Its title “Stop Killing Games” leaves little room for the imagination. in terms of its goals, which is not to say much about the event, much less the problem it addresses. Because yes, there is no doubt that this is a problem that the video game sector has been trying to normalize lately, but which normally has nothing to do with it, and against which any type of initiative is appreciated.

Stop Killing Games is just an initiative for now, an initiative to be specific started by a group of citizens from several European Union countries, who decided to use the mechanism that the EU allows citizens of member states to propose possible legislation to the European Commission. In the Spanish legal framework, we can compare this to popular legislative initiatives, which are not binding but must be considered by the legislature.

If in the case of Spanish ILPs the minimum number of signatures submitted for consideration is 500,000, in the case of European citizens’ initiatives this number is multiplied by two, i.e. at least one million EU citizens must sign up for itnominally so it is the next step and therefore EC can be considered. The initiative was registered on June 19, but the collection of signatures did not begin until July 30 Until the publication of this news, it received a total of 47,615 supports. A number that is admittedly quite low, but may respond to several issues such as lack of visibility and selected data. However, at least for now, no date has been given.

The goal of the Stop Killing Games campaign is not only simple, but also easy for developers to accept, and it is requires that shutting down the servers associated with a particular game does not result in the end of its lifetime. For both paid games and free-to-play games with microtransactions (the vast majority), developers are required by law in the European Union to keep games in a “reasonable” operational state of “outage” at the time.

As I said at the beginning, developers and publishers have recently become accustomed to completely ending the life of games when they see fit, which leads to somewhat paradoxical situations such as the current it is possible to play titles released in the last centurybut not to others who saw the light ten years ago (or even less), but this is no longer interesting for the business plans of the responsible persons.

It’s true that for certain types of games shutting down their servers means a dead end, but there are many others where online mode is just part of the experience, and of course It makes no sense to proceed as we see it today..

More information: Campaign / Collection of signatures | Main image: The Crew, one of the most recent examples of games affected by this circumstance.