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Killed the greatest gamer initiative out there for content (fedia.io)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/gaming@lemmy.world
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The "Change my mind" meme with the face of "Thor" from "PirateSotware"
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[–] 33 points 1 year ago (77 children)

You truly believe piratesoftware is the only reason a million Europeans didn't sign a petition on game preservation? You truly believe, if not for him, the EU would have passed legislation to regulate the video games industry. You might as well be mad at Gawr Gura for increasing the price of rice in Japan.

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  • [–] 59 points 1 year ago (71 children)

    He spawned a bunch of misinformation that people are repeating to this day every time the petition is mentioned. He was by far the largest negative influence on the campaign. Even if it was always doomed to fail, who would you have OP clown on if not him?

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  • [–] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (10 children)

    he happens to be the one that got into a call/response thread with the figurehead of the thing you support is pretty toxic

    Ross specifically didn't engage with him beyond a comment politely informing him of his mistakes and misunderstandings because he was rude and hostile from the very beginning.

    I wouldn't condone harassing him about this. He didn't directly engage with Ross either, so we can both respectfully keep our internet bickering separate.

    I don't fully agree with either of them,

    And you shouldn't. While his resume sounds impressive and I'm sure he knows way more about game dev than I ever could, he too is plain wrong here. He approaches the initiative as "this could never work in the current landscape" while the whole point of the legislation would be to legally obligate changing that landscape, or not sell in the EU. This is how iphones got USB-C, so why couldn't it work here?

    Edit: I meant Ross didn't engage with him before this as he obviously threw some hands in the latest video

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    One disagreement is technical: can developers provide communities with a safe, functional iteration of their servers to deploy freely in such a way that discontinued games continue to operate?

    The answer is "probably not". The devs speaking out aren't wrong about this. This requires rebuilding the entire concept of server architecture for games and centralized servers. Not only are older games probably unsalvageable for that process, but any game that is buying online services would be priced out and you'd end up with only the largest publishers being able to afford basic features like, say, matchmaking.

    I think a lot of the devs speaking out are missing the forest for the trees.

    There are unquestionably technical challenges involved in having to release the server software for games. These aren't the days of Team Fortress 2, and a lot of multiplayer games require clusters and massive tech stacks to handle authentication, persistent storage, and cross play. Add on to that legal challenges like licensing of third-party software, and yeah, it's nearly impossible for a publisher to just release source code or an executable file for the server software.

    Multi-player games being killed is an issue, but it's not the big issue that preservationists and consumers care about. The big issue is single player games being designed with the requirement that they connect to publisher servers for activation or for some multi-player component, then the publishers shut down the server and render the entire game inoperable. For example, I have an old CD copy of Bioshock for PC (a completely single player game) that I can't do fuck-all with unless I crack it, because it's tied to Games for Windows Live.

    It's not reasonable to expect a developer to make their proprietary server code available after a game reaches end of life, and I absolutely agree with the devs on that point. It's more than reasonable to expect a developer to not be allowed to lock the entire game behind a limited-life service that isn't strictly required for it to be a playable game.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    I disagree. I care about preserving multiplayer games.

    DRM servers going down is a thing and I think we can all agree that it should be regulated. In practice it exists in that grey area where Youtube also lives where... yeah, sure, cracking it is not technically legal but nobody is going to enforce that so if you want to play it you bypass the DRM and go on with your day.

    But I do care about keeping some version of those multiplayer games. It's a massive loss not seen in media since the early days of television to have a massive cultural artifact just poof itself out of existence at regular intervals. We need a solution to that.

    If what this argument is about is just forcing people to keep their activation and authentication servers online or removing DRM then it's been a pointless argument.

    It's not what the petition says, not what the advocates for the movement are talking about and not the core of the issue, though. The Crew, which started the entire argument, wasn't a single player game with discontinued DRM, it was talking to centralized servers all along. The Matrix's MMO or Vanilla WoW before that became a commercial product did not fit the bill here, and yet were the things we all think about when we think about this issue.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

    These aren't the days of Team Fortress 2, and a lot of multiplayer games require clusters and massive tech stacks to handle authentication, persistent storage, and cross play.

    With the exception of cross play, those are all only problems due to the massive scale of active and total players.

    All of these things are already somewhat modular and very scalable in implementation, by very, very intentional design.

    So... running a rented VPS or decently beefy home server that is just geared toward handling a much, muuuuch smaller total player count, with just one of every required module, instead of being networked to 5,000 other server units dispersed around the globe?

    Totally feasible.

    In fact, its often the case the scalability solution is the major 3rd party liscensed thing that causes this legal headache.

    Just design a basic non scaling model that works for a lower player count with a simple dedi server model.

    This is actually remarkably easier and more simple to code than what the industry does now... if you've ever run or coded any servers.

    Have you ever run any dedicated private game servers, have you ever managed a remote server cluster/cloud/whatevercorpobuzzword?

    I have!

    Sure, matchmaking wouldn't work as well, because your smaller server set up / instance could only handle a smaller number of players... but its not like the code just magically doesn't work at all unless it is massively scaled.

    In fact, all matchmaking fundamentally is, is finding an empty dedicated server, and then populating it with players who are in a queue, by some obscenely complex skill based matchmaking algorithm, and also trying to minimize total ping for the player roster it generates.

    Or maybe its using one of the client's rigs as the actual host, etc.

    Just take these parts out, and expose the more fundamental stuff that everything else is built off of, on your final patch. Make the new paradigm such that this fallback EoL scenario is accepted as a given from the start, and design the rest of everything with that in mind.

    I will give you that uh, yeah, crossplay on consoles?

    Thats almost certainly not feasible for post EoL games, as its just directly reliant on a Sony or Microsoft or Nintendo or whatever server at some point, and they're not gonna run a server in that situation.

    Add on to that legal challenges like licensing of third-party software, and yeah, it's nearly impossible for a publisher to just release source code or an executable file for the server software.

    So... the whole point is to make a new paradigm for things moving forward. Not retroactive.

    Yes, it would potentially be unduly onerous to just suddenly demand all current games need to re-architect themselves before EoL.

    But this isn't what SKG is advocating for. Its advocating for a new standard that applies to new games, such that they can be designed with this all in mind from the get go, and make it more like disabling/removing and swapping out some modules than rebuilding the whole thing from the ground up.

    Think of it as having a spare tire and a jackstand in your car before you go on a roadtrip, where you know that one day, one of your tires is gonna blow.

    Yep, the game company has to slightly alter the way they do things, have a clear, EoL contingency plan in mind from day one, ready to execute when their balding tire finally gives out.

    But this really isn't that difficult or costly to implement at all. Its basically just an emergency fallback plan, which is very, very common in the brosder server hosting industry.

    Also uh, obviously they won't release the source code. That would indeed be an insane legal/financial nightmare.

    But... a compiled binary for a server?

    That's gotten a final update that strips out what they don't directly own? Because the whole game was designed with that inevitabity in mind?

    Thats ... completely legally not a problem for game publishers.

    There are already tons of laws that punish people who decompile and then distribute or profit off of that, that's been a thing for longer than I've been alive.

    It used to be the norm to just release dedicated server binaries for many games, usually shortly after the release of the game, way before support ended... so that people could host their own servers.

    Like, by the logic of what you are worried about... Valve should be worried about my CD version of Half Life 2, because it uses a liscensed version of the Havok engine that they built off of to make the physics in the Source engine.

    Uh yeah, if I somehow decompiled the Source engine and its Havok code, and then freely distributed that or built something with it I sold for money, I'd get sued into oblivion Xen.

    It's not reasonable to expect a developer to make their proprietary server code available after a game reaches end of life.

    Nah, it absolutely is, this was the standard norm for the vast majority of games until the new industry norm became games as service, always online.

    They intentionally introduced this new paradigm that fucks consumers, the old paradigm of releasing server tools often even before EoL worked fine, they just got greedy.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    To preface, I support SKG. I'm not at all disagreeing with the movement, and I understand the point of SKG is to be setting a standard going forward that will force developers to stop doing this bullshit.

    My argument wasn't that SKG is bad. My argument was that the developers arguing against the movement are getting hung up on and bikeshedding about multiplayer and live service games. I was trying look at it from the perspective of a developer and explain that we (consumers) understand that it's not reasonable (for various reasons) to demand that they release the entire stack of backend services used by a game.

    Games like Pal World still manage to publish their dedicated server binaries without publishing the dedicated server browser, and that's all we actually want. Shitheels like PirateSoftware are being disingenuous and framing it as though the movement is entitled and asking for the impossible.

    Now, to respond directly:

    All of these things are already somewhat modular and very scalable in implementation, by very, very intentional design.

    For horizontal scaling, yes.

    So... running a rented VPS or decently beefy home server that is just geared toward handling a much, muuuuch smaller total player count, with just one of every required module, instead of being networked to 5,000 other server units dispersed around the globe?

    Respectfully, and as someone who has run community game servers, it's still not that simple or straightforward. A single private server can exist on a beefy machine or VPS and be fine. A private server designed to scale horizontally has much higher minimum requirements.

    I'll use Minecraft as an example:

    A private server for friends or a small community is exactly as you described. You download Paper, install MariaDB for SQL, and throw it on a VPS.

    A large community server is a lot worse. You still have MariaDB and Paper, yeah. But now you have multiple shards of Paper, with one shard per world. These shards need to have a low-latency way to communicate and share information with each other, so now you need to set up a Redis server. And now since you have multiple shards, you need to set up the Waterfall/BungeeCord server software to act as an ingress. On top of that, with multiple shards you're going to want multiple nodes, and that now involves creating a private network.

    You can run all that on a single dedicated server, but it's not going to be as cheap or simple to set up. Multiple gigabytes of memory are being wasted just on overhead for those services.

    The problem here is that with newer games like Destiny 2, the server architecture is almost definitely designed for large-scale usage. If Bungee released the server and matchmaking software tomorrow, only people like us would actually have the experience and resources to host it. And if their server software was designed to only run within a container orchestration environment like Kubernetes, it would be even worse.

    In contrast to Destiny and going back to my other comment, Team Fortress 2 was designed before horizontally scalable dedicated game servers were common. It's easy to distribute and easy to host.

    Have you ever run any dedicated private game servers, have you ever managed a remote server cluster/cloud/whatevercorpobuzzword?

    My previous paragraphs should speak for themselves.

    Just design a basic non scaling model that works for a lower player count with a simple dedi server model.

    Which won't ever happen with AA or AAA devs unless it's legally required. It costs development time, probably won't ever be used internally, and doesn't bring in money. The suits won't allocate resources towards that out of the goodness of their hearts, which is why SKG needs to be successful.

    This is actually remarkably easier and more simple to code than what the industry does now... if you've ever run or coded any servers.

    It's really not.

    In an ideal scenario where you have time to actually plan things out, you have a shared, common library for the game logic and two different projects that use the library for dedicated servers running under self-hosted or scalable environments.

    If something like player inventory storage is handled by a dedicated service in the scalable environment, you can't use the same code for the self-hosted environment. To solve that, you create a InventoryStorage interface, a SQLBackedInventoryStorage implementation, and a MemoryBackedInventoryStorage implementation. Now you have abstraction, which makes the code harder to follow for on-boarding and maintenance purposes.

    Or, you could have two different implementations of the dedicated server. That comes with even worse problems stemming from code duplication. If you want to make sure those two implementations are fully compatible with each other, you also have to add full integration tests... and the only common interface between them is the game client network protocol.

    Also uh, obviously they won't release the source code. That would indeed be an insane legal/financial nightmare.

    Food for thought: what if the server source code is written in some scripting language like JavaScript or Python?

    But... a compiled binary for a server?

    That's gotten a final update that strips out what they don't directly own?

    This is almost always going to be a viable option, but it's not a 100% guaranteed solution.

    Particularly when it comes to shit like patents, you're entirely at the whims of the patent holder. A hypothetical example: the game absolutely needs to license some super-optimized physics simulation for its gameplay, and the only way they get that license is if it's not distributed to other parties. The easy solution is to only run the simulation on the server side, but if the server has to be distributed as well, that's a bit of a problem. Because it's patented, they can't just create their own copy of the library.

    Uh yeah, if I somehow decompiled the Source engine and its Havok code, and then freely distributed that or built something with it I sold for money, I'd get sued into oblivion Xen.

    Good reference. Well played.

    Nah, it absolutely is, this was the standard norm for the vast majority of games until the new industry norm became games as service, always online.

    I really should have phrased that differently.

    It's reasonable to expect dedicated server executables.

    It's not reasonable to expect the entire tech stack used for the online services to be made available. For a shitty example that's straight to the point, I don't think Oracle would appreciate it if their SQL server was released alongside the server software to run a MMO.

    They intentionally introduced this new paradigm that fucks consumers, the old paradigm of releasing server tools often even before EoL worked fine, they just got greedy.

    Absolutely.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    To preface, I support SKG. I'm not at all disagreeing with the movement, and I understand the point of SKG is to be setting a standard going forward that will force developers to stop doing this bullshit. My argument wasn't that SKG is bad.

    I hear you, and I understand.

    My argument was that the developers arguing against the movement are getting hung up on and bikeshedding about multiplayer and live service games. I was trying look at it from the perspective of a developer and explain that we (consumers) understand that it's not reasonable (for various reasons) to demand that they release the entire stack of backend services used by a game.

    I mean, generally, in many modern scenarios, yes, I broadly agree, releasing the entire stack of how many things are currently done, just as is, would be basically legally impossible, which I why I kept trying to stress the whole idea is ... not to do or demand that, for currently existing games... but to instead, introduce new laws that would force or at least significantly pressure this current paradigm of game server stack development to change, to enable that 'strip down at EoL' process to be possible, and ideally, easy, if that new paradigm is in place.

    Minecraft example

    I mean... minecraft ia kind of notoriously memory inefficient... everywhere, at everything. I get that it makes sense as an example, you have experience with it, and it is very popular... but it is rather compute inefficient.

    I also find this example, while generally illustrative of the kinds of problems that can occur...

    You are using multiple third party, not officially connected to Minecraft, bits of software in your stack, to modify and add features and capabilities to the actual base game itself.

    SKG says they want EoL games to be ideally fully function, or at least reasonably as functional as the base game is.

    Your specific example here goes far beyind the scope of what SKG is asking for.

    But, I also understand that you are using it to illustrate how generally... sometimes stacks don't scale well.

    Destiny 2 example.

    Well, no one is asking D2 to just release its entire stack as is.

    If they hypotherically did release it as is... and its very complicated... I mean. Yeah. It probably is.

    It probably is not as complicated as building an entire server emulator from basically juat packetsniffing the client... which many gaming communities have managed to do for many, many games over the years.

    But uh, I bet Bungee has internal documentation on it.

    Do an audit/review pass at EoL and release it?

    Yeah, doing a standup would be hard and complicated.

    That's fine! All SKG is asking for is for it to be legally possible, technically possible to stand up a server, as opposes to the current paradigm of ... essentially illegally reverse engineering the server/netcode and then running an emulator.

    If the players are dedicated enough, and it is possible, they will figure it out. And I don't say that as cheery, unrealistic optimism... I say it because the even more complex task of just totally reverse engineering entire server/netcode has been done before, many, many times.

    To just give one example: RPCS3, the PS3 emulator... yeah they made it entirely possible for two remote people to emulate the same game, connect to each other and play multiplayer games together.

    https://wiki.rpcs3.net/index.php?title=RPCN_Compatibility_List

    Its a work in progress... but yeah, this is just one example.

    Which won't ever happen with AA or AAA devs unless it's legally required.

    Yep. That's basically the point of SKG. Make it legally required.

    This is actually remarkably easier and more simple to code than what the industry does now... if you've ever run or coded any servers

    It's really not.

    In an ideal scenario where you have time to actually plan things out, you have a shared, common library for the game logic and two different projects that use the library for dedicated servers running under self-hosted or scalable environments.

    So firstly, I guess I wasn't clear here?

    As indicated by my sentence above where you started your quote of me...

    I meant that setting up a dedi server for actual shared worldspaces... and that alone, basically, as in old school fps games... that, that is much more simple.

    If something like player inventory storage is handled by a dedicated service in the scalable environment, you can't use the same code for the self-hosted environment. To solve that, you create a InventoryStorage interface, a SQLBackedInventoryStorage implementation, and a MemoryBackedInventoryStorage implementation. Now you have abstraction, which makes the code harder to follow for on-boarding and maintenance purposes.

    Secondly... I mean, you've described a solution here, to doing this in more modern games.

    I have roughly done sort of an approximation of this over 15 years ago now, hooking up two GMod servers to a shared, seperate, player inventory db, as well as another db for the worldspace items of each server/map.

    I figured out how to make a custom gamemode, configure it with things like uh, certain props like file cabinets also having their own inventory, which was persistent, as well as persistent world space dropped / semi random population of various items... and set up two basically map profiles within the gamemode... stuff like door ownership by specific players... ability to take items with you from the city map/server to the outlands map/server...

    If an unpaid, not even 20 year old, with literally no formal CS schooling can figure this out, while going through uni... lets just say I woukd be very, very amused if this is somehow an unrealistic, overly difficult task for handsomely paid teams of professionals to figure out more a more complex game.

    Like uh sure, at some point I would hit max map specific db saturation... but that wasn't really from the db itself. That was from if you tried to physics sim every single possible item in the map, simultaneously, or spawn every random loot item at once.

    So what you do is... not that lol. You make items in world just go physics inert to most kinds of interactions, you keep most of them just in a player's inventory, or a containers inventory, have a tarkov style loot mexhanic in a gui, give containers a max volume and item count they can hold, only spawn a manageable number if a container explodes or is broken... you make the normal map load in first, block any connection attempts while you progressively spawn in world items on a tiny incrmentinf delay and/or batches and then do a verification pass, and then you allow connection attempts from players.

    ... And as for the shared player db... I can only ever remember that lagging when people were literally DDoSing something, or beta testing trying to dupe items... which i basically solved by mandating a bunch of client side and serverside warning triggers and conditions and cooldowns, and obfuscating the commands that would execute / show up in the player's console.

    I realize this isn't anywhere near the same ... magnitude of scaling that like D2 or Warframe or something has, in its backend...

    But the whole point would be to mandate that going forward, new games of that nature and scale, would have to offer some kind of lightweight, nowhere near as scale capable version of the server stuff at EoL....so they would just design this lightweight test version first, basically, then develop a tool ir script to translate between the small server framework and the huge scalable framework... and just do basic upkeep and maintenance on that conversion tool as the game gets more stuff overtime, and then at EoL, easy peasy, translate it all back to the small server format.

    You could maybe do something like implementing a very long sort of string that encapsulates every single aspect of a persistent player account, then encrypt it, then give this code to players at EoL, then the new, light duty, blackbox server has a built in decrypter and recrypter... and there ya go, your player is now still persistent, hasn't lost anything, and can just hop to different post EoL servers, with all their stuff.

    Or, you could have two different implementations of the dedicated server. That comes with even worse problems stemming from code duplication. If you want to make sure those two implementations are fully compatible with each other, you also have to add full integration tests... and the only common interface between them is the game client network protocol.

    Yeah I wouldn't personally recommend that approach either, for the reasons you described.

    Food for thought: what if the server source code is written in some scripting language like JavaScript or Python?

    Ok, unfortunately it is 4 am and my thought injestor is rapidly losing consciousness... I'll try to get back to the rest of this after .z.. sleep...

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

    I don't disagree. My caveat would be that this can't be a blank check to just pull the plug at will. There are different types of server dependencies and different types of remedies here.

    I would consider a time-gated mandatory refund for software that stops working within a certain term. That seems like a significant disincentive for the specific type of thing we're talking about. I'd consider carving exceptions in EU regulation for modding and community server replacements of discontinued software. I'd consider obligations to remove certain server checks (e.g. DRM-only or activation checks) on discontinued software and so on.

    You lose some face when you go online with delusions of large GaaS releases suddenly generating some magical portable package that runs on end user hardware, but that doesn't mean there isn't an issue or available solutions. I'm concerned that some of the petty drama is poisoning the well and nobody will take this seriously in a long time because of it, because I do think action is needed and is urgent.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    I'm concerned that some of the petty drama is poisoning the well and nobody will take this seriously in a long time because of it, because I do think action is needed and is urgent.

    Me too. Any post about this petition instantly gets filled with toxic comments like "fuck that cunt piratesoftware!" and it seems to have overshadowed everything else. I initially approved of the movement until I saw all the cult-like zealousy surrounding it. Hopefully other consumer protection movements like right to repair can make ground without devoling into internet shitflinging between youtubers.

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  • [–] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (23 children)

    With all due respect to Chet...

    Dude is a writer.

    He writes plots, and character dialogue, and storylines.

    Not code.

    Certainly not server or networking code.

    He's waaay out of his element on this.

    Also, he is misrepresenting and strawmanning the fuck out of Ross!

    Ross did not at any point say that 'All server code needs to be able to run on PS5s'.

    Ross did not at any point say that 'the server and client should be the same thing'.

    He instead gives a very technical and detailed breakdown of what he is proposing, which either flew right over Chris's head, or Chris is just intentionally strawmanning him, taking a picture that has a PS5 in it and cherry picking and decontextualizing what Ross actually said, such that it might make sense to a twitter brained idiot that believes whatever their favorite person says without even looking at the other side of the argument.

    All of the complex legal and usage rights that Chet just implies Ross greatly misunderstands or didn't mention at all, and isn't considering?

    Yeah, Ross gave a detailed explanation about how the whole fucking point of this is to redefine the legal and financial landscape and rules around this currently existing paradigm/framework regarding how servers and liscensing work, so that future games are still capable of being produced, still capable of being quite profitable...

    ...but in a way that game studios/publishers that want to make a fully online only game have to make just a teensy weensy bit less profit off of their MTX money printing machines, and spend a bit of it on making it possible to EoL release some server code that other people could theoretically run, if they wanted to foot the server hosting costs on their own.

    ...

    Here's the goddamned timestamp Chet didn't even link to:

    https://youtube.com/watch?v=HIfRLujXtUo&t=2231

    Watch this and tell me if Ross even approaches the same universe as saying 'PS5s need to be able to run servers' or 'the client and server should be the same thing'.

    He throws out 'maybe we should make a regulation that says an EOL online game needs to be mandated to be runnable on consumer hardware'.

    And then temporarily includes a PC and a PS5 in his diagram.

    And then immediately says, 'but hey, if thats not doable because of hardware limitations, then maybe another option could be to still mandate release of server code, but with specific hardware requirements.'

    As in, you know, a PC or Server Rack or rented VPS server with X amount of total processing power, memory and storage, minimum specs.

    Which is what every dedicated server or more complex system for any game on the goddamned planet is currently and/or has ever run on.

    ...

    Also, you literally can run a server on a PlayStation!!!

    https://hackaday.com/2022/02/10/turning-the-ps4-into-a-useful-linux-machine/

    Tada! Linux Distro for a PS4, supports NGINX, and with modern Proton and WINE, you could run a whole lot of dedicated servers that only even have Windows binaries for at least older games on one.

    I'm sure we all remember the clusters of PS3s being used to create a sort of poor man's supercomputer.

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster

    In case this is news to anyone... those PS3s... they're networked, together, to be able to distribute compute loads intelligently and efficiently.

    You know, like servers.

    ...

    For the love of god, people need to stop having 'technical' opinions on this issue if you're not even going to bother to actually listen to both sides of the argument, especially if you don't actually know anything about the tech that's involved.

    Watch the entire video.

    This is a very complex and detailed topic, and if you are only getting your info on it from fucking tweets and youtube shorts, you are misinformed by definition.

    Some things are actually so complicated that they cannot be easily explained or understood in under 1000 words.

    Its very, very clear to me that every single prominent 'reputable' critic of Ross has absolutely no experience with actually running and maintaining server clusters, nor developing and implementing any actual code that makes any of that shit work... and then they expand out of their domain of expertise and give 'expert commentary', like a fucking new nurse with an associates degree deciding they actually know how to perform a brain surgery.

    Nothing Ross is proposing is fundamentally impossible, it is in fact quite reasonable, and he freely admits when he is venturing beyond his own expertise, unlike everyone else criticizing him.

    I repeat, there is nothing technically impossible or unduly financially onerous to game publishers to what Ross is proposing.

    The proposed reforms are a very complex legal issue, and Ross is totally open to varying degrees of specific, exact details of what game publishers would have options to do.

    Its not going to be some retroactive thing that applies to every game that has ever existed, it would be new guidelines going forward that make the playing field just a bit more tipped in the direction of not totally fucking end users, by forcing new server architectures to adhere to be a bit more modular in design... which again, is completely doable and possible, there are already all kinds of different server stack configurations for all kinds of other large scale networks.

    ...

    Nobody is demanding 'release all your proprietary source code!'

    Nobody is demanding 'keep paying liscensing fees for some server component of a game you don't support anymore, forever!'

    They're saying:

    Build new games in such a way that, when they EoL sunset, you can withdraw those modules and release a closed source, proprietary server hosting solution, such that if a group of enthusiast players wanted to host their own standup, funding it out of their own pockets, not legally allowed any rights to the IP, not allowed to substantially modify that released server code, not to expect any ongoing support whatsoever... to just be able to run the damn server.

    ...

    I can, right now if I wanted to, find the server exe for Battlefield 1942, and standup and host a server for it, and people would be able to use it.

    https://community.pcgamingwiki.com/files/file/1000-battlefield-1942-windows-standalone-server-1619/

    There it is, right there.

    This used to be the norm.

    I could make my own mod for BF42 that is capable of overriding a specific player's specific kit, to give them a different primary weapon, and I could hook that into my server, and also a mysql or postgres database that keeps track of which players actually have access to the fancy gun, going by the same system a server admin has to ban or unban players.

    heck, i think i could also password protect the server, and basically use an id system of all players having their own unique password to id them, intercept the inputted password when it hits the server, have a script that checks that against the list of player passwords, send the actual game server password back to the server to let the player in, and then also now my game mod and sql db know what this player has for weapon upgrades.

    While it would be more complex to achieve this with a more modern game... nothing makes this fundamentally impossible with a more complex modern game, other than lazy, in reality, almost certainly contracted out, server architecture.

    Studios used to actually... you know, be largely defined by their engine, their netcode, their inhouse shit. Now everything is contracted middlemen, and people can no longer conceive of doing it any other way.

    ...

    You just have to offer companies, companies that are all absurdly wealthy, some kind of incentive trade off structure:

    1. Adhere to new design and legal guidelines such that when you go EoL, your game gets its last patch, and a black boxxed, 3rd party, unmaintainable deoendencies stripped out server binary is released, such that it is at least even theoretically possible for some other group that is footing their own server hosting costs can at least run a mostly fully featured, but much smaller in total simultaneously supported player count version of the server...

    or, 2) If you don't put what would be a tiny, tiny financial amount of effort into doing this, well, now you have to refund some defined set of MTX purchases to players that have now just poofed out of fucking existence.

    You can get more complicated with all the various technicalities of this, but something approximating that would work.

    ...

    And yes, this means Free to Play games that are entirely funded by MTX stop being a viable business model if they can't figure out a way to release a usable server model alongside either a sanitized and properly encrypted/obsfuscated and PII/financial data stipped out version of their entire player database so that people can actually keep their digital items...

    Or, just develop a kind of giant passkey, UID-like constructor/deconstructor system that encapsulates every possibly variable item or level or ability or attribute they have, and is then encrypted and decrypted by client and server, and provide these keys to every player ... like a CD Key, or ... any moderately complex website with a bunch of possibly varying input request parameters for filling out some kind of multi field form input.

    But more to the point, if this is somehow too harmful to the F2P business model?

    (which it shouldn't be unless your dev team has no actually competent coders

    GOOD.

    They are a fucking evil scourge that massively exploit and cause psychological harm to almost entirely children, and they are basically always trash tier games anyway with disgustingly toxic plauerbases.

    Switch over to an MMO style recurring subscription model of whatever $$$s a month, have an upfront cost if you want to, and maybe start making more of your in-game new content actually reasonably obtainable by actually playing the game.

    ...

    Thank you for attending my TEDTalkRant.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (15 children)

    Why is it not feasible? This is simply bullshit. If a company can do it the end user can do it as well. Even if they needed a thousand servers with 5090s to run the application it would still be a way to do it.

    And nobody is saying that this would be the requirement. The requirement is "to keep it in a playable state". How they achieve that is up to them.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    This person is a lost cause.

    If someone is short an succinct, they write a wall of text with a million questions

    If you reply to them with a wall of text that actually answers their gish gallop of questions, they say you are not succinct enough and won't be reading any of it.

    Go look at my exchange with them.

    This is an overconfident ideological troll who has never run or developed any kind server or networked anything, has no actual career experience in the kinds of large companies to understand how they actually make business decisions around such stuff.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (12 children)

    Speaking of TED Talks, I'm not reading all of that.

    But nobody is talking about running a service. Sure, someone might open up Anime CCG Pocket Collection 2045 Big Continuation Service, run like the original even with support staff. But maybe I'm fine with Joe's ACPC2045 server, because he's my mate and we just want to goof around.

    There are plenty of fan projects out there that run entire big services for their games. Keeping MMOs alive but also entirely new services based on stuff like Minecraft.

    If ACPC2045 wants to make this into an expensive complicated (for them and us) endeavour, let them. There will be plenty of other games that will handle the new requirements with grace because they are not incompetent. Look how quickly Ubisoft was able to turn around with The Crew 2.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    I'm currently watching the video and he is approaching this as if some company would continue complete support with every functionality still available without any interruption. His idea of the "simplest matchmaking" are freaking lobby codes. He can't even fathom a future without Steam.

    For him almost everything involves accounts and big companies and legal entities and central authorities. Stuff you do not need. Never ever. He is caught up on self made problems.

    If you put into law that a game has to remain playable developers will figure it out. Either they are stupid and tie everything to central unchangeable entities or they will add a config file where you enter an IP address and call it a day. Capitalism will find the cheapest way to comply.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    That's continued support. Not EOL. If continued support is his way to EOL his game that is of course his right. But also impossible to guarantee, precisely because of the reasons he listed. Thus an idiotic impossible stance to uphold.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (4 children)

    As long as a corporate entity is providing service the game is not EOL and beyond SKG.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    You are wrong. A corporate entity will always provide some service under any version of "SKG".

    I guess you could make it so it doesn't, but then all console games are excluded (since they all use some central first party API), all Steam games are excluded for the same reason and you'd be forcing developers to build their own substitutes for everything from hosting platforms to login platforms.

    I suspect you're misunderstanding what some of the stuff means or you're visualizing something that just doesn't fit how online games are built. Are you picturing a situation where no third parties are providing anything at all? No Steamworks, no Xbox Live, no servers of any kind hosted anywhere? Because that can't be the requirement, unless you want to make every game since Quake 3 illegal.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)
    1. This is about future games, not current games.
    2. Yes, the legal requirement would (or should) mean after EOL absolutely no dependency on outside services unless the infinite availability of that service can be guaranteed, which is of course impossible.

    None of the currently existing services like Steam, Xbox Live, etc are technically needed to run the games. They offer additional services. Hence they are called services. But you do not need any of them to run the core games.

    I'm not advocating for developers to implement these services themselves. I'm advocating for the absence of these services not making my games unplayable. I'm willing to compromise for that to only be the case after support for my games was dropped.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago* (5 children)

    I skimmed your response that stresses how this is a very complex issue that cannot be meaningfully understood without lenghty exploration of topics that require significant technical expertise, legal expertise and business expertise, and I acknowledge my preferred expert who isn't actually an expert was disingenuous, but I'm gonna stick with with opinion because I'm tired and I saw some arguments I've seen before.

    Ok, got it, this isn't a complex policy reform proposal to you, its primarily a vibes based assesment of a popularity contest.

    Well, if, somw other time, you wanna maybe actually read what I wrote some time and actually go over any particular reasons why you think it is impossible for an end user to run a dedicated server (it isn't by the way, tens millions of single individuals do this every single day), or any other objections you have to this initiative...

    I've got a degree in Econ, another one in Poli Sci, a decade in the tech industry as a data analyst, server admin, db admin, software dev, worked for 2 different Fortune 500 companies, and I've also been involved in game dev teams and written many of my own mods and custom game modes over the past 20 years.

    I kinda have pretty close to the perfect blend of experience and education relevant to the intersection of various fields this whole entire issue requires to truly understand it, if you want to have a more in depth discussion with someone who has more relevant technical experience than being a creative writer.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

    Just to correct the record on this more reasonably sized dose of surprisingly overt strawmanning, I don't think it's impossible for an end user to run a dedicated server.

    Well then maybe you should have actually said that.

    The way Scott presents the argument, even acknowledging that he argues that server code may need a dedicated server beyond the capabilities of end users, is just not feasible.

    If you wanna say things that are, you know technical, complicated... maybe... do that?

    But ok so you wanna be more technical now, let's see.

    I think it's not feasible to require a version of a modern persistent game server infrastructure, from login to matchmaking to data storage, to be converted or provided to be run or financed by end users.

    Ok, well, you are just objectively wrong on all of your clauses there.

    Dedicated enthusiasts can and do build home servers, all the time.

    People have been emulating and running long officially dead MMOs for almost 20 years.

    Login, matchmaking, storage... yep, all of that stuff still works. Sometimes you have to figure out a bit of a workaround, or run your own little side shunt thing as I described via example of Battlefield 1942 in my post you didn't read.

    These days, its easier and cheaper than ever to just rent a virtual server to host... literally whatever you want.

    The only real problem that would occur is if say, OverWatch 2 suddenly died... and... a group of enthusiastic OW2 players wanted to be able to support the entire current playerbase.

    Yeah, that indeed would likely be unfeasible.

    But uh... all you have to do is meet the base requirements for the server binary, the now incredibly cheap compared to 10, 20 years ago storage requirements for the base system... and then you scale up to meet the actual traffic from the number of regular players you want to be able to support.

    Theoretically, you could set up a nonprofit to legally finance scaling up to huge player counts, and have a subscription to this nonprofit server provider...

    Or you could just have many, many, smaller independent post EoL, enthusiast servers, capable of more or less doing it out of an informal amount of charity.

    The fixed costs of standing up a server are almost always so small as to be manageable by one or a few people.

    The variable cost, where things can really get expensive... is from scaling up massively.

    But you don't have to do that.

    Especially not in a way that still allows pre-existing commercial clients to run normally.

    TitanFall 2 has been dead for a decade. No more official servers.

    Its got a community made custom launcher that hooks into the community modified servers they run.

    Game is literally exactly the same.

    You can go play this right now, if you have a legit copy of TitanFall2.

    Basically its the same withing with StarWars Galaxies, to just give two examples right off the top of my head.

    I mean, for one thing, would you be running one instance or several?

    Could be either, depends on what the EoL game wants to do for its final shutdown server release.

    Probably it would be much, much easier to both the business and enthusiast post EoL server operators to set things up for many smaller, distinct, divergent individual instances, instead of designing a lemmy like federation system.

    You know, how like every major MMO ever basically has different realms or shards or whatever? Welp, now instead of 8 or 16 or 32.... theres 456 smaller ones.

    Who's handling how to point the client at the right place?

    Ideally this would be a very simple and minor patch to the client to enable this right before EoL, but as with examples I've already given, you can wrap the game in your own launcher, essentially 'hijacking' it in some sense, to be able to override the now defunct, default server address, and also include a server browser in that launcher.

    Then, you have that custom community launcher open source, so everyone can verify it isn't malware.

    But, there are many other possible methods and variations on this that are very specific to each exact game, that will or could work, even if the business doesn't bother to do a final patch on the EoL client.

    Who's responsible for the legal obligations regarding data storage and personal information?

    Uh, the people running the servers? The enthusiasts?

    Why would they have personal information beyond a UID, login and password for the player?

    The business would have to be immensely, catastrophically stupid to not scrub all other PII and financial type information out of the player db before they made a EoL final release version of it available.

    How do you handle monetization hooks in games where scarcity is baked into the design?

    Well there's many possible ways you could do this.

    One would be... the business just rips em out, disables them entirely on EoL release.

    Yep, that'd break shitty pay to win games that were designed with so much scarcity that obtaining game currency or items through gameplay alone is uh... unfeasible.

    Or, you could, just quickly modify the giant basically ini file that describes all the loot drop rates for getting things in game by... 10, 100, 1000, whatever, or let the enthusiast server operators modify these drop rates on their own.

    Or maybe its something like cosmetics you would normally have to pay real money for? They're all free now, woohoo! Just put in a little overide in the 'checks players real world bank account' routine to just return TRUE, basically, haha.

    There are an astounding number of ways this could be handled, either by the EoL final patch/release, you could just basically rip all that out, make everyone have as much of it as they want, or give the enthusiast post EoL server admins some gui or cli access to the already existing code in the server system to allow them to do a more fine tuned and tweaking approach to this... maybe everyone just gets an automatic allowance of whatever $50 real world dollars translates into in the game currency(ies) every month, who knows.

    All you have to do is say ok enthusiast server admins, you are NOT allowed to make money off of our compiled binary we are releasing to you, you have no right to do that, and we will sue you into oblivion if we think we can prove you are.

    Existing computer laws and liscenses already very well cover companies going after people who decompile their proprietary code and make money off of it.

    Whatever, the technicalities have been deliberated...

    Yes, now they have. I made many of these points I made here, and more, in my post you didn't read, so, uh yeah, kind of a one sided discussion here with a person who's already made up their mind, yeah.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    Considering any Valve game that came out after Half-Life 1 as an "indie game" is just... Wrong. Also mentioning a writer who talks out of his ass about programming stuff is just... Stupid.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

    Maybe you should have listed those, instead of saying that the Valve games he worked on were "indie hits." (Even though it would still be wrong since the other games you now bring up weren't hits.)

    Chet is also still a writer and not a programmer. Taking his opinion on software development as gospel is still silly.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I was being sarcastic, those aren't indie hits, they are genre-making, classic games that define multiple generations of gaming. The guy is a massive part of gaming history.

    Also not just a writer. You can go find elsewhere in the thread where I link to him breaking down a number of technical issues in the process of migrating Anacrusis from dedicated central servers to the peer-to-peer community edition. I'm not surprised. Not only did he start the studio, but he's a Valve vet, their whole thing is horizontal working.

    I'm also not surprised because most designers, producers or creative directors working in an online game like TF2, Portal 2 or Left 4 Dead would be pretty savvy about networking issues, the same way most screenwriters can understand how a movie is shot.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (13 children)

    Nevermind the fact that they have everything to gain from people buying their games as much as possible of course they’re gonna be against skg. If they kill their games they can sell more

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    Not worth a well thought out reply. Fuck corpos killing games if I pay for something it’s mine don’t come to me and take it away. Period. Skg is for consumers. Anyone against it is against me and my wallet

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    Of the two guys in question one seems to be a tiny indie dev making single player games. The other is a hugely established figure working on a multiplayer game.

    Thor is a guy who got fired from Blizzard, got mad, made an indie game studio, has been saying he's been developing this game for uh... 7 years now, while in actuality he's been livestreaming for 10 hours a day for that time, basically not developing shit.

    Chet is a writer, with literally no coding experience, who is now taking his first steps into trying to make an indie game, that is multiplayer.

    Neither of these people have ever seen or used or coded any of their own network code for running any kind of server architecture, ever.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

    Ah, ok, Chet was in a meeting with some actual networking coders who explained a single, particular, server architecture to him...

    Where I can guarantee they were all at least mildly annoyed that he's decided to change the scope of the game, so now they have to change the architecture, instead of just... designing it from the ground up to be able to add that at some point, as opposed to ... having to reengineer the whole thing.

    So, yep ok you got me, he has seen... actually no, he hasn't seen the code, because the people who actually can code, whom he just got out of this meeting with, know he couldn't read it or understand it.

    So they gave him a white board or powerpoint presentation on the relevant concepts and how they relate to each other at a very high level.

    How do I know this?

    Because I have been in that group of actually tech-competent people, giving the new or totally inexperienced project manager, the same presentation, many, many times.

    That and, there's no code in this video, at all.

    Its pretty normal for people who actually understand code to... do code reviews with their team, go over it with a fine toothed comb, works well as a screenshare on Zoom or something like that...

    ...

    You first say 'seems' and then say 'DEFINITELY'.

    You again struggle with being precise, accurate and consistent.

    Not good traits for someone who claims to understand highly complex technical problems.

    ...

    What Chet is doing is the classic...

    'im in over my head, i need to repeat everything i've just learned for the first time today as a vlog post to simultaneously help it stick in my brain while also outwardly appearing competent and responsible to easily impressed rubes'

    ...style thing that insecure project leads do quite often, you used to be able to see just metric fucktons of this kind of shit on linkedin, all the damned time, before it fully became a parody of itself.

    He's panicking man, haha!

    These are all brand new concepts to him, and he only bothered to, or was forced to learn them, after he screwed stuff up so bad that now his employees need to explain to him how badly he screwed up, and how complicated it will be to fix it.

    If Chet was a competent project lead, and leader of a business, this video would not include '(my) company fail(ed)'' in the title, nor would he have ordered ... worse than a slew of new features, but a slew of new features that can only work if the backbone, the foundation of the game is basically redesigned, as will various bits and bobs that only currently work with the exact prior configuration that now has to change.

    If Chet was a competent project lead, he would have outlined a development process that had contingency plan pivots built into it from the start, accounting for possible future changes to business conditions that should be expected over the course of dvelopment.

    Not suddenly jump tracks after something he didn't initially plan for as a possibility, neccessitating a sudden crash course in why and how its actually really difficult to rebuild the foundation and support beams of a building after all the floors and walls and electrical and plumbing have been put in.

    I've had good project leads, amazing project leads, and terrible ones.

    Chet is acting like a terrible one.

    ...

    Like I said, dude is out of his element, and is lashing out at others (Ross), doing projection, because he is insecure and too cowardly to admit it.

    Also just... any project lead with a 'manifesto' ... this is a gigantic fucking red flag that this person is insecure and overcompensating, initially inflexible and stubborn, and then after he refuses to listen people he ostensibly hired because he values their subject matter expertise ... well, then, his 'vision' cracks at the seams everyone was telling him would likely occur, and then he panics.

    Seen it happen first hand more times than I wish I did.

    ...

    Oh right, uh yeah, when you are being a project lead, and business director, for the first time... yeah that absolutely is 'taking your first steps into trying to make an indie game.'

    Has he... ever done those things before?

    No...?

    First steps.

    He seems to have used those first steps to jump headlong into the deep end, not realizing the pool hasn't been properly cleaned in two years, but yeah, he did take those first steps into this pool, for the first time.

    If I am a coder with a lot of experience in, I dunno, sql database structuring and queries... and then boss asks me to also learn the weird, proprietary version of javascript that the weird, 3rd party tool we use uses to make a complex, 200 field input page with interdepedent logic, and hook that all into the sql database?

    Well, I say I have prior experience with javascript in general, but not this unique implementation of it that tears out half the standard core functions and replacss them with custom ones... so i am 'taking my first steps' into this particular dialect or variant of javascript, might take me a bit to familiarize myself with the differences and get my bearings.

    Software development is not just 'a speciality'.

    It is actually hundreds or thousands of different specialities, which are lumped into a broad category, and non-tech lay people basically always think its 100 times less complicated than it actually is.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (1 child)

    I have worked in gaming, and I've already told you that, but you already said you don't read things that I write, so yeah.

    And, yes, I am at this point being a dick, to you, on the internet, for sport, because you are so entirely disingenuous and full of shit that it is quite amusing to me.

    I don't actually give a shit whether or not you in particular agree with me or like me or believe me... because its been clear from the get go that you are both woefully uninformed but also totally stubborn, obstinant and set in your opinion, and you aren't capable of discussing the technicals you claim to understand.

    The other actual experienced software / server engineer in this thread also tried to reason with you, more politely, and you just took a rhetorical approach of overwhelming them with questions... so I am now overwhelming you with relevant info, and you don't like it.

    You're now just mirroring some of my latest rhetorical approach back at me, albeit in very, very condensed form... you're not even clever at debating.

    You are a power user that thinks themself to be a seasoned senior software engineer, but you're not.

    But hey, since you asked me to stop, I will stop humiliating you now.

    Toodles!

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  • [–] 15 points 1 year ago (9 children)

    Why start a hate campaign against a person because a petition didn't get enough signatures?

    That's not the reason why people dunk on him. He actively sabotaged the petition by misrepresenting it and lying about it.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    Not what I'm claiming.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago* (5 children)

    You don't need to be the sole reason the petition failed. If you actively spread misinformation about the petition, you're a dick. Period.

    Where's the so-called hate-campaign.

    I wanna hate on him, because he's an ignorant prick, fyi. No need for any actual consequences he suposedly caused or didn't cause.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Where’s the so-called hate-campaign

    In the comments of every single post and video about the initiative. More people seem to be bent out of shape about whatever the fuck he did in WoW recently than SKG and are piggybacking on the drama to further dump hate on this one guy.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    So... how is that the campaign's fault? That guy misrepresented something that's dear to many "gamers" and seems like a dick in general.

    I'd file this under "fuck around and find out".

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Just saying that maybe people should focus less on the person they claim to not give a shit about and find a way to drum up more support for SKG instead.

    "I knew he was poopy the whole time" x 100 under every post and video isn't helpful.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Yeah, I guess you're right. That's a reason why Ross didn't call him out more. Now it starts to bog down in youtube drama bs.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    That's where I'm a little conflicted. It has basically become youtube drama and just an excuse for people to dunk on PS for yet another thing (deserved btw, I just think it distracts from SKG), but at the same time, it has reignited awareness. I think it might have better served him to have done it sooner.

    Also, I would just like to see someone that isn't from the US, UK, or Canada put their voice behind this EU initiative.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago* (1 child)

    Truth is that most people don’t really care about this. Game preservation is niche. This petition failed because there isn’t enough interest.

    The type of people that would watch videos about this are also the type of people that are already invested in this topic. People that didn’t sign the petition are people that don’t even know, or care, about this.

    That said, piratesoftware did misrepresent the movement, and I’ll take that into account if someday one of his videos pops up in my feed

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    Everyone is too busy getting in their "Pirate Software bad" to actually give a shit about the Initiative.

    Can anyone name someone of consequence from the EU that has talked about SGK? I genuinely want to know. SKG is a good thing that seemingly only people in the US and Canada seem to care to rally their audiences for.

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