Ross Scott put out a social media post on X, formerly Twitter, announcing that the campaign has now crossed 1.4 million signatures. The way this will help, he goes on to add, is that it significantly brings down the possibility of the campaign not getting through on account of botnets artificially spiking numbers. The number required to have the EU Commission look at petitions is 1 million, so technically there is a buffer of another 400k signatures to make up for any such signatures that get cancelled out during the verification process.
Stop Killing Games was launched as an action against studios taking out support for games, making them unplayable. The contention is that games as goods have been purchased without any ‘expiration date’ being specified at the time of purchase, and hence such decisions by studios or publishers go against the contract executed when the consumer has bought the game.
This practice is a form of planned obsolescence and is not only detrimental to customers, but makes preservation effectively impossible. Furthermore, the legality of this practice is largely untested in many countries
The contrarian view, of course, put up by studios and publishers to this has been that continuing to provide support and service to games without any timeline will make costs prohibitively expensive, as put up by Video Games Europe, the largest conglomerate representing big studios that are currently opposed to this campaign.
The campaign was first launched when Ubisoft announced closure of support, and servers for The Crew in 2024, and also revoked the game license from users through Ubisoft Connect. The game was first released in 2014 for PC, Xbox 360, PS4, Xbox One. Since the game was an online-only one, this rendered the game unplayable for all those who had purchased it.
