A premise: the petitions have always made me yawn, regardless of whether or not it shares the cause: it is precisely the word “petition”, perhaps, I feel it and sleep. In addition to giving me a sense of wasted fatigue, of the left game at the start (I will be mistaken, however I was also the subject of a petition launched by the complaint Michela Murgia and by the feminists not to be published more by anyone, and even that ended up in nothing, they did not make it even with me). A long theory of “signature here”, “signature there”, “Let’s save this”, “Let’s block that”, I imagine them all stored in a folder called “symbolic”, between the WWF panda and the spiritual legacy of the Maya.
However, in case I am about to tell you it is different. I am referring to the Stop Destroying VideoGames, I read her, and something started itching me: perhaps it was the thought that one day they could go out no man’s sky while I’m still in the middle of the galaxy, or any other game.
This petition, which has already reached a million signatures (i.e. the minimum to knock on the doors of the European Commission without being ignored as a human spam), does not ask for peace in the world, nor the system revolution. He only asks not to destroy the video games we bought, that is, not to destroy what we have already paid (an idea so obvious that it should be written on the box … if there were still boxes).
The problem is simple: connected games, live service, patch on patch, active servers as long as it is convenient, while if one day the publisher turns, just a click and hello. Your inventory, your character, your hours of play, everything evaporates in the cloud. There is also a collateral speech of historical safeguard, as many video games have made the history of video games.
Once the video games broke when you launched the controller, now they self -destruct and you are the idiot who signed the contract without reading it (because it was not there). Everything is digital, all liquid, all for rent, even the identity you have built in a MMO that will close your doors before you can understand if you were having fun.
In any case, the aforementioned petition asks for only two things: that a game remains playable even after the official shutdown, and that publishers cannot cancel it remotely without offering concrete alternatives. That is, a minimum union of respect for the user who has released a minimum of 69.99 euros plus DLC, plus Season Pass, more chromed armor for the unicorn, more varied skins, more various accessories, a small capital.
Thinking about it is that there is a need for a petition for this, in short, nobody would dream of making you disappear from your video library after you bought it, nobody would take a book from the “fine support” shelf. Maybe we have a collection of movies in VHS, but we all find them also online, and if we buy them on a platform they are ours forever (otherwise we would rent them). Video games instead yes.
All this to tell you that I signed a petition for the first time in my life (it makes me a little sense), above all because it could be successful (the EU regulates the digital on everything, it could do it here too) and because the video games are not yogurt: stop making them expire.