Ahead of a US House Committee discussion on SOPA next week, Firefall studio Red 5 and Destructoid will go offline on Monday for a 24 hour period in protest.
Red 5, speaking in a statement to Shack, said it was pulling the current online beta of the game for 24 hours, adding it was cancelling its appearance at this year’s E3 due to support by organiser ESA for SOPA and sister bill PIPA.
“We are extremely disappointed in this misguided legislation. We are also ashamed of the ESA for supporting a bill which is clearly not in the best interests of gamers or the game industry,” said E5 CEO Mark Kern.
“This bill, and it’s sister bill, Protect IP, will shut down live streaming, shout casting, user generated content and have a chilling effect on game innovation and social media.”
He went on to add: “We issue a call to all our industry peers, including developers, publishers and game press, to join us in letting the ESA know they do not represent our views on this issue, and strongly oppose SOPA and PIPA.”
Destructoid has also said it’ll take part in the blackout on Monday.
“On January 18th members of the House Committee will be discussing PIPA/SOPA in Washington, D.C. and, like many of our friends, Destructoid will be blacking-out in protest of legislation that would allow DNS and Search Engine Blocking,” said founder Niero Gonzalez.
“If you think this blog post is annoying and not about videogames, wait until you can’t reach our site at all because you won’t have the power to decide what websites you can and cannot reach.”
Meanwhile, Torchlight developer Runic Games has come out and said it’s firmly against SOPA as well.
“We at Runic Games oppose the SOPA/PIPA legislation and we encourage you to do the same,” read a forum topic on the matter on the developer’s forums.
Mojang head Markus Persson has also announced via Twitter that Minecraft.net and Mojang.com will be taken offline on January 18 in protest of the bill.
Nvidia, Bungie, GoG.com have also come out against the bill, with the Halo studio stating it could “cripple the kind of games we love to create.”
Epic, 38 Studios, THQ and MLG are just some of the firms which have previously spoke out against the SOPA bill as it is currently written.
The US senate is expected to vote on the bill and PIPA once it returns from recess on January 24.
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