Many people have a misunderstanding of what the Stop Killing Games movement is about. It's about trying to get governments to pass a law that requires game developers to have a plan in place for when they shut down the servers of online games. In the current gaming landscape, games can be taken offline at any moment for any reason. And when that happens, you're shit out of luck. The Stop Killing Games movement believes that if/when this happens, the publisher needs to have a plan in place to ensure that those games can continue to be played. This can take on many forms: modifying the game to not require an online connection, or releasing the server binaries so that players can host their own custom servers, or something of that nature. Worst comes worst, if none of this is possible, then the movement demands that it's made clear in the game's advertisement that you could lose game functionality when the servers shut down. Essentially, the laws surrounding game licenses are vague, and the movement wants a clarification on what buyers are entitled to when they buy a game.

The primary reason why many people have a misunderstanding of the movement is because a large YouTuber named PirateSoftware made 2 videos where he outright lied about what the movement was about and trashed it. He also made multiple statements on his streams where he purportedly "disproved" the movement, where he continued to lie about the movement and trashed it. His videos and statements were the most commonly viewed coverage on the movement, and this disinformation supposedly severely hampered the momentum of the movement, such that even now, many people still believe that the movement is about forcing publishers to keep their servers online indefinitely (it's not).

PirateSoftware was a former developer at Blizzard and was making an online game at the time, so some people speculate that the reason he lied about the movement was because he had a vested interest in keeping the current vagueness of the laws. As more and more people attempted to call him out on his disinformation, he doubled down and refused to admit that he gave any sort of incorrect information, even when the information is provably incorrect.

Apparently, PirateSoftware has a history of this sort of behavior and has gotten himself into some previous scandals due to his seeming inability to admit that he was wrong at all. This has led otherwise minor, forgettable mistakes to balloon into giant controversies.

Taken together with this recent controversy with Stop Killing Games, his reputation has taken a significant nosedive and many people now believe that he's a narcissist who is willing to take down the movement for the sole purpose that he wants to be seen as the smartest guy in the room.

The Stop Killing games campaign is an EU petition to prevent game developers from making games that people bought unplayable, for example by turning off the servers of always-online games.

Pirate Software is a youtuber and game developer who made several videos criticizing the campaign. He thinks it's unreasonable to expect game developers to do this and also asserts that people who purchase games don't own them. His videos supposedly had a measurable negative impact on the petition, which at this point looks like it might fail. Combined with the fact that he often acted quite rude and arrogant towards supporters of the campaign, he is now quite unpopular among them.

Dunno who you're referring to but the Stop Killing Games petition was started when Ubisoft announced that gamers would no longer be able to play The Crew, despite having bought it.

It's not new that online functionality is turned off after the player base dies down, but to be completely unable to play a game that can be played offline is crazy.

So now there's a petition circulating, but it's nearing its end. There are only a couple of days left I think.

It's a petition for the EU (or maybe Europe or the EER, I'm not sure), and every country needs a certain amount of signatures. I think some Mediterranean island nations are still lagging, but most countries have plenty now.

If you're in Europe, find the petition and sign it. Especially if you live in Malta or Cyprus.

Saw people talking in comments at several places now, expressing animosity towards them to say the least, always presented as something that everyone seems to know about.

tl;dr It's YouTuber drama. Consider yourself lucky you're not so terminally online that you understand it.

Piratesoftware is a Twitch steamer/YouTuber who speaks his mind quite bluntly and doesn't back down after doing so. Because of that, he's often involved in streamer drama and has a lot of people who dislike him. Haters love to reference these past dramas whenever his name is brought up.

10 months ago, he was involved in drama when he was asked his opinion on the Stop Killing Games EU citizens initiative. His opinion was that he didnt like it and expressed himself in a crass and crude way as he normally does. Supporters of the initiative didn't like that and it spawned a lot of back and forth arguments before dying down.

Currently, the citizens initiative is short on having the required signatures to move forward and the deadline is in a few weeks. The lead guy behind the movement put out a video saying the initiative will likely fail, he will be ending his organization efforts when it does, and blamed it on Piratesoftware's video from 10 months ago. That has restarted the drama.

He's a game developer and Twitch streamer (game dev and playing) who's become very popular in the last few years.

The latest pile-on against him is due to him having some reservations about the wording and intent of the petition/movement and, because we're currently in a era where False Dichotomy is king: anything other than 100% unquestioning support is treated as 100% unequivocal opposition, and vice versa. 😒

My understanding is that he thinks it's a good idea in principle (as do I), but games are no longer simply compiled with only the occasional update or patch, but multi-server online complex systems with a lot of moving parts. Of you're going to legislate immortality on games, then you're going to need to make your argument for it clear and robust, who has responsibility for what, how deprecating technology is handled, and so on.

He's a youtuber who is a known game dev.

And he's pointed out the obvious issue that you can't just demand companies keep servers up and running, if you legally mandate servers can't be turned off then companies would stop releasing online games because that's stupid.

It often costs millions of dollars a year to keep servers up and running. If they are causing the company to lose money, then yeah obviously they're gonna turn em off.

Only naive, entitled gamers would demand such a wild thing. It's not going to get past any courts