The EU Stop Killing Games initiative recently surpassed its goal of one million signatures, so it seems like everyone in Europe is ready to defend fragile online games to the death… except for those doing the killing.
In response to the Stop Killing Games movement's growing avalanche of support, Video Games Europe – a lobbying group whose board includes executives and legal representation from publishers like Warner Bros. and Microsoft – was dismissive in a new statement. Published both as a blurb on its website and as a full position paper, the statement dismisses Stop Killing Games as "disproportionate."
"It is not clear what the initiators of the stop killing games petition seek to achieve as a legal change," Video Games Europe says in its position paper.
To the group's point, the Stop Killing Games petition page can, at points, read more like a manifesto than a policy proposal; "An increasing number of video 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," it says. "This practice is a form of planned obsolescence."
The movement explains its vagueness on its FAQ page by saying that "it is best to keep the demand as simple as possible to minimize any chance of misinterpretation."
But Video Games Europe thinks it's half-hearted. The movement's ask "appears to be a combination of a requirement to provide online services for as long as a consumer wants them," says the group, "regardless of price paid, and/or a requirement to provide a very specific form of end-of-life plan where the game is altered to enable private servers to operate. We do not believe these are proportionate demands."
Among risking security, IP rights, and reputational damage, Video Games Europe says requiring companies to sustain online games past the point where they are "commercially viable" would generally "have a chilling effect on game design, and act as a disincentive to making such games available in Europe."
More specifically, as the lobbying group writes in a summary on its website, "the decision to discontinue online services is multi-faceted, never taken lightly and must be an option" in order not to "curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create."
