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Killed the greatest gamer initiative out there for content
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this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2025
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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?
I was pointing out elsewhere that I hadn't heard of this guy before today, but Chet Faliszek, who you may know from indie hits like... let's see... Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress 2, Half Life 2 and Portal 2, seems to not be on board for very similar reasons.
https://bsky.app/profile/chetsucks.com/post/3lsd7rsd3j22n https://bsky.app/profile/chetsucks.com/post/3lsf4vxbtls2p
I don't fully agree with either of them, but targeting a specific guy just because he happens to be the one that got into a call/response thread with the figurehead of the thing you support is pretty toxic interneting, and I don't like it.
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.
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
Because local servers and plugs aren't the same thing.
I think this whole conversation is mixing two types of disagreements and is going to end poorly for that reason.
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.
The other is of design philosophy: is it okay for live service games to exist in their current form, where they run for a bit of time and then, at the sole discretion of the IP owners, they go away with no recourse to ever run them again in any form, ever. Are we cool with that?
I am not. Some of these devs seem to be. I mean, they'd love if there was an alternative, but if the choice is between getting to have MMOs and quirky massive shooters they would rather keep the space deregulated and creatively available than restrict it.
The first one isn't much of a matter of opinion, but there are intermediate steps that can be taken. But because a bunch of people are disagreeing on the second issue with people who a) know a lot more than they do about the first disagreement, and b) aren't particularly inclined to meet them halfway on the second, we end up with this bit of entrenched online drama where ignorance, activism and disagreement is quickly becoming toxic.
I don't have an answer for this, other than maybe... please stop? That'd be nice.
I think the discussion about preservation of live games and consumer rights in server-based games needs to be had. But it needs to be mature and educated. The more the collapse of this petition turns into shitty, petty arguments full of disingenuous misrepresentations and misinformation (on both sides) the more inclined I am to say let it all die and maybe try again with a better understanding of what's being discussed, from scratch.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Absolutely! People who support it because of philosophical reasons are getting very upset over people giving practical criticism. Portability and maintainability of software are complex issues people make entire careers out of solving. You can't just make it illegal for software to stop working.
That doesn't mean companies should be allowed to purposefully brick your games for no reason, but there are cases where ensuring a game works forever would be a huge burden. The petition offers no exceptions, no practical guidelines, and no suggested punishment. It's just "If you sell a game, that game must work forever, or else". I see that affecting more small indie devs than large greedy corporations.
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:
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 TED~~Talk~~Rant.
I'm sorry to say that I have not and will not be attending that TED Talk. I've already done way more homework for this piece of online drama than anybody should, I'm not reading, dismantling and responding to an essay this fine evening.
At a glance, while I do agree that Faliszek is deliberately ignoring some elements of the argument, but I saw the whole video. 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.
This wall of text seems to just go back to the usual talking points of "in my day servers didn't need matchmaking" and "let F2P die", at which point it's just resetting the argument loop, in that the other side of the argument just goes "but I like F2P games", and we're back to the start.
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.
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.
OK, so you're now hosting the post-support servers for Anime CCG Pocket Collection 2045, the briefly popular collectible monster card game.
Where do I make an account? Does my old account work? Did you get all my personal info along with the game code to make that happen? Where are you storing my passwords? How are you linking my account to the first party account I used to buy the game? Who do I send a letter to exercise my access rights according to GDPR? In fact, are you GDPR-compliant? How do you know? How do I know? Who is running moderation on the chat? Are bans issued and enforced? Who is to blame if there are legal ramifications from something related to moderation? If I want to buy a skin for the game's popular Electric Squirrel mascot and my transaction doesn't work, where do I get a refund? If you don't handle MTX in your private server, then who makes the code changes to allow players to just buy everything without MTX or to not allow things to be bought? I mean, the entire game is built on collecting Monster Cards, so if everybody has everything it's gonna get weird. Are you rebalancing the game as part of this process or nah? Hey, there is no seasonal content in the game and it feels broken. Can you re-run some old seasons? Who decides which ones? Do you even have the right content server data for that? Where are you storing my inventory and the data for my Electric Squirrel Home Building feature? Are you paying for the server costs of doing that? What happens to my data if you run out of money the way the original developer did? Hey, I also want to run a server, but the entire thing is supposed to matchmake globally and cross-platform, so who says you're the official host of the game now? Why can't I run it instead?
Dedicated servers are more or less trivial, it's not about having a rack of 5090s. Plenty of games with small servers rent those out or let people self-host them, from Minecraft to Conan.
The problem is running a service.
That's why this is so hard. Multiplayer games revolving around standalone matches are whatever, but modern GaaS stuff is... fundamentally not that. Running the game and making the game are not that different from each other, and running the game gets expensive. As in, making-the-game expensive.
We need a solution so that enterprising communities can at least try to work around all those issues without getting immediately shot down by IP holders, and we need a solution to preserve this type of fleeting, fungible media in some form. I just don't know what that is, and I'm pretty sure it's not a one-size-fits-all thing that maintains the game you paid for running as if the servers hadn't been taken down. I just don't see how you set that up as a general rule that everybody can just comply with.
EDIT: Oh, holy crap, I could have saved myself the fantasy scenario. Turns out Faliszek went ahead and broke down exactly what it took to do this for their game. Because they did do it, despite him being actively hostile to this initiative.
I'm gonna pat myself in the back a bit for having caught a lot of the actual pitfalls he describes, but I still recommend giving it a watch. It's not an angry video, it's super informative and well worth the time.
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.
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.
I'm gonna be straight with you, I'm not gonna want to actually read what you wrote some other time.
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. 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. Especially not in a way that still allows pre-existing commercial clients to run normally. I mean, for one thing, would you be running one instance or several? Who's handling how to point the client at the right place? Who's responsible for the legal obligations regarding data storage and personal information? How do you handle monetization hooks in games where scarcity is baked into the design?
Whatever, the technicalities have been deliberated and I'm sure your perfect blend of experience and education is very aware of all that, has memorized the PnL of a dozen different live service games, is aware of all the costs and has accounted for all those wrinkles. For all I know it's all in that manifesto, I'm not gonna check. Ultimately if your rant ends up with "maybe F2P live service games SHOULD die" the argument isn't technical and it's not fundamentally about preservation.
Well then maybe you should have actually said that.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
He hasn't been with Valve for a while. His last game was The Anacrusis, an indie game from a studio he founded. It launched, it bombed and it got converted to a community edition. I guess you not knowing it exists explains why that happened.
He is perhaps the most specific example of what this petition would require in the industry I can think of. Along with KO City, which also converted their game from third party published paid to free to play and then to a community server edition.
So no, you're wrong on that one.
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.
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.
The sarcasm was clear, btw, to me at least. You meant indie as in small. "Small games like, oh, I don't know, Team Fortress 2!"
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
Who is "they"?
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, but I'm going to say Faliszek's career isn't particularly contingent on this argument, considering that he's a narrative director, first and foremost.
See, this is kind of the problem we're having. You guys are just... saying stuff.
I don't agree with the ultimate takeaway of either of these guys on this issue, fundamentally, but if you're going to stand here and say that they are arguing against this because they are making money out of some server-disconnection racket then you're going to make me stand here and call bullshit because it just doesn't follow.
And so the drama spiral goes deeper and the internet becomes a little crappier.
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
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.
That does not seem to be accurate in Faliszek's case. He did not "take his first steps into trying to make an indie game", he led the studio that did make it, led development on the game and then proceeded to go through the exact process we're discussing to make it community-runnable.
He has DEFINITELY seen the code needed to run the server architecture, if the 30 minute video breaking down the process of decoupling the game from central servers he posted today is any indication (which I did watch, including the parts that are about organic farming, because Chet actually IS interesting enough for me to spend my day checking out his manifesto).
Nobody? Why start a hate campaign against a person because a petition didn't get enough signatures? The vast majority of petitions don't get enough signatures. It's nobody's fault. Stuff like this just makes me think supporters of SKG are entitled man children.
That's not the reason why people dunk on him. He actively sabotaged the petition by misrepresenting it and lying about it.
Again, you truly believe his video is the only reason a million Europeans did not sign this petition? If he did not release the video, the petition would have all the signatures and the EU parliment would be enacting regulations to preserve video games? You honestly think that?
Not what I'm claiming.
It's what I'm claiming. Why hate on someone you don't believe prevented the success of the petition? If the petition would have failed in the absence of his video, then why post this kind of content? He had nothing to do with the failure.
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.
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.
A single meme or people complaining under articles isn't a hate campaign. And he was hostile and rude enough right from beginning to earn some clowning.