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Louis Rossmann's response to harsh criticism of "Stop Killing Games" from Thor of @PirateSoftware (www.youtube.com)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net to c/games@lemmy.world

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[-] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 98 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Boy, it was frustrating to see Thor completely misrepresent the position of the campaign. It wasn't "vague enough to also include live service games"; it purposely includes them.

[-] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 61 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

He's showing his true colors here. either doubling down so his initial reaction doesn't make him seem foolish, or he really has a soft spot for mega corporations due to his ties with Blizzard.

Ross wrote a response to Thor's in the comments of this video, but it's a bit buried. I'll include Thor's for context as well:

Thor:

I'm aware of the process for an initiative to be turned into legislature much farther down the road after many edits. If people want me to back it then the technical and monetary hurdles of applying the request need to be included in the conversation. As written this initiative would put a massive undue burden on developers both in AAA and Indie to the extent of killing off Live Service games. It's entirely too vague on what the problem is and currently opens a conversation that causes more problems instead of fixing the one it wants to.

If we want to hit the niche and terrible business practice of incorrectly advertising live service games or always online single player only games then call that out directly. Not just "videogames" as stated in the initiative. Specifically call out the practice we want to shut down. It's a much more correct conversation to have, defeats the actual issue, and stops all this splash damage that I can't agree with.

Ross's response:

@PirateSoftware I actually wasn't planning to write to you further since you said you didn't want to talk about it with me and I'll still respect that if you'd like. But since you brought up what I said again I'll at least give my side of that then leave you alone:

I'm 100% cynical, I can't turn it off. I wasn't trying to appeal to legislators when I said that, I doubt they'll even watch my videos. I was trying to appeal to people who are are kind of doomer and think this is hopeless from the get-go. I wanted to lay out the landscape as I view it that this could actually work where many initiatives have failed. Did it backfire more than it inspired people? I have no idea. I've said before I don't think I'm the ideal person to lead this, stuff like this is part of why I say that; I can't just go Polyanna on people and pretend like there aren't huge obstacles and these are normally rough odds, so that was meant as inspirational. You clearly weren't the target audience, but you're in complete opposition to the movement also.

I'm literally not a part of the initiative in any official capacity. I won't be the one talking to officials in Brussels if this passes. The ECI could completely distance itself from me if that was necessary.

In my eyes, what I was doing there was the equivalent of forecasting the weather. You think it's manipulation, but I don't control the weather. I can choose when I fly a kite based on my forecast however.

It was also kind of half-joke on the absurdity of the system we're in that I consider these critical factors that determine our success or not. So yes, I meant what I said, but I also acknowledge it's kind of ludicrous that these are perhaps highly relevant factors towards getting anything done in a democracy.

Anyway, I got the impression this whole issue was kind of thrust upon you by your fans, you clearly hate the initiative, so as far as I'm concerned people should stop bothering you about it since you don't like it.

[-] magic_lobster_party@kbin.run 58 points 1 month ago

It's entirely too vague on what the problem is

How is it vague? If I buy a game, it should be playable for all eternity. Just like how I can pop in Super Mario on NES and play it just like how it was in the 80s.

Or how I can still play Half Life deathmatch more than 25 years after its release.

[-] proton_lynx@lemmy.world 7 points 1 month ago

I agree. Louis brought a good point when he talked about Gran Turismo licensed content (like Ferrari cars and etc), that some companies have licenses that will expire for content in the game. But you know what? THAT'S NOT MY FUCKING PROBLEM. You buy a game, you should be able to run it until the end of time.

[-] it_depends_man@lemmy.world 4 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

How is it vague?

It's vague in all the legal ways:

First of all which kinds of games it applies to. It obviously can't work for games that have a technical server requirement, ... world of warcraft, but actually EVE online. The guys who run that game, get experimental hardware that's usually military only (or at least they did in the past). The server is not something, you could run even if you wanted to. Drawing the legal boundary between what "could be" single player offline (e.g. the crew, far cry, hitman), wasn't done.
It's not clear how it should apply to in terms of company scale. The new messenger legislation that was passed, made space for the EU parliament / system to declare and name, individually, who counts as a company that is is big enough, so that they have to open their messenger system to others for interoperability. It's not clear if the law has to apply to everyone, and every game, or just e.g. companies above 20 million revenue or something.
It's not clear what happens if a company goes bankrupt, and the system isn't immediately ready to keep working.

And a few more.

That being said, I think Thor's stance on this is silly. All of that is part of the discussion that is now starting. He could raise good points and get them included, but I guess that's not happening.

[-] ZeroHora@lemmy.ml 13 points 1 month ago

He’s showing his true colors here. either doubling down so his initial reaction doesn’t make him seem foolish, or he really has a soft spot for mega corporations due to his ties with Blizzard.

I don't think he have any soft spot for mega corp, is just online figures/influencers can't never be wrong type of thing.

[-] atro_city@fedia.io 12 points 1 month ago

If we want to hit the niche and terrible business practice of incorrectly advertising live service games or always online single player only games then call that out directly. Not just "videogames" as stated in the initiative.

Spoken like an idealist. Video games is probably the biggest thing that will gain traction. Sure, it would be great to tackle the entire issue, but the people making this initiative aren't using other software that does that shit. Saying "care about all the people" dilutes the issue.

Hard disagree with Thor on this one.

[-] tehmics@lemmy.world 22 points 1 month ago

I've been a big fan of Thor since his first shorts boom, but this take is a massive fucking L from him that I'm very sad to see.

[-] CaptainEffort@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 month ago

Honestly him calling Ross a “greasy used car salesman” really hurt to see. I didn’t take Thor as the type to insult someone like that simply for disagreeing with him.

Kind of makes me wonder if his whole nice guy thing is an act. Either way it calls into question the person I assumed he was.

[-] tehmics@lemmy.world 3 points 1 month ago

I've heard reference to that and Thor backpedaling calling it 'car salesman logic' or something. Do you know where the clip is?

[-] CaptainEffort@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 month ago

It was on stream, so hopefully someone recorded it and uploads it.

In this video though, at the very end, this guy shows another clip that I haven’t been able to find of Thor reacting to one of Ross’ comments and… well I can’t think of a better word than melting down tbh.

[-] ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca 11 points 1 month ago

Yeah, that's why he says it's stupid. It seems like he's fine with the idea of removing DRM that makes single player games unplayable but forcing devs to make online multiplayer games playable forever is ridiculous.

[-] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 27 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

To clarify, your position is it's ridiculous, or you're stating that his position is that it's ridiculous?

[-] ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 month ago

My position is it's ridiculous. I agree with Thor. Saying all games must exist forever is too vague because I don't think all games should be forced to exist forever.

[-] Cowboy_Dude@lemmy.ml 46 points 1 month ago

Per the official Stop Killing Games FAQ: https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq (apologies if formatting ends up looking weird)

Q: Aren't you asking companies to support games forever? Isn't that unrealistic?

A: No, we are not asking that at all. We are in favor of publishers ending support for a game whenever they choose. What we are asking for is that they implement an end-of-life plan to modify or patch the game so that it can run on customer systems with no further support from the company being necessary. We agree it is unrealistic to expect companies to support games indefinitely and do not advocate for that in any way. Additionally, there are already real-world examples of publishers ending support for online-only games in a responsible way, such as:

'Gran Turismo Sport' published by Sony 'Knockout City' published by Velan Studios 'Mega Man X DiVE' published by Capcom 'Scrolls / Caller's Bane' published by Mojang AB 'Duelyst' published by Bandai Namco Entertainment etc.

[-] ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

That's fine for single player games but modifying some massive MMO so that someone can host it on a laptop is literally impossible. This language applies to everything. EVE Online, WoW, FFXIV, all of it would need to be able to run on someone's home computer when they're purposefully built from the ground up to work on massive servers?

[-] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 49 points 1 month ago

It's not impossible at all. People have done this literally for decades. Classic WoW only exists because people hosted their own seevers and Blizzard wanted in on the money. Star Wars Galaxies the same. I think Everquest 1 as well. And probably others as well.

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[-] ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net 40 points 1 month ago

The difference between a home server and a larger business server is simply the scale of how many players it can host at once.

WoW's server binary was reverse engineered by fans, and a large ecosystem of privately run WoW servers that players can connect to exist at this very moment.

Private servers running older vanilla versions of wow became so popular, blizzard then created their own vanilla wow server to get in on the action.

[-] echomap@fedia.io 37 points 1 month ago

People have been running private wow servers for a long time now apparently, so it seems possible for mmos.

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[-] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 23 points 1 month ago

I don't think there's any language in this petition that says it must be hosted on a laptop. The server binary, with a reasonable expectation that someone with documentation, the hardware, and the know-how to use it, would be enough.

[-] ZeroHora@lemmy.ml 15 points 1 month ago

Lol that not impossible.

[-] Katana314@lemmy.world 11 points 1 month ago

FFXIV has headed in the opposite direction of your claim. They’ve recently been making a lot of changes to major story dungeons so that the experience relies as little as possible on online communities. Right now, playing requires a subscription. It’s more and more believable to see that requirement removed if the game was somehow dead and that ‘had’ to happen.

[-] computergeek125@lemmy.world 10 points 1 month ago

If a big MMO closes that'd be rough, but those types of games tend to form communities anyways like Minecraft. You don't have to pay Microsoft a monthly rate to host a Java server for you and a few friends, you just have to have a little bit of IT knowledge and maybe a helper package to get you and your friends going. It's still a single binary, even if it doesn't run on a laptop well for larger settings.

With a big MMO, there will form support groups and turnkey scripts to get stuff working as well as it can be, and forums online for finding existing open community servers by people who have the hardware and knowledge to host a few dozen to a few hundred of their closest friends online.

Life finds a way.

If it's a complicated multi-node package where you need stuff to be split up better as gateway/world/area/instance, the community servers that will form may tend towards larger player groups, since the knowledge and resource to do that is more specific.

[-] proton_lynx@lemmy.world 5 points 1 month ago

God, finally someone with common sense. The devs do not need to change the software for you to host a server in your 10 year old ThinkPad, they just need to make the software available. It's not up to them to figure out HOW you are going to host the game's server, they just need to make it POSSIBLE.

[-] Icalasari@fedia.io 22 points 1 month ago

They all should still be preserved. The code can be stored without needing servers to be kept open, for example

[-] jay@mbin.zerojay.com 4 points 1 month ago

Code is already stored, it's just not public.

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[-] ampersandrew@lemmy.world 12 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Well, it wouldn't be retroactive. As a consumer, I don't think it's ridiculous to know what I'm buying. If anything, this petition is way softer than my stance. As per this petition, you could get around doing the honest thing of providing the customers the ability to host the servers themselves by just clearly informing the customer at the point of sale how long services will be up for, if you truly want to try to convince people that it's a service and not a product that they just made worse for business reasons. But they don't want to do that, because then they can't sucker people into buying something that isn't long for this world.

[-] TheGalacticVoid@lemm.ee 12 points 1 month ago

Many consider games to be works of art in the same way that music, books, movies, and paintings are. In the same way that historians use the creative works of yesteryear to guage how people during events like World War I, historians of tomorrow need access to games to study the events of our lifetimes.

Book burnings have occurred throughout history and they have been devastating, but many works can still be studied because other copies exist elsewhere. The problem with games is that they're deliberately designed to self-destruct. Historians 50 years down the line can't study Fortnite's mechanics or its evolution because as soon as a new update releases, the servers for the previous chapter of the game are gone. Even if we wanted to preserve just the final release, we can't because it is far easier for Epic Games to hide or throw away the server source code rather than properly archive it when they inevitably kill the game. This is a huge deal because Fortnite has genuinely had an impact on our culture, for better or worse. Even if it didn't, it is a technical feat to get a game like that to work well, and programmers need to be able to study the game after the industry inevitably moves on.

To be clear, companies shouldn't need to maintain their games and software forever. However, there is simply no way to play many games because there are no usable servers for them, which is entirely unacceptable. The initiative simply wants us to be in a world where someone can put in a reasonable amount of effort to play abandoned games, and I don't think that's a huge ask.

[-] Archelon@lemmy.world 14 points 1 month ago

Only if you think the campaign means that companies must pay for the multiplayer servers forever which Ross has said on MULTIPLE occasions is not reasonable and not what he wants.

Giving players the tools to host their own servers or adding LAN functionality, though? That’s entirely reasonable seeing as that’s how multiplayer always used to work. I mean, there are still plenty of Unreal Tournament servers active today without any involvement from the developer in decades.

Especially since, if this initiative works, developers will make games with that functionality in mind.