Yeah, under 50% of the required signatures and it’s just a few weeks from expiring, there’s no chance this will succeed unless some big-name influencer gathers support for the petition, which at this point I doubt will happen.
It made some people talk about the problem, though. That’s a step in the right direction.
bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 5 days ago
Sometimes they still look at a petition even if it didn’t reach the threshold. At least that has been the case for German petitions.
In the end they still get ignored, whether they reached the threshold or not.
rikudou@lemmings.world 5 days ago
I mean, not even 500k people in the whole of EU care about this apparently, so we get what we deserve, I guess.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 5 days ago
That’s a bit reductive. Perhaps plenty care but don’t know to even look for this thing to sign, or are too young to know how games used to be made, or didn’t get the message about this petition in their own language. 1M signatures is an absurdly high threshold to clear; that’s one out of every 450 people in the EU.
sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 5 days ago
Exactly.
And it’s something that only applies to a fairly small subset of people. If we look at Steam users (decent indicator of people passionate about games), Germany has the highest in the EU at 3.6M. 3.6M is ~4.3% of the German population, so if we extrapolate to the EU, that’s ~19M Steam users.
If we assume that’s an accurate measurement of people who would be interested in this petition, you’d need 1/20 of them to sign. I’m not in the EU, so I don’t know how popular these petitions are or what the requirements are (do you need to be voting age?), but if I assume a lot of people who play games are young, and that young people tend to be fairly uninterested in politics, getting 1M signatures would be incredibly difficult even if it’s something that all games agree with (and I would imagine most would care about this at some level).
So yeah, getting >400k signatures for something like this sounds like amazing success.
witty_username@feddit.nl 5 days ago
I think that reframing it in the context of consumer protection for digital planned obsolescence might benefit this campaign. Ultimately, this is bigger than games and I think it could benefit from a broader appeal