I’m so glad to see that this has gotten so far. When I saw Ross’ video on it I thought it was probably over. I hope some good change will come of this in the future.
Who is “Ross”?
Creator of Freeman’s Mind, Civil Protection, Ross’ Game Dungeon, and Dead Game News. Generally short humerous videos focused on video games and the industry. Accursed Farms is his website with all his content. He started the Stop Killing Games movement.
VideogameRoss is a youtube guy who really pioneered this whole movement. He has a series devoted to really old niche games that is really interesting (Ross’ Game Dungeon). I’d highly reccomend looking into his standard content and the don’t kill games afterward.
Edit: Also his voiceover halflife series is likely the best protagonist commentary series ever.
Freeman’s mind is youtube gold. I can’t play half-life without imagining gordon being a sociopath asshole.
Edit: Also his voiceover halflife series is likely the best protagonist commentary series ever.
It is. hard to say why but it’s quite compelling.
from Friends obviously
So… when do we get to play Concord? I assume that’s what this is all about.
Likely never, the intiative is not pushing for retroactive legal changes, it is pushing for new regulations / legal standards going forward.
Thankfully for publishers and unfortunately for us, it is not retroactive. But I do wish that it was.
if the game you bought isnt really yours, than sailing the high seas isnt really theft. I love the EU for their consumer rights agendas.
Looks like it’s time for the reverse engineering folks to come in.
A fair chunk will have come from the US. I would not be surprised to see a 20% drop in the end. Hope this goes somewhere for everyone’s sakes. And as always, avoid signing if you’re not eligible!
No, no no.
You have to input your name, address, and various ways of establishing your EU member state, such as an EU electronic visa/id, or your specific EU state drivers liscence or tax id or some such, and the form makes it very obvious you must actually be an EU citizen.
Examples:
Poland
Portugal
Estonia
Its possible there could be spam or accidental/malformed inputs… but if you are putting fake info into an official government portal, especially en masse, thats potentially a number of crimes, and if its a genuine mistake from an EU citizen, it seems like there is a review process where people will be contacted and allowed to fix up their info.
Also, technically, there are a few countries with more lax submission requirements, such as the Netherlands, likely due to more intense personal privacy laws… but its not like this system is not logging people’s IPs, not like they won’t be taking that into acount.
This isn’t a change.org petition, its an official EU government portal for a core process of democracy.
Knowingly falsifying info on this is again, potentially a large number of crimes, as if you say lied on voting registration, or lied to Social Security or your US state’s unemployment assistance system.
My understanding is you need to input identification data, like a driver’s license just as an example, to sign.
They expect some invalidating, hence aiming for over the million, but why do you think a “fair chunk” will be from USA specifically?
it’s just name/age/address. And I expect a decent chunk to be from outside the US because people are terrible at following directions when an issue pertains to them.
No, not for the vast majority of EU States, no, it requires an actual official government id like the EU eID, your tax ID number, something like that.
I think it depends on the country. If you click on their instructions for different countries—Itally, for example—they have screenshots that show needing a document number like a Personal ID card.
More than that, I was asked to login with my electronic identification account
Are ID Documents numbers validated on submit if you fill the form instead of using eID? Some countries don’t even have an eID option, and Finland and Ireland don’t even ask for document id.
I do not know, I cannot sign the petition and just working with the info on the site.
From Belgium it was also necessary to provide your social security number. And as more EU countries are moving towards e-id, I would assume there will be a negligible amount of non-EU signings.
Just logged in via CSAM, didn’t need to take out my eID or enter INSZ.
… dafuq?
Wow, what an unfortunate coincidence. TIL.
For me i had to write my personal number which is not something you could just guess on the fly so i dont think its so easy to fake signatures.
It is. There’s no system to check if signature exists in your country’s ID list. Random number generator +random name generator is enough to “validate” the vote.
some countrie’s id numbers have built in checksums or something similar so it would be trivial to implement code to check if the number can be valid even without having access to the actual database so a random number generator would have to be at least a little bit sophisticated
Huh thats stupid. You would think they have a database which they check a hash against at least or something. For the user it would look like everything is excepted but in the backend they would only count the valid ones so you cant brute force it. But of course governments never think about stuff like this so why did i expect it was like this.
There probably isn’t a central database to verify against so the solution would be to come up with a distributed system where each country implements its own verification process and then implement a standardized messaging structure that all countries would have to use. It would be a significant development effort to make something like that and it probably wouldn’t pay off to if it was made just for citizens initiative. Considering in the last 5 years there has been only 4 (5 if we also count SKG) initiatives that have passed 1 mil it’s probably cheaper to collect all the signatures and then have each country verify the dataset that relates to their country.
I mean countries should have such systems in place. It would make a lot of things easier.
Poland requires DigitalID or PESEL (National Identification Number, kinda like SSN for the yanks) number.
I was asked for my ID number for Portugal.
It’s a popular proposal, and gamers like to game the system.
I feel kinda helpless as an American watching the petition grow. I wonder what would happen if an American petition got big, would corporate America kill it? Would it get traction? Idk…
They’d let it grow to near 100% acceptance among relevant groups, then seed articles to split attention and truth, and then buy 60 senators for a bag of bubblegum and two spools of string.
then buy 60 senators for a bag of bubblegum and two spools of string.
The old senators will think that’s a good deal.
Does the US have citizens iniatives?
This isn’t just a change.org petition. In the EU (and a lot of member countries) theres a system for citizens initiatives, which have the same or similar legal weight as laws proposed by legislators.
That doesn’t mean the proposed laws get passed, but it does mean the people can bypass the politicians in order to at least get something onto the starting line.
They had the “We the people” platform, started by Obama. But Trump started ripping it apart, and Biden pulled the plug on his first day in the office.
And even then instead of being people driven, the US administration would choose what they want to address or not. For all the excesses of EU bureaucracy, there are plenty cases like this where it prevents politicians from ignoring people’s concerns; they can still refuse to act, but at least the petition system forces them to go on record.
Many US states have official citizens initiatives systems, but not on the Federal level, no.
Some states allow citizens to propose ballot measures if they get enough support, which then get put up to vote in the next election and become law, but both parties hate the practice and fight it wherever they can. No such thing exists at a national level though.
Don’t worry too much. If the EU passes legislation for this, you’ll likely benefit from it as well, similar to all the other pro consumer things spilling over.
Glad to see all of Ross’s effort wasn’t in vain :)
Holy moly. Amazing to see the numbers keep going up after the goal was met.
We did it! *high fives self on the other side of the world*
These posts are borderline spam, just to save a few shitty live service games.
https://www.stopkillinggames.com/
If you have time to complain, you have time to sign! Not EU citizen? Then spread the word!
no thx
If you’re gonna be a troll you can at least be good at it.
It’s every other day now, without any real milestones, just some progress.
I’m actually going to remove my downvote and reserve judgement until a response.
What games do you play, and what games do you think this movement is targeting?
Thankee-sai for your generous and condescending offer! But please, downvote. It‘s not about games that never need an internet connection, but I‘m not against the petition.
You misunderstand me. It wasn’t out of consideration for you; it’s just a vote. I just want to remind myself that the person I want to be doesn’t make snap judgements on half of a hot take. There hasn’t been enough substance to affect me. You don’t have to answer my original question, but I am still curious.
It‘s not about games that never need an internet connection
That is half correct. The big point is for games that are singleplayer that you pay up front for that require a internet connection for no good reason.
How is that half correct? A game that requires an internet connection for no good reason is still a game that requires one, no?
Well, it requires one because the producer said so, not because the game can’t function otherwise. That’s what makes it half-correct.
Having the “server” locally hosted on your device would fix it, but they just let it die without allowing those who purchased the game to be capable of playing it. That’s the big push behind this movement, not online only multiplayer games. Everyone knows those die eventually.
