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ampersandrew @lemmy.world
Accursed Farms

The end of Stop Killing Games [Accursed Farms]

  • The EU Citizens petition to stop killing games is not looking good. It's shy of halfway where it needs to be, on a very high threshold, and it's over in a month and change.
  • paraphrasing a little more than a half hour of the video: "Man, fuck Thor/Pirate Software for either lying or misunderstanding and signal boosting his incorrect interpretation of the campaign."
  • The past year has been quite draining on Ross, so he's done campaigning after next month.
  • It will still take a few years for the dust to clear at various consumer protection bureaus in 5 different countries, and the UK's seems to be run by old men who don't understand what's going on.
  • At least The Crew 2 and Motorfest will get offline modes as a consolation prize?
50 comments

  • It was nice to have some degree of hope for nearly a year. So I guess, thanks for at least giving it a serious attempt Ross.

  • I am still of the opinion that they aimed too small and focused too narrow. Games are a "luxury" anyone can live without and it's hard to rally grassroots support behind protecting something that people only use for entertainment. Yeah it's low stakes to force them to let you continue to play it after servers shut down but the same low stakes also makes the petition itself pretty ignorable to anyone who's not a very invested "gamer".

    Actual right to repair and right to continue to access to the software and services and devices you buy goes SO far beyond mere games, there are other huge impacts to society from exactly the same problem that leads to game servers being shut down, and this petition ignored them completely to focus exclusively on games. I know that was done purposefully, but I think it was a miscalculation.

    I'm convinced it could have got a lot of support if it had broader aims. Yes if you go after the big boys who are locking down tractor parts and integrated electronic modules so they become obsolete and unrepairable and directly impacting farmers and our food supply, you're going to REALLY piss off some very big business interests who are going to try and kill your petition, but you're also going to help educate and hopefully get a lot of support from politicians who already know this is a problem and from the general public who doesn't care about games but does care about society (at least once they're properly educated about it, which is hard but also a necessary and positive step to even attempt).

    • that was sort of the point though. a big case with a narrow focus can later be used as a fulcrum for a wider scope, given that the original case has the right spin. it's also easier than going after the anti-repair people.

    • It was a shitshow start to finish.

      First and foremost: it is an inherently adversarial "movement" name which actively shifts the blame toward developers. One of my gaming buddies was a community manager for one of the studios that got gutted over the past year or so (gotta "love" how that doesn't narrow it down at all) and he definitely had some Thoughts about getting constant social media spam about how they are "killing games" by not releasing offline versions of old games as they were doing layoffs on the regular.

      There is a reason the only dev/"dev" who gave any meaningful feedback was thor the shithead. And while it may suck that he didn't have the same opinion as the people accusing devs of killing the games they spent the better part of a decade on... Yeah, pirate software is a dipshit who was just trying to put himself as a position of authority because his dad worked at Blizzard.

      But most of the key points he raised were sensationalized but not actually wrong if you look at things from a developer perspective. Well, from the perspective of a developer who expects to get fired any second now because funding will arbitrarily dry up. Yeah, the end result will TOTALLY be that you get an extra six months of salary to make the offline client and not that you'll be held in breach of contract and lose your severance because you couldn't pound that out in a week.

      But even without starting things off at "its just about ethics in game journalism" levels of discourse: Yes, yes, yes, I know that Ross et al intentionally were vague and shut the fuck up. If you push "We need legislature on X" to a governing body without an actionable plan? Schoolhouse Rock doesn't start blaring and Aaron Sorkin doesn't... okay, he still gets a boner but for different reasons. What happens is the lobbyists and Jack Thompsons of the world swoop in and make damned sure that those "details get ironed out" the way they want.

      It sucks because treating this as part of a larger effort that included actual Game Preservation efforts and worked with policy groups and developers would actually have been awesome AND gotten widespread support even from the studios themselves. Instead it was a flashy campaign that started off by flipping the bird to people getting fired left and right and reveled in its ignorance of how legislature even works. And then managed to get dragged into a slapfight with some jackass who plays wow and sells mobile games.

      It was overly narrow in most cases while positioning itself as speaking for some massive swathe of the industry it was actively antagonizing.

      • Well, from the perspective of a developer who expects to get fired any second now because funding will arbitrarily dry up. Yeah, the end result will TOTALLY be that you get an extra six months of salary to make the offline client and not that you'll be held in breach of contract and lose your severance because you couldn't pound that out in a week.

        This is like saying:

        "You shouldn't ask for more rights, otherwise I will have to work in the gulags for longer."

      • Wow, somebody didn't watch the video.

      • But most of the key points he raised were sensationalized but not actually wrong if you look at things from a developer perspective.

        they were also not really relevant to the campaign, which was the biggest problem with his comments. there was no expectation that studios do extra work to keep servers up, or make offline clients. the expected legislation was to have publishers allow external use of the relevant source code of the product when the publisher deems the work no longer profitable, to spare people the effort of reverse-engineering protocols and building their own servers. a knock-on effect of that would be that future services would have to be built with eventual shutdown procedures in mind, which, let's face it, they should already have been doing.

        thor was saying "this isn't feasible because it's a bunch of extra work for the developers", completely missing the point that this is not on the developers. it's on the company sitting on the IP. they can publish source trees no problem, no developer involvement necessary. and the legislation would have made sure of that fact.

      • There was plenty of off-the-record talk from devs who wanted something to show for the years they put into a project that was shut down in less time than it took to make the game in the first place.

  • Ah you know, not the outcome I hoped for but it's exactly what I expected from humans.

    paraphrasing a little more than a half hour of the video: “Man, fuck Thor/Pirate Software for either lying or misunderstanding and signal boosting his incorrect interpretation of the campaign.”

    I agreed with Ross previously that Thor taking a really dumb fuck position helped get more attention on the issue that was, IMO, as hopeless as trying to get the masses to care about or understand Net Neutrality. That was what I saw repeated and upvoted at the time even before Thor revealed himself to be a gigantic narcissistic nepo baby bullshitter more recently.

    If you watched the vid OP, what changed his opinion? I'll check it out once I'm home from work regardless.

50 comments