“We want to ensure gamers are part of those conversations”: Stop Killing Games launch player advocacy group to lobby the UK government

The Stop Killing Games campaign announced plans to set up some non-governmental organisations earlier this year, with the aim of ensuring their work goes beyond a current push to prevent online games being rendered unplayable when publishers shut down their servers. One of these regional advocacy groups has now launched in the UK, going by the name Gamers’ Voice.

Announced by Stop Killing Games organiser Moritz Katzner on Reddit and Discord, Gamers’ Voice will campaign around UK government policy on issues like game preservation, live-service shutdowns, age verification, loot boxes, online safety laws, and any proposals that could affect young people accessing games. Naturally, that’ll be taking place alongside the wider campaign’s efforts in the EU and North America.

“Too often, conversations about gaming happen without input from the people who enjoy playing games,” Tom Shannon, one of Gamers’ Voice’s two co-founders who also serve as managing directors, said in an annopuncement post on the NGO’s website. “From questions of digital ownership and monetisation practices, to proposals linked to online safety laws that could require adults to show ID to access games or restrict younger people’s ability to stream gameplay or socialise online, we want to ensure gamers are part of those conversations.”

Gamers’ Voice note that they’ve “already begun engaging with parliamentarians from across the political spectrum”. To that end, their announcement includes a quote from Liberal Democrat MP Tom Gordon, one of the politicians who took part in parliament’s debate of Stop Killing Games’ UK petition late last year.

“Gaming is a hugely important part of how people relax, socialise and connect. Gamers’ Voice is doing valuable work to ensure that players are properly represented and that their voices are heard in decisions that affect them,” Gordon said.

The two co-founders of Gamers’ Voice, Shannon and James Baker, have “over 20 years of experience working on digital rights issues”. The pair explained in another post on the NGO’s website that they initially met while playing Magic: The Gathering in 2010 and were spurred into action by the wider Stop Killing Games campaign taking off. “We wondered why there was no organisation that represented the interests of gamers in the UK,” Shannon wrote. “We saw that back in the 2010s some other people had tried to create an organisation, but it had closed down. So we figured we would give it a go ourselves.” So, they incorporated Gamers’ Voice in January this year as a not-for-profit company.

We’ll see whether having a formal UK chapter helps Stop Killing Games’ campaigning efforts over here going forwards. In his announcement of this NGO, Katzner also teased the campaign as a whole having “massive news” to share soon.