Stop Killing Games' EU petition amassed just under 1.3 million verified signatures, according to final count

The Stop Killing Games campaign have revealed the final signature count for their European Citizens’ Initiative, dubbed Stop Destroying Videogames. According to the folks behind the campaign, the European Union have been able to verify that 1,294,188 of the petition’s nearly 1.5 million signatures are the real deal, putting it above the one million signature goal required for EU politicians to look into the issue of server shutdowns rendering online-only games impossible to play.

“Things are moving quite fast right now, and we’ve decided to share the final count with you ahead of schedule,” volunteer Moritz Katzner wrote in a Reddit post which includes a breakdown of the verified signatures by country. “Originally, this wasn’t possible due to certain background limitations, and our plan was to wait until shortly before our next meeting with the EU Commission.

“At that point, we intended to reveal everything through a video, alongside a redesigned website, a restructured Discord, and several other updates that – ironically – I still can’t talk about just yet. We didn’t want to present our case unprepared, unintentionally leak information to lobby groups, or worst of all burn out our team.”

According to the breakdown, the largest signature total a single country contributed to the petition was 233,180 from Germany, followed by France with just over 145,000, and Poland with around 144,000. Katzner expanded a bit further on the relatively low number of signatures – at least in the context of the overall total – which have turned out not to be valid.

“I’d say we’re definitely in the top three when it comes to low rates of failed signatures,” he wrote in a comment on the post. “We’re sitting at around 10%, while the best-performing initiatives tend to fall in the 10–15% range, which puts us firmly in the upper bracket. Some initiatives see failure rates as high as 20–25% and still manage to get over the line, but it’s worth noting that the overall sample size is quite small, only 11 initiatives.”

While a wait for the campaign’s organisers to begin meeting with EU lawmakers and properly discussing the issue looks to be on the cards for now, the group have seperately announced plans to “take some proactive steps” with regards to the recent shutdown of Bioware’s online-only exoshooter Anthem. Those steps have taken the form of providing intructions as to how Anthem owners in France and Germany can report the shutdown to relevant consumer rights organisations. The hope is that getting in touch with the Federal Union of Consumers – Que Choisir and Verbraucherzentrale might help those who bought the game secure refunds, with establishing “more generalised international reporting mechanisms for any games killed in the future” being one of Stop Killing Games’ goals going forwards.

The Stop Killing Games campaign was the subject of a debate in UK parliament late last year. Recently, a small group of UK Green Party members revealed plans to propose an amendment to policy which would “compel” their MPs to support Stop Killing Games, were it to pass a vote at the party’s next conference.