This is your somewhat regularly scheduled Stop Killing Games update.
Stop Killing Games is an European Citizens Initiative aiming to keep games playable even after their developers and publishers have stopped supporting it.
Germany has hit the threshold sometime yesterday evening. France has also started to catch up. They are still below 50% but there growth over the last couple of days has been the biggest. Netherlands and Denmark are still in the low 90s.
The milestone comes on the eve of this years Gamescom in Cologne, Germany which is set to kick off today. SKG is not going to have an official presence there. (I've checked with the organisers) But if you are attending and want to help spread the word I'm happy to share official marketing material, either in the form of flyers or the files for flyers, so you can print your own. They come in both German and English. If you want some, send me a DM.
Relevant links:
The point is not to force them to invest into it, but to open them up if they don’t want to support them anymore.
"open them up"? make them open source or what? thats ridicolous
No. Remove the need for a server that the company provides for example.
Why is that ridiculous? Seems like a totally fine solution to me. Probably not possible in most cases due to licencing issues, but if not this is the best thing a developer could do. And making games and/or their servers open source isn't even the only option. In most cases it will suffice to just provide server binaries and patch the game to make it work with self-hosted servers, or just patch it to make it playable offline. It's that simple. Developing games with that in mind from the beginning makes this even easier.
They’ve got options.
And maybe others. It’s about making sure that a product you have paid for actually works as it was sold to you. It’s honestly a really basic consumer protection concept. You sell me a television and it stops working within a reasonable lifetime due to your own failure, and you’re obligated to repair or replace it. The same should be true of software.
Lol, yea exactly. Thats why electornic devices stop working after their guarantee runs out 80% of the time... ;)