Hello guys and gals, it’s me Mutahar again! This time we take a look at a campaign known as “Stop Killing Games” we’ve seen this a few months ago in regards to publishers abandoning games and leaving them unplayable, since then it’s evolved and the initiative has some ground and has sparked a debate, what’s being said? Let’s find out! Thanks for watching!
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We Have To Talk About “Stop Killing Games”…
Shame the uk government shut down the Petition because of the general election that happened
8:35 Definition of playerbase: The players of a game, considered as a whole. The game has 12 million players even if the game is not online. There is a differentiation in "current playerbase" and "playerbase", the word current is there for a reason. So is not misleading, it's a representation of what this initiative is, those will be players as they are owners of their copies. You said it well, "those are just sales", a sale of a product, a sell of a licensed copy, like a CD of music is, or a Blu-ray of a movie is.
What Thor said about the possible damage that it can be done to a developer, is false. He confuses, somehow, licensing with copyright. If we follow his example, the "hackers" that "ruin the developers" will have problems with the copyright, of the code, of the art, of the name, of the music… No, what it seems to me is that Thor is ignorant on the matter, or he just wants to defend the model of SaaS and GaaS because is more convenient for developers and this may put a pebble on it.
I think we all programmers know that SaaS and GaaS it was an idea meant to benefit us specifically and not necessary our clients. I remember how hard it was in the 2000's to have a software made because it was like a constant investment that can easily destroy a company. SaaS was meant to give the developers air to breath, to not be super stressed out, the finished product doesn't need to be 100% tested which means less money on beta-testers, and faster progression and income. It wasn't meant to have the clients happy, but at least in return they could have a good QoL sooner instead of waiting for the 2008 version of the software.
However, we developers are "lazy" and get efficiency even of our own fun. Software as a Service is not actually a service, we sell a product with a license and made that product unavailable later to sell it again. Games as a Service are not a service, either. None of this are bound by a restricted time, because we do install our product in their privacy. What is a service are the actualizations and what ever we choose to make the deal more interesting, but the program and the game are products and, at least in EU, it's illegal to remove it from the client's property or make it unusable. The companies don't want that. And the companies shouldn't be able to do that no matter which product they sold.
It doesn't matter if they clarify, it should still be illegal. A difference is when you don't install a product, like Netflix. They are dealing with the cost of their programs, and we use the service as long as we pay.
I miss when youtubers just had their own craft and concepts. Seeing 50 takes and reactions to one person's video just cause shits "topical" is just annoying at this point.
Games that can be played offline, that get shut down for everyone, is like if Tesla one day shuts off the functionality of all their cars
I think what they mean by "privately hosted" is the ability to make a server in the game itself that you can invite people on your friends list to without giving your IP. Minecraft Bedrock has and Minecraft Legacy Console had this functionality, where you can just invite people from your friends list to your world.
Signed 😀
i don't have any problem with games being shut down, as long as they aren't paid games. Like if Fortnite shuts down i wont lose sleep. But if i pay money for a game, and eventually i wont get access to it, that's bullshit. Buying a "License to play" is the stupidest thing i have ever heard. I Also hate when paid games are riddled with micro transactions, like Ubisoft games. If I'm paying 90 bucks for a game, i expect it to not try to get more money out of me.
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The Crew is NOT an Online Only experience.
Since Day 1 The Crew has had a "Play Offline" prompt, but they NEVER re-enabled it. That's what the community is SO upset about. It's why Stop Killing Games EXISTS.
"Play Offline" is a fallback option which runs a new Local Save on your machine with absolutely no connection to online servers. I've gotten it ATLEAST TWICE after crashing the PS4 version- POST Calling All Units. Monument Run was a timebomb.
The fact that this exists PROVES that the "Internet Required" necessity is EXCLUSIVELY DRM.
We're upset because some absolute LOSER at Ubislop couldn't take an hour out of his day to flick a switch and send a last minute patch. Instead Ubisoft is BREAKING SEVERAL LAWS by going out of their way to REVOKE the "Purchased Copy" of The Crew from people's accounts, claiming they NEVER purchased it, and changing the legal text later on, gaslighting us that "we all agreed to this".
It's literally devilish, and nobody's buying Ubisoft content anymore because of it. And I ain't buying zilch from Satan.
Thank you for explaining Thors side of the argument in an actual coherent and not blind strawman way like he did. Now I can actually comprehend and see where stopkillinggames needs to change
Coming from the age of dedicated and reverse engineered private servers, I did somewhat blindly offer support and do look forward to a more refined version of this movement even if it's more gentle consumer protections, like I think it is an absolute bro move to ensure the games are preserved, it's (relatively) trivial to restore functionality to most games pre-2020 provided you either have the time to reverse engineer or packet captures from when the servers were active, but it takes a combination of passion and skills to get there. But at the same time, yeah adding extra burden could back fire if it's beyond making them add a big red label of shame for online required, then at least that has a chance of letting developers choose to allow offline functionality and seems like it will be infinitely easier to get lawmakers on board with. I would love for it to be the norm for dedicated servers to exist and be provided to end users during EOL, FFXI has been an awesome example of the new life that can be breathed into a game both from a preservation and from a new sources of engagement perspective and would love to see that being officially supported.
My guy, you should have covered Star Wars Galaxies as fans emulating an MMO over the Matrix. There are over a hundred emu servers, most dead now, but a much better example than the Matrix, in my opinion.
As someone who had three accounts at one point on the live SWG servers and paid monthly fees, I can say I am in favor of companies allowing fans to continue hosting the games they no longer want to.
Dude watches the pirate software video and completely flips on what he's been saying for years. Muta, man, buddy, pal, companies are not your friend. You can't give them any room. It's reasonable to maintain server code and release it under source available. Companies still own the IP code everything but other companies can't profit off of it.
Continuously impressed by Ross's dilligence… he already preemptively responded to this entire video. Respectfully, a lot of thought and work has gone into this, so if Muta's points here are resonating with anyone and you really want to consider the situation genuinely, go watch the FAQ at Accursed Farms as he's already heard these views out with respect and provided honest answers to them.
Are you actually trying to make people stop watching with that light?
The key phrase in all of this: 9:58 "Depending on how they programmed 'The Crew,' MAYBE the game could run on a client without any server, maybe it couldn't." This is the crux of the whole matter IMO and it is illustrated easiest with a metaphorical analogy to paper literature (though it could be demonstrated with similar metaphorical examples in other commercial media too).
A publisher figures out a chemical formula that can cause the ink in the book you paid for to disappear at a certain date. The decide on this date based on their projections of when sales of the book will drop below a certain threshold (there are limitations to this example). Maybe they could have written the book so that the words didn't just fade and disappear after X months / years, maybe they couldn't? No, the answer is that they definitely COULD HAVE and should have.
In sum, publishers/developer should not be able to get away with developing games which are developed in such a way that they were "written in ink which will eventually go invisible."
xcom 2 multiplayer did not had a reason to need servers to be played, p2p exists, games from 1990 can stilll be played online today with lan and don't need the company to host servers, theres no need to have servers its just a lie by the developers, official servers does provide a better experience, but allowing me to play with my friend with me being the host should not need the company to host anything. i can still play quake world farcry 2, and old multiplayer games without the company needing to host anything this server thing is just a lie its not needed, allow the user to host stuff and thats it, HECK you can even play WOW in you own pc if you host you own server so not EVEN for wow this is valid, so all you own argument is totally false as private and custom servers exist.
if valve dropped the left 4 dead 2 official servers, i could still play it online why? cause of LAN support, plus hability to host myown server not needing valve at all, this need to have servers is just a lie, just allow the user to host stuff
the lol argument is also false, because the game is totally doable the be hosted on the local computer, dota 2 allow you to host you own server on custom matches =P and you can setup a lan game without internet using console commands and it works fine (y) no need server this is just lies by companys, they can patch and allow user to host, if even WOW you can host yourself theres pretty much no reason other games you can''t, maybe cracakdown3 if that destruction running on cloud was real but they lied as well.
i can't think of any reason to why people could not host they own servers, again only game i think it would not work well is crackdown3, because they showed a intersting destruction in e3, but when the game released it was just a lie,, if people can host WOW, even ESO online i should be able to host on my own machine.
edit: i was writing the comment before i finished the video and noticied you talked about the same things i did in the comment. but for REAL if someone can host WOW sorry, theres no reason someone could not host the crew server and play o offline i can't think of any reason, sure the server could be a unoptmized MESS that need to have like 2 games installed it don't matter, so it would take double the size but THERES NO REASON someone could not host the game.
I just want to play burnout paradise online 😞
The industry got a money making machine on steroids, but got collective amnesia whenever LAN gaming is mentioned.
Anyway, like said, Ross is a good guy, but he's not a lawyer, and it shows. I got introduced to Hoeg Law around the time he claimed that live service games were literally fraud. And Richard Hoeg really tried to explain to him for well over an hour, that words have meanings and you can't just change them, and ultimately Ross didn't seem to relent. But i also didn't hear much from him since.
Maybe if he surrounded himself with some knowledgeable people instead of dwelling in the basement alone? (i don't know if he does that, he just looks like someone who does that)
Hey Muta, Ross already addressed most of this stuff!
Comment tribute
Petitions are useless
I hope the seeds being planted result in something good, because, while there may be some exceptions, we see that the idea that this cant happen because of how it was designed, because all that means is that you didn't care about the user experience past the point of the dev support window. That's foul. Especially for games with single player modes with online features weaved into them that are forced into being an "always online" experience. Think Destiny, if I'm playing solo campaign missions, why do i HAVE to be online? Maybe that's why the game is always having server issues, because the game is always online when it doesn't need to be lol. This is just one example of this BS hurting more than it helps lol. Hopefully, this changes how games are designed., so the " This isn't possible by design" excuse is thrown out the window and these experiences can be preserved. Always, so people's games can stop being stolen lol.
Even with the most pessimistic view of the stop killing games initiative, signing is the right option. Even if the petition itself was perfect, it will still be reviewed by a board of legislators where experts can clarify any technicalities brought by pirate software. These issues will be clarified and ironed out once the law is written. Right now consumers are getting ripped off and this initiative is a good enough attempt to start acting against this practice. Perfecting it's flaws is not worth the delay in legislation full stop.
The argument for taking down a particular game server if the player numbers fall too low doesn't really add up. Game servers are scalable which means that you can scale the available server resources to match the number requirements of the player base. If the numbers are going down then the server requirements will go down so you can shut down the number of individual servers and hence the cost. And you can host more than one game server on a physical computer so if the numbers are that low for some games then you can put more than one game server on a physical computer and the costs would go down proportionally.
In fact, this is something that might be worth looking into, for those who have the knowledge. Dynamic game server meta-environments should be a thing where a companies various game services across all their available hardware can (and should) be dynamically scaled to suit the needs of each game and commit the server resources where they're needed. I feel like this is an area of low to zero awareness that should be raised in general awareness so that people can recognise the potential here and some development of such system can be initiated.
This could be done but that might take some development to make happen. It may a high or a low development cost but you can bet your fucking soul that many game companies will make a massive, disproportionate and dishonest argument against this. They will lie about the development cost and tell you it's incredibly expensive or complex or that it can't be done.Not because it can't be done, but because they don't want to do it. Most game companies are so hyper focused on money that they will harm the very thing which is giving them a revenue stream. They don't care about games and gamers. In fact, just going by the long history of game companies, they hate the players and even the developers that make ALL of this possible. It's as if they want to take money and not give a single thing back. A net negative.
Make no mistake, gaming is in bad shape at this point in time because of the greedy and hostile nature of business.
My favorite gamer girl
The Industry plant is working really well for publishers huh
no, no WE don't have to anything to talk about muta…. I WANT A DIVORCE! 👀
If a game has single player mode, that mode should be available forever.
Muta you do know that FreeSO is basically the Legal Sims Online that was granted permission to exist; and the Sims Online has been gone since 2008; I think people who do servers of their for a game like this is not a bad idea; if done right
I would rather go with a rule that single-player games must have the option to be played offline.
At least you are reading the FAQ instead of some other people.
I remember the time when you get engine together with the game.
The initiative is vague on purpose, because it is just an initiative, not ready-made law. It's up to the EU commission to iron out the details into actual law (if they decide to do so in the first place). The initiative itself even has a character limit, which the SKG team had to really squeeze to stay under.
As somone tied to MMO's and Gacha games, I realize the day they shut off servers is gonna suck. I just wish games like Genshin would have an offline patch new game plus… I know I did it to myself but it sucks to know it's just gonna shut off like Dragalia Lost
the current votes are 261k of the 1 million, if eveeryone works together we can hit that quota at the end of the year.
The crazy part about this is there is actually a huge number of live service games which don't function that much differently than standard multiplayer games. There is many live services, once you are actually instanced into the game you're only actually playing with 4 other players. So the idea that once a live service is dead that it does not make sense to "revive" the game because its entire existence relies on several hundred players playing at one time to play it is actually a rather silly argument. Take warframe for instance. Is it a live service? Yes. Would the game be ruined entirely if it was only 4 player coop? … Not really. It's not actually a great example because a majority of the game can be played even solo, but for the portions where you need a team, actually having 3 random players playing alongside you, or 3 friends is pretty irrelevant. Even player trading can be facilitated, there is many times where 1 of the 4 players who you are playing with will be unlucky and you can trade for those items to ease their burden. Of course, you can't swipe your credit card and own every single item in the game however, but you could imagine how easy that would be if there was actually 10,000 players and not 4. The point is, yes, in an archived state these games won't be able to function in the capacity that they were originally designed, but at the same time there is actually much that can be learned from or even enjoyed if these games were still accessible. This won't work for every live service game, some live service games you just "needed" to be there to experience it, but there is likely a surprising number of live services where they could be rediscovered many years after the servers were shut down if they were given the chance.
5:30 I don't necessarily care. Ranbow Six Vegas 2 still worked on Tunngle (don't know what happened with the program), and it most certainly works on GameRanger. As does SWAT 4 and Star Wars Empire at War and any other game with Direct IP Lan. Gamespy went the way of the dodo, but somehow miraculously these games still work. Are the devs still supporting them?
Didn't world of warcraft had private servers…. made illegally by fans?
Another youtuber that doesn't really understand what he is talking about and tries to dilue the thing ? YUP ANOTHER ONE !
Publishers only have to do TWO things when they kill the game : release the server code (which is in the proposition but he didn't even read the FAQ) and allow the game client to connect to an ip and that's done. We don't want "ah they need to modify the tuning blah blah blah useless blah blah blah."
if they release the server code people will be able to fine tune those things.
I don't agree that Pokemon Go has an essential need for the online component. The game would still work well in singleplayer/offline with the exception of raids maybe and of course trading or battling other trainers. But the core gameplay of walking around and catching pokemon would work just as well offline, though may need a larger storage space to house all the data about which pokemons can spawn in which areas in the world etc. (rather than needing to get this data from a server in real time).
For MMOs it's similar, sure the whole economy aspect of MMOs wouldn't work without multiplayer, but the actual character building and story progression and combat would all work fine.
I don't think the aim of stop killing games is to force publishers to preserve games in a like for like fashion where they must be playable in exactly the same way forever, since that would be impossible for quite a few titles. Just to have some form of plan to make the games playable offline even if that means cutting down on certain features
8:35 But this are the numbers that Ubisoft used! If they use it to describe the payer base of the game you should be also able to use this data against them and say it in their own words.
17:04 Sadly it isn't. With my collages we also run a MC server, but 2 weeks ago with the Azure outage we couldn't play, because all player authentication is going through Azure. So even your own server run on your own machine needs a connection to the Publisher (Microsoft) in order for you to be able to play on it.
the US has had such a culture all around suing and abusing the definition of their laws, can hardly blame them for seeing this as a threat
i cant hate mia mutahar, he discusses the issues happening with games, and the drama surrounding them. thank you for being informative and neutral
The fact that valve still allows community servers on cs 1.6 which is OLDER THAN ME AS A 22YO MAN, but they cant let us play original CSGO….?
I missed a bit about how Louis Rossmann read the campaign. the things mentioned in the campaign aren't set in stone. it's so that the EU will pick it up and if they agree they would try to implement it while talking to game developers and people. if the EU would only look at this campaign and base the new rule on it it would be really weird.
I sell ACs for a living. I would love to look up my old customers from 2 years ago in my database, drive out at 2 in the morning, smash their old AC with a hammer (without announcement or permission) and then wait at 8 in the morning at their front door, ready to sell them a new and improved AC for twice the price. I would even give them 10% on install because I am already there and of course I would do that on a hot summer day just to make sure they don't spend 2 days looking for other ACs.
Ubisoft is a company who can do that with their product, and I would love to do that with mine, too.
So I am with Thor on this one, make the market fair.
We are having an Initiative right now. We are asking, democratically, if enough people in the EU think something should be done.
Less than 1 Million means where we are right now is exactly where we want to be.
More than 1 Million means we should look into this and change it in some way.
Thor complaining that it is too vague is funny. The question is not what kind of leather the seats should have, the question is if you need a car or not.
And because the exact leather isn't already decided on, you can keep going on foot.
I feel like this video is dumb and unnecessary. This is all lawyer type bs “well technically it was server side so we don’t legally have to support this game” The Crew was very clearly a SP game and if they pull that BS then we need to make laws restricting making non-human interactions all server side and only client side. I get there’s some speculation but let’s stop playing devils advocate for a sec.
12:28 common Mayozaki W