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.

What happened ? I'm out of the loop on this one

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".

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.

• 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?

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

He's so polite!

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.

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!"

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.

Typical Blizzard dev BS

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?

Ross is pretty great, give the game dungeon a go.