- cross-posted to:
- gaming@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- gaming@beehaw.org
- 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?
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I’ve always thought that the only solution to this problem is being able to reverse engineering central servers and thus being effectively being able to pirate online only games.
Reverse engineering the server is reverse engineering the whole game. It’s going to require skilled engineers and a significant time investment. It may be possible, but not practical.
Also, the client will likely verify it is talking to a legitimate server by checking a certificate, so you may also have to hack the client too.
At some point you’re better off working a job and coming up with the $50 or making your own game with hookers and blackjack.
Ross mentions reverse engineering towards the end of the vid so it’s definitely top of mind now for the future of the initiative, bar rebooting it with someone else. Agreed that it’s really the only alternative when the industry is as steeped in back alley deals and skeevy dishonest commentary as it is.
It’s an unreliable solution, because there’s no guarantee that even dedicated and talented individuals will be able to reverse engineer every online server, if that game has those individuals in its customer base in the first place. The solution seems to be either legislation, which this campaign is seeking, or for the market to outright reject online-only games, which it isn’t doing. I don’t even really have an alternative to online-only games in some genres, like FPS for instance, to send my dollars toward instead; sports games are in a similar position, since the sports organizations all signed exclusivity contracts.
The solution is legislation, as without that, we can’t expect companies to decide to release either the executables or source code for running the servers, other than a handful looking to get some attention and goodwill.
I think the initiative just ran out of steam. I remember seeeing it everywhere for the first month or so, and then nothing, and it plateaued around where it is now. Maybe the vast majority of EU gamers just can’t be arsed to read and sign a petition like this. I mean most can’t even vote with their wallet when a shit game releases. And of course it’s fun to blame thor/pirateguy for this ( and they probably did have their share of fault ) but in the end it looks like 500k is the amount of gamers that actually give a fuck about the state of things.
It just didn’t reach enough people, no one I know that is not on Reddit and Lemmy even heard about it or understood the problem to begin with, on top of that, most “gamers” are playstation players that don’t know anything about these problems or care for that matter.
Piratesoftware makes me so fucking mad, shit is so crazy people give him the time of day.
What happened ? I’m out of the loop on this one
Sorry, I went to sleep not long after I made that comment. I see I was beaten to it but, he was just so dramatically crass and rude when introduced to the movement, and said mean shit about Ross, the guy behind the movement, calling him gross, a greasy used car salesman, saying “he can eat my whole ass”. And after all of that, he refused to speak to Ross and continued to make 2 entire youtube videos, and some livestreams about shit talking the movement, fuck that snotty little prick.
Calling one of the most polite, succinct and eager to explain themselves YouTubers a greasy used car salesman is just an automatic red flag, just unbelievably skeevy behavior from him.
Typical Blizzard dev BS
“You think you do, but you don’t!”
He’s opposed to it. He speaks with a very clam, professional voice, so people like to believe him. I get skeeved out by it personally. Honestly, we shouldn’t be taking advice from former Blizzard dev anyway. Nothing that comes from that company has ever been respectful to players or even human decency.
Don’t forget he’s also (allegedly) a nepo hire
I would like to thank you because, I immediately fell in love with the website you recommended.
It’s mainly because they use RSS.
He’s so polite!
Ross is pretty great, give the game dungeon a go.
One of my favorite youtubers for over a decade now.
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.
yeah my opinion on piratesoftware was really cemented by his inability to do a charitable reading of the petition.
It really was a good ole’ internet argument where he was just obnoxiously wrong in his interpretation and remained just as confidently incorrect the entire time.
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.
But politicians will actually be prepared to get behind right to repair. But they regard games as a bit infantile, and don’t really want to be involved. A point that was made right at the start of all of this and was then completely ignored.
that’s an assumption. for all we know they would have connected the two, or seen one as harmless and implemented it, or lobbied against both.
People are already talking about to right to repair, so why not take advantage of that, why make life more difficult for yourself than it needs to be?
because to most people software is not a thing that can be repaired.
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 is a reason that there are regularly listicles about “top 1000 horrifically angry comments on github” and the like. And that goes up even more when you are working on a closed source product and have been up and pounding through tickets for 26 hours straight.
Not to mention proprietary or re-used code. Like… I think Call of Duty is STILL technically the quake 3 engine if you go deep enough into the source code? And while Q3a (presumably licensed at some point since it is GPL from a google) is open source, there is going to be a lot of code in there that isn’t. It is very common to use other libraries and suddenly needing to open source your account management system because one of your games is dead in the water is a huge problem. ESPECIALLY if the goal is so that “fans” can… reverse engineer it to build their own servers (and nobody would EVER profit from one of those…).
And then you just have the kind of “spirit of the law” shit that Apple et al love to abuse. Is that game fundamentally unplayable “offline” because it did REALLY cool stuff with sharding so that players can drop in and out of a game seamlessly? Or is it a bunch of phone homes for every single achievement for a fully SP game? Because that would NEVER happen.
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.
Which can be the difference between “Okay, we’ll give you two months to get this shit popular again” versus “Well, it is going to cost X engineering hours to clean up the source so we are just gonna kill it now and get on that. Oh, and if the source isn’t cleaned up within, let’s say, one month, that is a breach of contract and none of your team gets severance”
The other aspect this tends to ignore is the use of proprietary software libraries and even having expert consultants come out. My understanding is nVidia have mostly stopped doing it (for gaming) but for decades they would fly out a solution engineer or five to look at the game, help optimize the graphics and physics pipelines, and even document what needs to be added to the drivers on release.
Not all of those contractors who have ever touched the code are going to be okay with it being released. Since this would be the equivalent of having potentially entire mega companies worth of software libraries and the like change their license overnight.
and that’s what the regulation is for. to get them to plan ahead.
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.
And that always comes up because it is the truth. It is the same problem as “Well, you worked yourself to death for the past five years but decided you needed to take time off for mental health reasons. Unfortunately, we don’t launch until six months from now so go fuck yourself. Hey, send in Fred on your way out so we can tell him he needs to work 90 hour weeks for the next six months but won’t have been here long enough to get in the credits”.
You know what doesn’t get that? Being told you need to architect your game, from the start, to use listen servers while also being unhackable and controlling all progression in the data center AND scaling near infinitely with no host migration issues (oh Warframe…). Or to know that if things even look slightly bad you will have no runway to fix it and will immediately be told to wrap it up and release the “offline mode” in the next month.
People can (and shouldn’t) be nasty about anything. Part of a community manager’s responsibility would be to convey what customers are asking for, and…yeah, games should have listen servers and offline modes and do what they can to prevent cheating. Those are all things that some segment of their customers or potential customers care about. And at the same time, plenty of devs want to make their games live forever but don’t have the ability to make it so. It’s not inherently adversarial, nor does it inherently shift blame toward developers. We all know why we don’t have these things: microtransactions. The people mandating those are the ones with a profit share incentive, which aren’t typically the boots on the ground actually building the game.
No. But “stop killing games” is an inherently adversarial statement. Hell, even a lot of PUBLISHERS would rather keep their games running forever. Let alone the devs who have put their blood, sweat, and tears into it.
People can (and shouldn’t) be nasty about anything. Part of a community manager’s responsibility would be to convey what customers are asking for, and…yeah, games should have listen servers and offline modes and do what they can to prevent cheating.
And here we get to the crux of things. And the good news is that we already fucking went through all of this.
“Nobody should have to put up with harassment. But, really, it is your job to deal with that and we have our demands. So give me what I want and this all goes away”. Am I talking about “Stop killing games and give us an offline server for your MMO” or am I talking about “Fire that bitch and stop talking about woke games because I care about ethics in games journalism”?
And we saw the exact same responses from the dev side (and the smarter/older influencers). Either completely ignoring it because they don’t want to get doxxed or “Yeah… there are parts of that I really like. But I don’t know enough to really comment too much. Anyway, back to talking about the new Silent Hill game”.
Hell, even a lot of PUBLISHERS would rather keep their games running forever.
This is such a shit take that publishers want games running forever. The whole reason they get shut down is because they don’t make a profit and if something that’s not earning them money might as well be something that’s going to take gamers away from their new game. So they’ll of course shut it down. It’s in their incentive.
Your arguments seem very disingenuous.
Harassment is not an inherent part of Stop Killing Games. If publishers (or really, whoever the financiers are for a given game) wanted their game to live forever, they had the power at the start and opted not to.
Yet again, your response was “if they didn’t want to get harassed by the people who totally aren’t with us, they shouldn’t have crossed us”
Yet again, we lived through all this shit with gamergate.
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.
what changed his opinion?
The metrics on signatures for the citizens’ initiative. If it helped, it would have boosted those too, but it didn’t. He also got word that at least one very large YouTuber/streamer that he did not name decided to stay quiet about SKG because it would have contradicted Thor.
I’ll also reiterate that 1M signatures out of a population of 450M is an absurdly high threshold to have to reach, so getting 1/10th of that is still impressive, even if it’s unsuccessful.
He also got word that at least one very large YouTuber/streamer that he did not name decided to stay quiet about SKG because it would have contradicted Thor.
So, Asmongold. Got it!
Actually Asmongold was one of the biggest names in support of SKG.
Broken clocks are right twice a day.
Fuck whoever stayed quiet then
“Oh no, I might contradict the annoying moron who is wrong! I can’t be seen as being on the opposite of that!”
Man, so many influencers do this. It’s really a shame what kind of world we are building. People who actually have reach - influencers, staying quiet about real issues in fear of cutting the hand that feeds them. Off topic but damn if it doesn’t hold true.
I am not following Thor very much, what did he do recently?
It’s all incredibly online, but searching the keywords “piratesoftware WoW drama onlyfangs” will get the ball rolling if you want to see a prime example of how a narcissist acts when getting caught out very publicly. He also embellished his past a lot and that got parroted in every thread mentioning him for months, so that shouldn’t be hard to stumble upon.
Don’t forget throwing his LGBT fans under the bus to have a happy conversation with asmongold and basically inviting the cunts fanbase to harass his LGBT viewers.
Then when said viewers tell him that he was wrong for that and now they are being harassed, he said people were trying to cancel him for having a normal conversation with asmongold about a video game.
That shit pissed me off so much. Pretentious cunt…
I hadn’t heard about that since I quit reddit. That might be the new best of the worst examples of his incapability of admitting fault ever.
I feel like this needs to be spread as far and wide as possible, and for PirateSoftware to be mass reported for misinformation about an ongoing political initiative.
I understand why he’s frustrated. EU citizens are just so damn lazy and won’t help themselves. I’ve told all my friends and family, brought it up at parties and other gatherings to anybody who plays games. But there are EU gamers (streamers and consumers alike) who are chronically online, on every proprietary platform out there and who don’t give 2 shits about the campaign.
Edit: Fuck Thor.
That’s not true. The petition to ban gay conversion therapy achieved the same number of signatures within days. This is just much more niche.
I’m quite lost (disinterested) on MCU stuff as of late, what’s going on about Thor? Is there a game?
thor is a tech youtuber. it’s just his actual name.
Huh. The things I miss out of these days!
You didn’t miss a thing
