After a moribund period lasting multiple months, the "Stop Destroying Videogames" European Citizens' Initiative has gotten its required number of signatures, thereby compelling the European Comission to propose a law regulating the discontinuation of games which require a connection to the Internet to play.

The Initiative intends to forbid game publishers from discontinuing online services a game is dependent on to function without providing an end-of-life plan. While the specifics of the legislation have been left to the EC, we can confidently predict that no lawmaker wants to create a special product category for "video games". As such, any legislation that is likely to be proposed will apply to any software product which contains specific online features. A specialist comission may be empowered to dwell over the specifics, putting those in a format the average development team can act on. Much like how the norms regarding the GDPR have informed new standards on data protection worldwide, any norms which may be created as a result of the legislative process will inform the discontinuation of online services from now on.

Given the current unwillingness to undermine the European Union's software-as-a-service industry at a time where the bloc seeks to strengthen it, any norms and legislation which may be born out of the Initiative will lead to the lowest common denominator, which may look like organizer Ross Scott's suggestion for the bare minimum scenario: that companies only be strictly obliged to release documentation on the specifics of the online features, so that users can restore part of the product's functionality. Of course, just like with the GDPR, even the most elementary requirements may be revised or lessened over time.

Any scenario which requires a large degree of active work from the users means that preservation measures will be the most effective when applied to smaller software products using simple protocols, thereby favouring the bad faith adoption of overly-complex systems designs which can only realistically be implemented by large companies, creating another kind of "regulatory inequality" in the market.

Of course, we give no care to small SaaS firms, which are merely the progenitors of new methods of profound control and dependence, but given how the Initiative is couched in the language of "ownership", this seems like quite a big possibility to overlook. For them, a "success" built upon half-measures — the exact kind of thing which the bourgeois legislative process is built out of — will be worse than a straight-up failure, merely introducing a new legal fiction for large capital to weaponize against all of its enemies, in and outside of the market.

That is, if the European Comission decides that this whole mess is worth their time in the first place. The ECI process is notoriously ineffective, with the Comission preferring to either not persue cases, or to not actually compel anyone to do anything. They can opt to issue "recommendations" and guidelines which may eventually be half-assed into some kind of actual law, which seems like the perfect device for sidelining this Initiative once people stop caring about it.

We will note that this kind of "single-issue" initiative, even within the framework of liberal activism, is an unnecessary handout of political power to the opposition. By artificially reducing the proposal to the abstract category of "games", the organizers of the Initiative allow the Comission and any "industry experts" it may call on to determine what the reality of the proposal looks like, what an acceptable threshold for "disclosure" even is, what an "end-of-life" plan entails. And this initiative has already had their run-in with experts...