you cant think things further than just “teenages signing nonsense” i find it little annoying that you have the same voting power than me.
You know that large groups can pursue more than one thing at a time right?
I’ve never seen signature for other things get so popular on the internet.
And your solution is put down the one that did?
The EU citizens initiative objectively improves our chances of having a slightly better society in the future.
And that does not happen at the expense of some other arbitrary more important potential improvement.
So you are literally just complaining about something getting better.
I’m complaining about peoples priority
Sounds like you’ve got your own first world problem there :P
Then get off your ass and start and promote the petition you want to see instead of whining about what you do see.
Assuming you want to do more than just complain about shit on the Internet while actually doing nothing, that is.
No you aren’t.
There is absolutely nothing here indicating the people who care about this, don’t care about other issues, or only do so second. That is an assumption, and entirely on you.
If anything, this was so successful because it might actually work.
A bunch of EU citizen signatures wishing a war to end wouldn’t do shit.
Honestly (their) opinion needs to die. Any time people mobilise in big numbers to participate in democracy is a good thing on general principles, and unless people are signing a petition by the millions to like, make babies try cigarettes, it’s almost always going to be a good thing. It’s nirvana fallacy from top to bottom.
Exactly. And once people sign a petition and see it actually get implemented increases the chance that they’ll get involved next time.
This petition is great because it’s:
- actionable - it’s easy to see what the expectation out of a suggested policy is
- non-specific - there are a bunch of laws around this, and having a specific petition that happens to be illegal is a great way to get it killed
- broadly relevant - almost everyone who plays games cares, and gamers tend to complain more than act, so this is a baby step to get those people invested in action; even people who don’t care about games could care, such as right to repair people, since this lays a framework to get similar policies enacted
Something like homeless doesn’t have as clear of direction on solutions. Likewise ads, since that runs afoul of how tons of businesses make money, but this could be leveraged to reduce/eliminate ads in games that you pay for.
If this petition actually goes somewhere, I sincerely believe we’ll see more petitions from people who otherwise wouldn’t speak out. Ross was one of those people, and if he sees success, he’ll inspire a bunch of other people like him to act. I think it’s fantastic.
Frankly if people are petitioning the government en masse to allow babies to smoke, I think the government should at least seriously consider it. Democracy isn’t just for when ideas are good.
By that I mean that such petitions shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand, I don’t think that babies should be allowed to smoke, unless they can make cool smoke rings.
… on games@lemmyworld
Hey, to be fair, if Helldivers 2 taught me something is that we’re all a complainy bunch
Why are you worried about other people’s priorities? Worry about your own.
Well clearly you’re lying or you haven’t been looking, because this is NOT the most popular initiative on ECI.
Regardless, you can support more than one issue. It’s not a zero-sum game, you can fight for multiple things. It’s really not that hard to figure out.
makes sense
There’s a lot of crossover here. It encompasses the “you rent everything and own nothing” aspect of today’s society. It’s multi-billion corporations against consumers.
A win here will be something that will expose chinks in the armour for a lot of other issues. I know it might seem unimportant because it’s games, but that’s its beauty. It’s a backdoor into so many other fights.
Exactly! Some examples:
- right to repair - actually owning games is similar to actually owning laptops and phones
- ads in cars, apps, etc that you’ve bought - do you really own it if it’s littered with ads you don’t control?
Set the precedent, then gradually expand scope.
Then you’ve not been paying attention.
So, let me get this straight. You came into the internet, on a community that’s focused on gaming, and it’s sole topic is games And then complain when someone posts news about a petition related to gaming? Because people aren’t talking about… Homeless people and free food… In the gaming community?
Have you forgot your meds when you woke up at morning? If you want to talk politics, go to a politics community.
I agree with your statement by the way except for this is also politics
It’s interesting that you dismiss this as unimportant while listing other causes you presume we don’t support. One can care about multiple issues at once. Your inability to grasp the value of game preservation doesn’t make it any less valid. Perhaps you should focus your efforts on the homeless, since you’re so concerned about where others direct their energy.
You should take the time to downvote the rest of your comments as well.
Why are you wasting time posting on lemmy when you could be out helping the homeless?
The dude is an obvious troll just ignore him. People like him are out miserable and don’t outside and touch grass so he has to come in here and shit on everyone’s party.
Same as you alone can’t do much for games, I alone can’t do much for the homeless. And how do you know I’m not the one in need?
Following your logic and example, since we can’t individually do much for the homeless we should go around shelters and aggressively try to convince volunteers that destitute people are a lost cause.
Bullshit take a blanket and a old jacket and sit down with a homeless person, it absolutely could have a huge impact on them.
Extra points if you bring some munchies to share.
Even if you are in need you can still help. I volunteer at a food bank every Wednesday. It is ~2 hours of my time. I also am able to take about as much food with me as I can carry. Most of the food I take I then give away to the unhoused that live in and around the park across the street from work.
I used to volunteer at a church doing food bank stuff too.
There are plenty of things you can do while you are the one in need.
Why don’t you guys make signatures to improve the life of homeless people? Stop putting ads everywhere?
Let me guess, you’re from the USA
Nah man, you know it’s not that.
It’s exactly that and you know it.
To answer your questions: this is posted in [email protected] because this specific petition relates to the interests of this specific Lemmy community, this does not mean it’s “so important”, or that it’s a priority, it’s just one of the many topics the users that frequent this community are interested about.
On the topic of other petitions, there are actually a lot of different petitions by European Citizen, that are available on the website dedicated to it: https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/. For example, there are two other petitions that are at the same stage of the Stop Killing Games petition (they’re in the process of verification). One calls for a ban on conversion therapies, which are discriminatory and harmful towards LGBTQ+ citizen, the other calls to “Stop Extremism” within the European Union, but is rather vague about what it’s about.
The “My Voice, My Choice: For Safe And Accessible Abortion” was verified as “Valid Initiative” on September of this year, and on the 1st of October, its representatives met with Hadja Lahbib, European Commissioner for Equality, and European Commissioner for Preparedness and Crisis Management to discuss it, they will later have the opportunity to present it publicly to Parliament Members, which may hold a dedicated debate session. So far there’s been 11 “Answered Initiatives” of varying subjects (this means the parliament debated on it, and reached a conclusion, and made a statement, you can learn more about the process here: https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/how-it-works_en).
It’s a great system that’s underused in my opinion (lots of reasons for it but that’s another subject matter). If you’re a European Citizen and feel like there are topics you would like to bring to the European Parliament, I highly encourage you to create one and fight for what you believe is important!
Good to know about that. I’m not from EU tho. Also I’m not in position to help others in person, I’m just trying to survive, but I could help with a signature to give it more reach.
My comment is because I’ve seen this on Reddit a few months ago in general communities, not just gaming focused ones.
I honestly don’t care about the state of games, I think people have the decision to stop killing games the whole time, just stop paying for shitty games.
There are good indie companies doing a great job.
And why should we care about your opinion?
You’re like the idiots complaining about NASAs budget and that it should be spent on something else.
If you want to hate on this you could at leasdt argue that the games that will not be killed are crap in the first place because they are shitty live service games.
Not very smart are you?
What makes you think that the kind of people that sign this European action don’t also sign other actions?
What makes you think that the shit corpos get away with in the videogame industry will stay in the videogame industry? Have you not been paying attention to other areas of industry?
I’m a relentless idealist too, and I get where you’re coming from, but idealism alone isn’t a winning strategy. The state of the world right now proves that. Sometimes you have to crawl before you can walk, and walk before you can run. This is important precisely because it is so minor and inconsequential: the stakes and consequences for failure are so low while there is absolutely no legitimate argument against it. Not to put too fine a point on it: People are losing hope in our ability to create any change at all. We need a win. We need to start getting traction, and start making progress somewhere. We need to show people that these battles against corporate interests CAN be won so that they are willing to try to fight more of them in the future, including eventually the bigger ones where there will be real consequences and really serious forces entrenched against any efforts for change.
This is just a first step, a tiny example of giving the finger to “the man” to prove that we still can, taking back a sliver of power and agency. It is not the last step, it is merely a beginning, an almost invisibly tiny crack in the armor of capitalism and corporate rights in favour of society and people’s rights. It’s certainly not going to fix the world on its own, but once we’ve got some cracks in the armor, we can keep working at them to make them bigger and eventually maybe we’ll start making real visible progress.
Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to solve the problems of the world overnight with a single petition too, but that’s not realistic given the scale of the opposition and resistance we are facing. Late stage capitalism and corpo-fascism are not weak or fragile and they have grown to a scale that is almost inconceivable. We will not beat them in a single blow. We will need to hammer at them for a long, long time before we even start making any serious progress. We have to be prepared for a long, long fight, and relish these small, small victories when we get them. Because every victory is valuable and every one counts. Especially ones where we don’t have to fight to the death to achieve them. Small, cheap victories are the best when our resources are so limited. It’s going to be a marathon not a sprint. Right now they’ve got all the money, all the power, all the media, all the organization. A single large decisive battle would almost certainly mean we lose, and lose big. This is guerilla warfare. We will fight on the fringes and fight them where they’re weakest not where they’re powerful. Eventually the balance of power will shift as long as we keep winning battles, but it isn’t going to change anytime soon.
Social justice isn’t the only thing on people’s minds. If that’s all you care about in your life you need to get some friends, make some hobbies, and start working on enjoying the life you have instead of constantly hand-wringing in endless despair over the state of “society”.
The difference is that everything you’ve mentioned already has hundreds of organizations, a lot governmental, trying to solve those problems.
Game companies screwing over consumers was mostly passing way under the radar. It’s also a gaming community. I don’t know anyone IRL that knows about it personally.
Playing devil’s advocate here a bit, but
This is a good way to test the water. If they give a nonsense response, then what use would it be to do the same thing for somethijg there’s an even greater problem?
The US is sinking into fascism at an alarming rate, and many other “leaders” are taking inspiration - all over the world, including Europe.
Signing an online petition with your name and ID is a great way of saying “I’m ripe for the disappearing”. Just look at what happened to Charlie Kirk “critics”.

















