Those ECI that manage to get the needed vote count do influence the EU politics.
Since ECIs were launched in 2012, 110 initiatives were started, 10 reached the needed vote count.
Of these 2 made actual impact:
- Ban Glyphosate led to a reevaluation of the pesticide approval procedure
- End The Cage Age made the commission reevaluate the factors for a transition int the agriculture sector.
This particular initiative about games will probably face much less head wind, since:
1. It is about customer rights ( which the EU just loves )
2. It will disproportionately impact American companies
I don't know the outcome of the second one you mentioned, but Glyphosate use was extended last year for another 10 years [0]. So what is the "actual impact" you are referring to?
[0] https://food.ec.europa.eu/plants/pesticides/approval-active-...
> I don't know the outcome of the second one you mentioned,
There is a whole paragraph about the outcome in the page you literally linked. It leads to this report [1] where the commission basically dismisses the ECI and explains they will do nothing but at least the commission had to make its position clear and replies.
[1] https://food.ec.europa.eu/document/download/09b68864-8425-4f...
The proposal had 2 clauses, the second reads:
” ensure that the scientific evaluation of pesticides for EU regulatory approval is based only on published studies, which are commissioned by competent public authorities instead of the pesticide industry”.
The second part was addressed by a proposal, that was accepted.
It’s in the bottom of the pages here:
https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/initiatives/details/20...
I wonder if CDPR will support this proposal if it gets somewhere.
I'm sure the company that differentiates itself by marketing a DRM-free gaming platform would certainly voice support of similar concepts, but more importantly, why should we care? CDPR's politics is merely the politics of one person, their CEO. Is the EU a democracy of hundreds of millions of citizens, or is it an oligarchy of CEO's?
It doesn't matter one bit what a corporate spokesman says about democratic legislation and IMHO it feels unwholesome to even bring it up.
> but more importantly, why should we care?
Because money talks, and CDPR has lots of Witcher/Cyberpunk money.
Yes, we are in 2024 an oligarchy of ceo's facading like a (republic) democracy. Wholesomeness was never in the equation. If you have any benevolent dictators, you may as well use them.
I never played it, but apparently Gwent had a pretty graceful termination of support where they kinda handed the game to the "community" and allowed them to keep the game going. Don't know if they would support legislation to enshrine those kinds of practices into law, but at least CDPR seems to be more on this side of things.