3w ago

The 'Stop Killing Games' initiative is close to its final deadline, and after that, its leader is understandably done: 'Either the frog hops out of the pot, or it's dead'

www.pcgamer.com

EU petition to stop publishers from intentionally destroying games with kill switches.

Gaming @beehaw.org

atro_city @fedia.io

3w ago

The 'Stop Killing Games' initiative is close to its final deadline, and after that, its leader is understandably done: 'Either the frog hops out of the pot, or it's dead'

www.pcgamer.com /gaming-industry/the-stop-killing-games-initiative-is-close-to-its-final-deadline-and-after-that-its-leader-is-understandably-done-either-the-frog-hops-out-of-the-pot-or-its-dead/

49 comments

: goes to sign
: scrolls countries list
: no 'United Kingdom' option
: remembers
: sadface
- You may consider signing the UK effort, but that isn't looking chipper either.
  https://www.stopkillinggames.com/countries/united_kingdom
- Same for me, no Switzerland option.
  So I can only encourage EU citizens to do it.
  
  Same, no Norway
- Sign the UK parliament one
- Me, a US citizen, not seeing a US option. Also me, realizing that means I cannot sign for the other countries because I am not a citizen of EU or UK.
Ah, another post where I get to rant about Piratesoftware. Fuck that self righteous, egotistical, fear mongering, ignorant, big headed, grifting, skript kiddy, cornball. Dude couldn't be assed even to read the Q&A, then makes up stuff about the initiative out of thin air. Dude is such a little weezel, I can't BELIEVE he still has a following after his hate campaign against the initiative. The fact that anyone outside of his immediate family cares about what he has to say boggles my mind.
TLDR: Thor, not my cup of tea personally.
- Louis Rossman is, at best, a "free speech absolutionist" libertarian, but he is probably the youtuber with the most experience actually working to get consumer (well, small business) rights legislature passed. And he specifically talked about this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TF4zH8bJDI8
  In a nutshell: It doesn't matter if thor is a dipshit (he is and always has been). Attack the arguments, not the person. Because others will have similar complaints and all "He is a fucking prick and he didn't read the FAQ" does is hurt your argument and make things seem culty.
  Because if it really WAS actually addressed (and understand that a response is not necessarily a refutation), point that out. Rather than require people to go dig through a bunch of youtube videos and blog posts.
  
  The relevant actors in this discussion already tried to address the arguments. Ross made a response video because Thor refused to talk to him like a petulant child.
  Thor simply doesn't care, his first comment to the initiative was literally "eat my whole ass"[sic]. The whole conversation is way past rational discourse. Thor decided to actively oppose the initiative under the main argument of "this is fucking stupid"(direct quote). There simply isn't any rational argument to address. It's all a personal attack and misinformation from a narcissist with an audience. He knows that this initiative kills his grift business. That's all there is to know about the content of his rationality.
  
  Attack the arguments, not the person.
  I mean... Piratesoftware certainly went after the person.
- He's a dev himself. He won't be able to abandon his next game after it flops if this goes through. That's why he's spreading disinformation. I can only hope MoistCritikal's video on it helps.
  Also, SKG should seek legal action for defamation.
  
  See, this again. They can abandon their game, it's just that they have to patch out call home to function functionality. Patch out account verification and other bullshit. The game won't work like before? That's OK, it's about reasonable playability. MMO with no players? That's OK. No match making? That's OK. However it was playing before abandonment, just let that run on the computer.
  Maybe the final law will ask for a local server client, but the petition is only asking for reasonable playability. Reasonable.
- They certainly didn't conduct themselves in a polite or persuasive manner during their argument(s). As others have said in this thread: he has attacked everything but the topic and when they did they (purposefully) seemed very confused about the overall goal and desire of the campaign.
  Is this a case of being wrong about your initial conclusions and doubling down? Or is this a bad actor spreading purposeful misinformation? Going by the video alone it's hard to see an alternative.
Fucking piratesoftware....
- I mean that guy was a dickcheese even before he tried to torpedo this initiative. But wow did he add to his pile of stink.
  
  He abandoned his hardcore group to die in DireMaul. I have no respect for Thor.
- Even sadder is that there are no popular EU streamers throwing their weight behind the initiative. What are they waiting for? Does PewDiePie still stream games?
  
  PewDiePie moved to Japan and while I have no idea what he's uploaded (or not uploaded) I get the sense he's basically retired. He's doing surfing, rock climbing, art, I don't know that he cares enough anymore to support it.
- It makes me sad that people like him get enough views and money to live off of
- I don’t understand this fucking clown, why is he holding water for these big corporations?
Signed it ages ago when it first came about, and it's really sad to see it still hasn't gotten enough signatures.
Every time I see the argument that "Oooh no you can't release server code, there's proprietary code there!", I question my software development skills.
You mean to tell me when you have licensed code, you don't wrap it with your own interfaces? I was always under the impression that it was best practice to never rely on one single concrete implementation of your interface, hence the Dependency Inversion Principle.
If you have a proprietary library you use for determining the positioning of players on a map, you wouldn't be directly instantiating BinglyBooCharacterPositionWhatsit, you'd be using ICharacterPositioner and then using BinglyBooCharacterPositionWhatsit as the implementation of that interface, surely?
- In my experience working with devs at game studios (i'm a sysadmin/infra engineer type by trade), it is rarely them that is so against open sourcing code, or giving fans of the game the tools needed to keep it going on their own once the devs move on. Most of the devs I have dealt with would like nothing more than to see the thing they created live on and be enjoyed by people, even if they are not personally getting paid for it 10 years down the line.
  It is nearly always the executives looking to make sure no one manages to enjoy something the people that work for them created without the c-suite getting paid for it first that is the road block.
  
  I crunched like hell in my mid 20s on a live service game that I enjoyed playing, was well loved and consistently played by a few fans, and had a few unique ideas in its niche. I gave up a lot of life for that game to see the light of day, under extremely tight timelines and wavering support from a flakey publisher.
  It lasted less than a year in release because of a few mistakes in early access and it inhabited a saturated market that seems near impossible to penetrate now. The console ports that caused the worst months of the crunch never even saw a release.
  Me and the rest of the devs would love to just play the game again, but the game's kinda just rotting somewhere in storage of a publisher that long ago tried to pivot toward NFT/metaverse bullshit, to predictable results. Outside of a few early playtest builds a few people have (and definitely aren't supposed to) we have basically no way of playing it ourselves, much less letting others play it. We couldn't even get much approved to show in a portfolio once the studio closed and the assets went to the publisher. It makes me really sad and I'm no longer in game dev / tech at large professionally for that reason. This story is not unique, this is pretty much just how the industry works and devs near-universally feel screwed over by it.
- I don’t follow this argument. In this context, proprietary code is work product that has value to its owner. Often large swathes of said work product is reused across games so the theory is that releasing the work product means your competitors can make your work product. I do not understand how wrapping someone else’s work product in your own work product doesn’t require them to first release their work product.
  Note I don’t necessarily buy the company mindset on proprietary code; I explained here because I don’t understand where you’re coming from.
  
  I mean if you are required to release a server dev kit, or at least make best efforts to release one, you can release what code you have and go "Here are the interfaces, but I can't legally release this code because I don't own it, so someone else is going to have to create an alternative".
  It's about making it easier for other devs to make up for the gaps, rather than going "Nope! Proprietary code, can't do anything!"
- Abstraction is a trade off. You don't want to build interface layers between everything... It's a pain in the ass, and if there's a 1-1 relationship between parts of a system then you're basically putting in a minimum cost to modify that area in any way. So if you do it, it'll probably be once you've locked down the design pretty well
  Game development is pretty different than normal development too. You have a lot of one off and lose ends based on creative decisions... You aren't building up on top of your system, you're building out
  And frankly, it leads to a mix of mind blowingly good code and a lot of terrible code
  So no, I don't think it's that easy. I think it's also a bullshit argument, and they should release the "proprietary" code when they finish supporting the game, or put in the time to make the interfaces
- Idk if most software developers know this is what they should be doing and ignore it completely or if they just don't know.
  There are so, so many reasons to do this.
  But I don't think this really happens very often in the real world because it's not the shortest line from A to B.
- Understand that significant percentages of any game are made under crunch conditions. And there is no real "okay, let's go back and reduce our technical debt" for the majority of games.
  So all those best software practices go out the window when you have slept in your cube for the past four nights and your well rested boss is screaming at you wondering why the cape physics still look so shit.
  But also... how does that change anything? "Here is our end of life offline mode. We reference these packages you will never have access to and that have no open source equivalent because they are so specific to the proprietary way this auth system works"?
- Most devs are shit at their jobs.
  Not that this is exclusive to devs. Most people in general are shit at their jobs.
- I'm not a smart nor good developer so maybe I'm looking at this wrong, but if you're a game Dev and you're using Unreal Engine or Unity, aren't you already bound to whatever license they have?
  I believe if you're following say Unreal's structure, you're using their server/client netcode, and while you can release whatever you've made you can't use or share any of Epic's code. That would still require users to agree to Epic's EULA to get the full engine to compile your server setup.
  Add in server handling for VoIP, audio middleware like FMOD, proprietary stuff like Xbox/PS crossplay, Steam's SDK, etc and I feel like that's a tangled web.
  I'm also very tired and am probably not fully registering here.
  
  I've never worked with Unreal's server setup, but I imagine it doesn't absolutely require to use their code, right? You can still make an Unreal game on the client and use something else for your server, meaning there must be some sort of common interface between them.
  The point is yes, there is going to be code you can't legally release, libraries you can't use, but you can release what code you can, and then leave the interfaces for code you can't, leaving hobbyist devs to pick up the slack. You can even make servers from scratch that way, as with stuff like AzerothCore, where all of the code was figured out from scratch based on packets from client to server and studying hex code for hours. Technically AzerothCore was just building on top of MaNGOS but that was created using packets.
  Even if you strip out the code you can't legally release, that's a hell of a boost to development that you wouldn't otherwise get.
This is a great initiative, and Ross did an incredible effort, and i hope this second wind gets the petitions the signatures they need.
Infinite respect for Ross, he can truly say he did everything he could do.
Really hope Charlie's video on the subject helps mend things.
Signed it. Can't believe I completely missed this petition.
Information on Personal Data:
To sign, you must provide a set of personal data, which is required by the authorities of your country for verification purposes. Specific measures are in place to ensure the protection of your data. See our privacy statement.
Perhaps if signing a petition didn't require doxxing yourself then more people would sign.
I realize that it's to prevent fake signatures and allow verification that the signatories are residents of the jurisdiction under petition, but this method inherently creates a sampling bias.
In the same vein as age verification, we need a solution for digital attestation that preserves anonymity and privacy. There are some initiatives in this direction, so perhaps we will get there some day.
- Can you help me understand which political petitions meant to document real constituent desires don’t require doxxing yourself? I don’t believe I’ve ever participated in any citizens initiative that didn’t require personal information.
  
  There aren’t any, thats the point I’m making. Petitions produce sample bias that excludes the opinions of people who don’t want their legal name and home address printed on a document that might get passed around God-knows-where.
- In Spain we already have that.
  There is an app that let you show only some data of your national ID and it's verifiable by the other party. One of their usecases is specifically age verification. The app shows that the user is over 18 or under 18 and the portrait. There is a qr that can be used for instant verification.
  But signing is kind of different. For signing you need an unique id.
  I signed this petition with the digital certificate. It really never asked me for much more data. But the digital certificate includes full name, country and national ID number. But I suppose that's the minimum needed for a valid signature.
- zkproofs for the win!
  Buenos Aires in Argentina already rolled out a decentralized digital id via zkSync on the Ethereum blockchain for their citizens, you basically have a zero knowledge proof that verifies who you are without revealing sensitive information. No more doxxing required
  For those interested on how zkproofs work, it's all mathmagic:
  Computer Scientist Explains One Concept in 5 Levels of Difficulty
  https://yewtu.be/watch?v=fOGdb1CTu5c
  https://youtu.be/fOGdb1CTu5c

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