I also love this part:

Earlier this month, game publishing trade association Video Games Europe said the initiative's proposals "would curtail developer choice"

Well, yes, that's the point of pretty much any regulation about anything. Curtailing the choice of people abusing the system.

When you run out of even decent logical arguments you attack the people. This really tells that the industry is afraid of this movement and will use all the dirty tricks they know to oppose it.

In short:

The complaint accuses the initiative of "systemic concealment of major contribution," violating EU stipulations requiring citizens to report any sponsor contributions over €500.

The complaint cites PC Gamer's interview with Scott from June, in which he said "there have been many weeks on the campaign where I've been working 12 to 14 hours a day to keep things moving to get signatures." That promotional work, the complaint argues, amounts to "€63,000-147,000 in professional contribution" if he'd charged a "market rate" of "€50-75/hour."

It's also not how the EU's disclosure requirements work. As Scott notes in the video, the EU's citizens' initiative rules say that "individuals providing non-financial support, such as volunteering, are not considered sponsors under the ECI Regulation and do not need to be reported."

If the petition heads to the Commission after its petition deadline on July 31, we can expect to see even more exciting rhetorical maneuvers.

I sure hope that the EU can withstand these 4D chess 900 IQ rhetorical maneuvers.

"Look at all this paid labour he's been doing, if he'd been getting paid!"

Love the headline. Great to see publications directly call out bullshit

[...] violating EU stipulations requiring citizens to report any sponsor contributions over €500.

If the initiative failed to disclose any such funding, that would be bad! However, the complaint argues that the initiative didn't receive any monetary contribution; rather, it claims Scott simply volunteered too much of his own time to promote the movement, which—if you've decided words no longer mean anything—is basically the same thing.

🤣

Ross isnt the movements founder, other people started the citizens initiative. He says this in his videos multiple times.

It's the equivalent of "you spelled one word wrong, your entire argument is invalid!"

Well it’s crazy that they’re accusing him of giving too much of his own time.

I really hope the Stop Killing Games initiative changes something as I want to own my (single player) games forever on every store (not only GOG as it’s not so Linux friendly despite the heroic games launcher).

Tells you that the guy behind it is causing some folks in the halls of power to get some uncomfortable questions.

I'm pirating any game made by any producer that oppose SKG.

If they want to antagonize consumers. Consumers will be their enemies.

Oh wow... an anonymous complaint that is complete nonsense... whatever will they do. I at least expect the EU to correctly dismiss this pathetic attempt.

This is just someone in the industry trying to buy time and throw gunk in the works of the initiative. Unless they are aggressively retarded they knew this challenge would fail, they just want to buy time.

Yah, they seem very worried about the public groundswell.

Almost like it’s not just about allowing games to be run locally or a third party server being an annoyance. It’s almost like killing games was more part of a larger business strategy, like they were intentionally deleting products people payed for to force them to buy new versions, or move to more heavily monetized ones.