The Black Death was generally a bad thing. Lots of people died and not in pleasant ways. Broadly speaking, it wasn’t a good time. As tends to be the case with society altering events, there were other impacts beyond all the terrible death.
The feudal system was essentially damaged beyond repair by it. That was an unexpected positive benefit of it. Ordinary people owned nothing, there was instead a chain of responsibility from monarch through nobles to lesser nobles and eventually peasants or serfs.
Those higher up the chain benefited from those at the bottom engaging in the system, largely through no choice, and could pull the rug out from the serfs at any time without any right of note for peasants to challenge. With fewer peasants or serfs available to work the land they didn’t own after the Black Death, those left became empowered to demand more.
The European Commission may soon be in a position to end or reform digital serfdom due to a movement built around computer games.
Stop Killing Games is a movement that is using the commission’s European Citizens Initiative (ECI) to try to reform the nature of ownership of digital assets.
Its core demand is that if a consumer has paid for a game, that consumer should be able to play it even after official support ends. That goal goes beyond video games to a fight over what digital ownership actually means.
The ECI was introduced under the Lisbon Treaty and is a direct democratic tool that requires action from the European Commission should certain thresholds be met. The key threshold is to get one million signatures from EU citizens with signatories from at least seven member states.
Stop Killing Games began collecting signatures in June of last year, in response to a game called The Crew being delisted by Ubisoft, a gaming giant, earlier in 2024. Players who had invested time and, crucially, money into this game could no longer access it.
One game that most of the people reading this column haven’t heard of has fuelled an extraordinary movement. The Stop Killing Games ECI cleared the one million signatures and seven member states requirement earlier this month, indeed it has signatories from 22 member states of the EU.
The movement plans to collect another 400,000 between now and December, at which point it plans to submit the ECI to the European Commission. That’s the point where matters get interesting.
Once the signatures are verified, the commission must meet the campaigners in a public hearing and respond within six months, either outlining what, if any, legislation it will bring or, if it opts not to, explaining why it won’t bring any forward.
Any outcome, even a negative one, has ramifications for the subscription-led digital economy we all live in today. It will be obligated to address the issue of digital serfdom.
In a manner akin to medieval peasants, consumers today have access but not control over many of the things they spend money on. The rights consumers have are quite limited in terms of preservation. The games, books, films, and music you listen to exist at the mercy of platforms and publishers.
It extends beyond our social lives. Subscription models permeate every aspect of the software we use in our working lives today. The result is a built-in obsolescence not just of the good or service but of users’ rights to them.
The gaming industry has largely opposed the movement. Sega, Nintendo, Microsoft, Square Enix, and Epic, along with many more large publishing houses, have come out against Stop Killing Games. It’s understandable, as any level of success for the ECI will cost these publishers either money or power.
In the case of the financial issue, publishers would have to consider maintaining largely unprofitable platforms to continue providing access to games in perpetuity. If they opted against that, they would need to turn over control of these games to an entity that would create assorted headaches around intellectual property.
That is why a petition using a platform that isn’t all that well-known or understood, the ECI, about a game few have heard of, the Crew, is pivotal to the future of what we consider ownership and the consumer rights therein.
To date, the ECI hasn’t proven all that effective a tool. Of the few that have gone forward, none have directly led to legislation. That said, the attention gained using the ECI has indirectly led to change. This includes the EU’s current plans around limiting the caging of animals, to the union taking stronger stances on matters such as the right to water.
The commission’s own rules and habits mean we won’t have to wait all that long for answers on what comes next. Assuming Stop Killing Games files as expected in December, which it likely will, then we’re less than a year away from the European Commission indicating what it will do and why it will do it.
Digital serfdom will move from a concept for philosophical debate to the legislative agenda. That in itself is a win for Stop Killing Games.
