At this rate, January 18 is going to be a very productive day. Two more notable gaming companies that feel passionately enough about the Internet to shut down their sites for a day are joining the fight against SOPA and PIPA.
According to Notch, both Minecraft.net and Mojang.com will go dark next Wednesday. Similarly, Red 5 Studios plans to take down its website, community site, and the Firefall beta for 24 hours.
“We are extremely disappointed in this misguided legislation,” writes Red 5 CEO Mark Kern. “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.” It’s not just talk, either. The studio “will not attend E3 unless ESA reverses their stance.”
Perhaps if this trend continues, we’ll start to see some of the massive sites (Google, Facebook, Wikipedia) join in as well. It’s tremendous to see gamers come together like this, but we need to reach much further if we’re going to prevent SOPA, PIPA, and future legislation of this nature from becoming a reality.
Firefall dev shutting down beta in protest of SOPA [Shacknews]
