games

Long story short, Ross Scott, who you may know as the Freeman's Mind guy, has been annoyed by games as a service and the industry practice of requiring online connections to company run servers to run their games. The primary reason is that once the game becomes unsupported, access to that game altogether usually goes with it. He's a hardcore game preservationist, and has been keeping a running count of games that have completely died with absolutely no way to ever play them again, so he decided to vanguard an international campaign to see if this issue can be settled for good.

His latest (and most promising) endeavor has been an European Citizens' Initiative called "Stop Destroying Videogames". Once it reaches a million signatures, the European Parliament will discuss the matter and move forward with whether or not this is a valid consumer protection violation, and if so, write into law a way to stop the practice.

There's been some recent drama with some youtuber called Pirate Software who seems to take issue with the initiative seemingly from a bad faith argument perspective. Fortunately this brought some attention to the initiative, but it is a classic tale of reactionaries coming out of the woodwork the second political traction against corporate interests starts taking place.