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While the petition seemed doomed to fail just a few weeks ago, Stop Killing Games supporters have rallied to get the 1 million signatures the EU initiative had been seeking. While it's a moment of celebration for the campaign, its figurehead wants more signatures because he's worried many of them could be fake.
"The site says we have cleared 1 million signatures," YouTuber Ross Scott, who has spearheaded the campaign from the start, says on Twitter. "I hate being like this, but there's a chance a significant number of them aren't real. That means we have to keep signing in overdrive mode to make up for them!"
Even if some of those signatures are fake, it's still a massive turnaround for the campaign. The EU citizen's initiative at its heart had a deadline of July 31, and by June 23, it hadn't even reached half of its 1 million signature goal. That's when Scott posted a video titled "the end of Stop Killing Games," running down the campaign's successes and failures, with the expectation that this would be the final update on the campaign.
That video ended up being a turning point. With more publicity, buoyed by support from major streamers and YouTubers - and some amount of backfiring spite from other content creators who did not support the campaign - the signatures started coming in at a rapid pace. The campaign reached 95% of its goal by this morning, with the remainder coming through the rest of the day.
But the EU citizen's initiative is still looking for more signees to make up for any invalid signatures. "It's probably not many, but I've been given a couple reports that there have been claims of non-citizens spoofing signatures on the EU initiative," Scott said yesterday. "A reminder this is a government process and that's considered a crime and would probably get reported to Europol or Interpol."
Those fakes won't invalidate the campaign as a whole, but they will ultimately be removed from the count, which is why they're looking for more signatures from EU citizens. For more info, you can have a look at the Stop Killing Games FAQ. There's another petition for UK citizens, but unfortunately there's no similar venue for people to raise such issues in the US.
In an unrelated lawsuit, Ubisoft's lawyers said you "cannot complain" it shut down The Crew because you never actually owned it, and you weren't "deceived" by the lack of an offline version "to access a decade-old, discontinued video game."
