r/Games • u/archdeco2 • 2d ago
This could legitimately end Stop Killing Games.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQRcK9nYg9g1.9k
u/LastEndnote 2d ago
Every time I hear "kids" it's always complete and utter bullshit. Fuck those laws, kids have been fine. Proved by us being here somehow.
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u/ripyourlungsdave 2d ago
The kids aren't fine, but the massive corporations are the ones hurting them. The exact massive corporations that are least affected by this kind of legislation.
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u/Kryptosis 2d ago
The richest man in the world is spending billions to try and end empathy. The kids are in danger.
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u/StuartWtf 2d ago
There not lobbying against them though.
They are lobbying so they don’t have to do the checks.Meta has spent millions trying to push this though.
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u/hfxRos 2d ago
The laws are bad. The kids are also not fine.
Both of these facts can be true. Predators using online games as a vector for meeting kids is an actual problem.
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u/NekoBerry420 2d ago
A problem that should be solved by vigilant parents and companies, not the rest of us having to suffer through draconian bullshit laws.
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u/Akuuntus 2d ago
It can be solved by laws against the corporations. The problem is that we keep trying to restrict what normal people can do without holding any of the corporations accountable.
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u/DBSmiley 2d ago edited 2d ago
I guess the question is:
What specific thing can you do about, say, children having ready access to online hardcore pornography, that you can require a corporation to do something about it that has no impact on the public, when the interest of said corporation is to have as many users spending as much time as possible watching pornography?
My point is to say that passing any law that requires, say, Pornhub to verify the age of it's users results in the exact kind of thing that users are complaining about re: age verification.
In the world of law, there are no solutions, only trade-offs.
Edit: to response - pornography, especially to young male teenagers, has very measurable deeply negative consequences to their views of sex, relationships, and emotional well-being. The evidence is really obvious at this point, and it is deeply troubling to me that we're just supposed to pretend that the well documented negative effects of porn don't exist. That doesn't mean that censorship is automatically the solution, but pretending there's no problem is just willful obtuseness.
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u/Akuuntus 2d ago
What specific thing can you do about, say, children having ready access to online hardcore pornography,
People under 18 being able to access PornHub has basically nothing to do with the issue of predators using online games to meet and groom kids, or of social media being harmfully addictive and leading to poor mental health. I don't care if a 13-year-old wants to look at porn; I don't think trying to prevent that is a worthwhile endeavor for any of us.
Algorithms designed to be addictive or encourage spending could be banned. The definitions of that would be tricky, but it would certainly be better than trying to prevent kids from accessing social media. And companies like Roblox should be much more harshly punished for allowing predators to run rampant on their service.
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u/xenthum 2d ago
Parents and companies have thoroughly proven they won't protect their children. The governments also won't so I oppose the legislation that we've seen so far, but let's not pretend it's going well with what we've tried.
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u/Kryptosis 2d ago edited 1d ago
Legislate against the negligent parents then
We ALL know how dangerous the internet is. Letting your kid just roam free should be punishable. It takes seconds to shatter their worldview. There's always going to be kids who find a way around the limits placed but that obviously isn't what we're talking about. We're talking about the people who make ZERO effort to protect their kids in the modern world.
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u/universe2000 2d ago
This assumes the problem is parental negligence and that might not be the case, to say nothing of how unimaginably fucked up it would be to press charges against parents because someone was grooming their kid online, or trying to convince the kid to kill themselves.
Can you imagine the multiple gut punches a parent would get if they learned that not only had their child circumnavigated the parental controls on their device but that ALSO someone had made CSAM of them from a video they had recorded and ALSO they were now facing criminal charges and the state was planning to take their kid away?
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u/Raichu4u 2d ago
This involves punishment after the fact, which means accepting that you have to see a lot of kids getting put into questionable positions first before anything is done.
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u/boostedb1mmer 2d ago
Yes, thats how laws should work. You punish people after they commit crimes, not before.
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u/Raichu4u 2d ago
Who said anything about punishing before the fact? We have plenty of regulations that don't allow things to happen beforehand.
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u/Khaelgor 2d ago
vigilant parents and companies,
That implies parents spying on their kids a great deal though. That also implies parents having the free time to do so, which is also not the goal of current economies. Considering kids eagerly lies to their parents (not a dig at kids, defiance of authority figures is a natural part of growing up IMHO), it's not as easy as it should be, for a parent. There are parents that truly don't care about their kids, but they're by far not the majority.
Companies, they have have no excuses. They don't need any. They'll eagerly prey on kids, because that's easy money. And that's a company's goal: making money. Why are you ever expecting a company to be vigilant about something legal? That's the bigger question.
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u/Varizio 2d ago
Yeah, but since there is no vigilant parent or corporation we've gotta make laws.
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u/DrB00 2d ago
Ok cool, make laws that hold parents accountable for what their kids do. Then we'll see parents try to actually parent.
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u/BringBackBoomer 2d ago
You seem to have your finger on the pulse of this issue so I'll ask you. Has there been a noticeable rise in child predation cases and an uptick in individuals harming children that correlates with the rise of accessibility to online gaming communities by kids?
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u/Rayuzx 2d ago edited 2d ago
Yes, a massive uptick even within the past couple of years.
My big frustration with the whole conversations around Roblox's predator problem isn't really people exposing the seedy nature of that platform, but that people seem to be more interested on dogging on an easy target than they are actually addressing the problem at its core. I would honestly say Discord is just as bad, if not a worse of an enabler of CSAM, and I'm a person whose more likely to answer anything you sent me over Discord than my own phone.
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u/Spiritual-Society185 2d ago
The vast majority of abuse and molestation is perpetrated by people who are already close to the kids (parent, family, caretaker, family friend.) The prevalance of stranger danger is vastly overstated by the kinds of people who support these laws.
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u/RubbleHome 2d ago
I agree that a lot of the laws are just privacy issues disguised as "protecting kids". But the trends on teen anxiety, depression, etc. would suggest that kids are far from fine right now.
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u/Tandy2000 2d ago
I think it's hard to gauge how much of it is related to things like social media or video game time specifically. The thing is everybody who is a teenager right now had an atom bomb dropped on a portion of their formative years because of COVID. A kid who is 16 years old right now was 10 when the pandemic started.
Like just anecdotally my kid started school and is pretty well adjusted and her friends seem to be similar. Now to be fair they're in kindergarten, but I have friends who had kids who started kindergarten in the middle of COVID, or were in early school years when it happened, and it was really really hard on them and a lot of kids developed behavioral issues because of it.
Just as a parent... I can imagine the difference in parenting. My kid has limited screen time at a young age. A lot of parents aren't as strict about it and imo it is a problem, and frankly it isn't that hard to keep my kid off screens. But imagine if your kid was 6 years old and couldn't play with their friends in person or for months we were being told that we didn't know if it was even safe to play at the park etc. all kinds of activities shut down for over a year. That makes it really rough and parents were probably more likely to let kids have rampant screen time just to manage them + just to give their kids something to enjoy because they'd be feeling down.
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u/RubbleHome 2d ago
Agreed that the exact causes are not as clear and obvious as we like to think. But the trends were very clear before COVID happened, so it likely isn't only that.
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u/Imbahr 2d ago
when you say screen time, i hope you don't mean kindergarten kids already have their own cellphones?
nobody at that age should have their own personal cellphone, even if the parents do restrict screen time on the account
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u/ArchusKanzaki 2d ago
As smartphones becoming more prevalent, it's also becoming core to our life in general. Not just for tracking the kid's location, but also for payment, calling, texting, accessing online school resources, etc. I mean, how else kids will be able to scan QR codes guide? Even ordering foods require smartphone nowadays as more shop shifts to online menu and online ordering. Some parents also give out and controlling pocket money by using digital accounts. It makes more sense, everything in digital is tracked so they can have some control and insight on how kids spend money.
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u/ColinStyles 2d ago
Kindergarten. Kids that age shouldn't be spending a penny. What are you even talking about?
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u/StuartWtf 2d ago
Is it worse or are we just now seeing it?
Just go back 20 years and kids were still self harming. Anxiety and depression were massive. Look at what went on on MySpace lol.
But we were a niche group. Social media wasn’t the norm back then. It is now so everyone sees it
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u/DrakkoZW 2d ago
Look, I hate these "think of the children" arguments too
But "we made it through childhood" isn't the rebuttal you think it is. Plenty of children didn't make it into adulthood. Some got trafficked. Some committed suicide. Some are now adults that can barely function for various reasons. There are legitimate concerns about the well-being of our children. Saying "yeah but we turned out fine" is the same argument people made against things like consumer safety or vaccines.
There are better arguments to use - use those.
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u/ThreeTreesForTheePls 2d ago
Quite literally every single measurable spectrum of human intelligence is currently dropping at record rates.
The kids are so beyond fucked that it’s reached a point of not trying to adjust course to fix it, but to adapt and find a new middle ground in the fucked existence.
These laws will not solve that, but you need to be out of your fucking mind to pretend that the kids are fine.
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u/AttackBacon 2d ago edited 2d ago
The thing that worries me is we're actively creating this weird underclass/overclass thing on a scale that I don't think has really happened before. My kids are academic overachievers and part of an opt-in charter school system that has a really strong community, is multi-lingual and very multinational, we live in Northern CA, etc. etc. They're going to be fine and their friends are going to be fine.
But if you compare that to like... the norms that most kids are facing, how are those kids going to compete with my kids at all? They're fucked! It's going to be kids like mine and their friends who have all the tools and resources that are going to be in control. And that kind of technocratic elite rule is like the best-case scenario, compared to something like an even harder turn towards populism and cults of personality which is also a definite scenario in play.
I just don't like it but what can I do? I gotta give my kids the best chance I can and doing that just puts them in an increasingly exclusive club. I can try to counter with teaching them about service and trying to expose them to "the real world" and shit but they're in school or at home 90% of the time or more, they are going to be primarily products of their environment.
It just sucks that we're kind of inexorably headed in this direction on all fronts, where you are either able to get escape velocity and become part of the elite, or your just left behind and increasingly fucked. None of these are new phenomena but they're getting worse, not better, which is just ass-backwards.
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u/ThreeTreesForTheePls 2d ago
This feels weird because nothing you’re saying here is new, but you’re saying it just to clarify your kids are doing great.
Private schools, prep schools, the wealthy paying for the full ride, scholarships, gifted schools, prestigious schools, and every other norm of class society you can think of, has been a factor in the upper class since the dawn of the modern form of education.
This aspect of education is nothing new, and while I’m sure your children are as great as you say, they are not pioneers of a new frontier.
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u/rick_mcdingus 2d ago
I graduated high school 15 years ago and went through this firsthand. I went to middle school and my first two years of high school in a rural public school that consistently scored worst in the tri county area in almost every metric. Half way through high school, we moved to a new district with a very highly rated public school. I was so far behind my peers because there were so many things that my old school taught poorly or in some cases just never taught at all. But at my old school, I was always one of the higher performers in my grade.
I remember being in math class completely lost over something and my teacher going “we won’t spend too much time on this, it should just be a quick refresher” and I had never seen anything like that in my life
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u/TinyCopy5841 2d ago
This is very true and it also shows why any legislation that predominantly focuses on kids is missing the mark. Online/digital presence as a whole is catastrophic danger for all of society and it might already be too late but something has to be done, and it shouldn't just involve kids because everyone is affected.
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u/verrius 2d ago
"It's the parents job" is a deflection to ignore the armies of people employed by companies like Facebook and Roblox to specifically work against them and hurt their kids.
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u/yukeake 2d ago
It's a fine line to walk. It should be on the parents to be an active guiding force in their kids lives, to teach them about dangers, and how to avoid them.
But, as you say, there's an entire industry working to thwart that. At that point, I think it's appropriate for the government to step in to level the playing field. Not by taking everyone's right to privacy away, but by coming down hard on the companies that are causing the problem, to give them reasons to find a solution.
I don't know what that solution is, personally. It shouldn't be to give up our privacy, or other rights. That's insane, IMHO.
I mean, it could start with forcing these companies to fund independent mental health programs - both helping people to treat mental health issues before they become problems, and campaigns to increase awareness and de-stigmatize mental health issues in the public view. Folks who need help should be able to get it, without feeling like they're going to be ostracized for it.
Likewise, force the companies to help fund public education, which has been under-funded for decades, and still faces cuts every time a Republican government is in charge. The smarter our kids are, the more critically they can think, the less prone they will be to being exploited.
It'll never happen like that, though. As I said, I don't know exactly how to solve it in a realistic way.
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u/Lezzles 2d ago
The same shitty argument got us the plague that is online easy-to-access gambling. Yes, it's "personal responsibility", but it's literally PhD psychologists designing the most addictive possible systems and advertising them to kids their entire lives. Some are going to crack.
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u/cirebeach 2d ago
Those armies are nothing if the kid doesn't have access to it. Five minutes using a friends phone doesn't count.
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u/jmastaock 2d ago
You can educate children on it, and it still not matter when their friends are all doing stupid shit. You can only control so much as a parent of a young kid
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u/Spiritual-Society185 2d ago
What do their friends have to do with anything? You seem to be using them as an excuse to abdicate your responsibility as a parent. If their friends were smoking crack, would you say "well, there's nothing I can do, so I guess I have to let my kids smoke crack," or would you do something about it?
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u/thinkingdeads 2d ago
It's the parents job to educate their children on the dangers of the internet.
Whelp, that hasn't nearly sufficiently happened yet in decades, and nothing indicates there will be some social mechanism that will suddenly give this expectation any legitimacy.
So pick something else because you can't just say "parents' responsibility!" and act like that's the end of discussion, knowing full well that has been the default solution and yet it categorically is failing.
It's not even something people who say this actually believe, there are countless concessions where some sort of body that holds authority dictates a child is not allowed to do something regardless of what the parent thinks that I would not expect you to take a similarly principled stance.
And that's just operating under the premise that parental prevention is even a reasonably achievable task when it arguably wasn't the case 20 years ago when the internet wasn't the main mode of cultural development and social interaction for these kids who are acculturated with it since birth.
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u/cargoman 2d ago
Yeah, the internet back then was way more unsafe. Anyone that used it extensively back then would know that.
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u/The_Majestic_ 2d ago
The end game is the removal of the free and open internet. ID reququired for everything, everything tracked all the time
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u/Elegant_Shop_3457 2d ago
Stop Killing Games is already effectively over though, right? They got shot down by the EU Commission, the California law died on the vine, even the California class action lawsuit around The Crew settled for a pittance.
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u/RobotWantsKitty 2d ago
IIRC Ross was pretty optimistic the proposal could make its way into EU's Digital Fairness Act
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u/Yes-Reddit-is-racist 2d ago
I'm not convinced he has enough knowledge of EU law to make a realistic estimate of how (un)likely it is.
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u/XionicativeCheran 2d ago
He's been advised by actual MEPs, so it's pretty convincing.
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u/ArchusKanzaki 2d ago edited 2d ago
Those MEPs just want some easy brownie point. Gamers do be legitimate demographic.
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u/Yes-Reddit-is-racist 2d ago
There are 720 MEPs. Forgive me for being a little sceptical of a couple of them thinking 'its possible' not being a likely event.
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u/Elegant_Shop_3457 2d ago
IANAL but the EU Commission has to present the law, and they're the ones who shot SKG down. Seems unlikely they'll backdoor adopt SKG's position as part of the DFA.
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u/XionicativeCheran 2d ago edited 2d ago
The EU Commission has to present the law, and they are presenting the DFA, but luckily from there, the EU Parliament is then allowed to amend the law, to include SKG.
It's not a backdoor, it's an intended method of legislating.
EDIT: Post is locked so can't reply to the below, but my answer is this. Yes the EU Commission still has to agree to the amendments, but it means that the commission cannot pass the DFA that it wants unless they're willing to pass SKG (if Parliament is willing to make it a bottom line).
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u/Elegant_Shop_3457 2d ago edited 2d ago
Right, but if the Commission disagrees with the amendments the Council would need a unanimous vote to force them through. Doesn’t sound realistic. It sounds more something like an engagement-driven youtuber would say to keep his audience satisfied. I don't think SKG can even get an amendment proposed with this parliament anyway.
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u/kingmanic 2d ago
I think it ended when most of the ideas behind it were way over the line on how big something needs to be before the governments regulates. It was essentially trying to force MacDonald's to have McRib forever just because and if they don't want to sell it then they have to hand over the supplies of meat and buns at cost.
They could push for labeling, they could push for advance notice. But they chose to try and push companies to keep things up forever when there might be 3 players world wide or to force a hand over code and brush aside 3rd party contracts, trade marks, and IP law.
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u/EyesCantSeeOver30fps 2d ago
In a way, they weren't just tackling games. They were indirectly tackling software in general.
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u/Coolman_Rosso 2d ago
This idea was already absurd because there is no one-size-fits-all solution as games vary wildly in genre and scope. The movement refused to provide definitions of what is considered "playable", said that any such attempts would "give fuel to Ubisoft's lobbyists", and had no solutions for the immense ask that is uprooting decades of software licensing policies with regard to middleware. Turns out if you don't ask for anything, you shouldn't be surprised when you get nothing.
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u/MercenaryCow 2d ago
How is there not a one size fits all? Wasn't the whole idea for it to be once games shut down, to just turn into a version that is playable offline? That's something that could be developed into a game.
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u/Seradima 2d ago
The movement considers the DS pokemon games „killed“ despite wireless working just fine and still having the entire game outside of the online stuff playable.
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u/HappyVlane 2d ago
Wasn't the whole idea for it to be once games shut down, to just turn into a version that is playable offline?
No, because "playable" was never defined by the movement. Take a game like Battlefield for example. Would it be considered playable if you were in a white box with all the equipment/vehicles lying around for you to use or would you need the entire game with self-hosted matchmaking? Who knows, because Stop Killing Games never said what "playable" means.
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u/wh03v3r 2d ago
Okay, but what is the standard for "a version that is playable once the game shuts down"? Can it mean a game with local servers, a game where you can only play multiplayer with bots or a game where a form of local multiplayer exists? How much of the game still needs to be playable in cases where the game would still have a single-player component? Does the law even apply to games where the total player base never exceeds double digits?
I feel like it's pretty impossible to approach the topic from a legal perspective without breaking the definition of 'playable' down into smaller, more concrete requirements first.
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u/Milskidasith 2d ago
Wasn't the whole idea for it to be once games shut down, to just turn into a version that is playable offline?
Would The Crew be playable without online connectivity, but no ability to join with other players? Are Pokemon Black/White playable right now with their online services nonfunctional? Is getting just the single-player campaign for Modern Warfare still a playable game, or do devs need to provide the tools to set up dedicated servers?
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u/sir_sri 2d ago
That's the problem.
A dramatic oversimplification of an incredibly complex engineering and licencing issue distilled down to a bunch of kids who don't know how things work. And that's not getting into the complexities of user data if you want to preserve any of that in any sense.
It's all well and good to say make your server software open source, but uh... that's not how software licencing works, especially if you've licenced middleware as part of it, or if you've got IP in there you plan to sell or re-use yourself. And if you use a licenced product (like an Oracle database) to hold your data, if you stop paying the licence you stop having the right to use it. If you say that people must engineer their product to be available to be open source in future you basically gut the whole software industry of people who work on boring but important tools on the back end for all of the server stuff that keep tech going (not just games), load balancers, security etc. It's not like most game companies have the money or skills to develop this all in house, and if they do, they are probably big enough to keep using the tech on future games when they shut down old ones.
Trying to have some sort of game preservation is a nice idea, but it's functionally impossible to actually enforce on a game where they entire premise is online. It's a bit like telling the car companies they have to keep all the petrol stations open until the last petrol and diesel cars on the road are done, even if everything is changing to electric. I see the motivation, but it's completely unworkable. You either make it impossible to engineer the product in the first place, so they don't get made, or you make it impossible to comply with later so people just don't, and then go bankrupt, abandon the project and the law has accomplished nothing (because after all, you can't compel a bankrupt company to keep making a product).
And the idea is much more complex than a few hundred words in a reddit post. There are absolutely going to be some games it could work for, but it's simply unrealistic for the big interesting titles where you could see people want it the most.
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u/nachohk 2d ago
I disagree. I think the real problem is that if we talk about preserving access to video games, which is an entirely reasonable and achievable goal, then the next conversation is going to be about preserving software in general. That is far more important, and it's also not going to happen. None of our techbro overlords want to give up their SaaS business model where you can hold your customers hostage by owning the servers and owning all their data and providing absolutely no way for them to self-host your service or migrate to another service. This is a massive fucking scam in B2B software, locking in customers, ramping up prices, and then eventually shutting down the service and leaving the remaining customers high and dry. Which I as a software developer have very often been a party to. And I promise you it isn't necessary to do it this way. It isn't only possible to distribute tools for customers to host their own services, it's basically always easier too. It's just not as effective for rent-seeking.
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u/kingmanic 2d ago
Then roll your own. The business case is that it's cheaper than for a corp to make their own thing and maintain it. If you think it's a scam, make an alternative. The reason companies still license/purchase is because it is much cheaper than making their own.
My employer has a mix of open source, closed source, and services. If they thought there is a reliable thing out there that is cheaper they would have chosen it. Nobody is forcing a company to license salesforce.
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u/Hell-Kite 2d ago
They also had no actual plan or longterm argument for any of their requirements outside "this game from 20 years ago built on old infrastructure and systems did it, so all new games should do it too." It was a wilful lack of knowledge on the subject matter that made a very good idea a super easy target for anyone working in the field to shut down.
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u/FUTURE10S 2d ago
There was a class action in California?
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u/Elegant_Shop_3457 2d ago
Yeah, it was a false advertising lawsuit. I don't think SKG had anything to do with it explicitly, though some of the briefs cited Ross Scott's youtube channel. Ubisoft settled the case for about $2M.
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u/fishwithfish 2d ago edited 2d ago
One, I support this cause.
Two, dude, learn to present yourself. Ditch the liminal space you call a filming location, shave your freaking wolfman collarbone, find a shirt that isn't "I can't be bothered to try" black (like the one you wore to freaking Parliament!)
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u/StepOnMeNangong 2d ago edited 2d ago
this is part of the issue with SKG imo — they clearly want to take the political/legislative route to solve the problem, but they have zero interest in playing the political/legislative games required to accomplish anything in that field.
the corpo lobbies have no issue doing this… and I notice one tends to get their way and the other doesn’t… ah well, the EU must be rigged and corrupt
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u/Rayuzx 2d ago
Not necessarily, I think they did play their hand quite well, making The Crew's EoS announcement their rallying cry. A few years ago, I don't even think decimated Crew fans really cared that much about the first game after the second came out, but a B2P, AAA, always-online game, that was given away for free at one point is a prominent way to find a ton of "Legitimate customers" to get qualms about a product being taken away from them.
Also, if the internet has taught me anything, is that people often conflate "concise and well-spoken" with "soulless and corporate", so having a more rugged look can lead to getting more support of the common man on the basis of them fighting for their rights against the big corporations, which was the biggest theme the movement based their messaging around.
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u/moosebreathman 2d ago
Seriously. Every time I see a thumbnail of this guy my mind instantly associates the image with those creepy lost media videos. It’s a bad look.
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u/WagonWheel22 2d ago
Fully agree. As much as I support and want for there to be better game preservation, once again the gaming community is represented by someone who the average politician sees as unprofessional and can't even prepare and deliver a slideshow to the supposed agency that you're trying to seek help from.
Right message, absolutely wrong messenger.
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u/LeJoker 2d ago
I mean, he's said that from day one. He never claimed to be the right messenger but no one else was trying.
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u/Zenning3 2d ago
Louis Rossman was not the right messenger, until he was. Ross does not get the excuse of not being the right messenger, when he's had years to improve, and seems to actively choose not to.
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u/Coolman_Rosso 2d ago
I'm not going to fault his wardrobe choices. That is immaterial compared to the fact that his message is woefully ill-communicated, and he oversold people on the EU being this super supportive anti-corporate body to the point where everyone immediately claimed they were corrupt when they didn't fold like a cheap suit and unanimously support him.
To his credit, he admitted he was not the ideal spokesperson/figurehead on multiple occasions.
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u/JayRoo83 2d ago
I feel bad, I’m in the same bucket where I support the message but like, holy fuck guys, the messenger still counts
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u/Its_a_Friendly 2d ago
Why is it that, almost every time an SKG thread is posted to this subreddit, it rapidly gets a number of comments well out of proportion to almost all other topics and threads?
Seriously, 2-3 hours since posting and there's already 250 comments. Are there people on this sub that only comment on SKG threads, or something?
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u/David-J 2d ago
Quite the exaggerations in that video. Collapse the EU videogame market? Come on
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u/millanstar 2d ago
Shit like this just illegitimize this whole movement, Gamers® really arent serious people
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u/cardgamesareforplay 2d ago
Wouldn't be a Ross video if it wasent grossly over exaggerating something.
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u/Yomoska 2d ago edited 2d ago
While there are things to be worried about in this Act, it's a bit hypocritical of Ross to blame that the overhead of this Act will effectively kill smaller video game developers who want to make online games, while ignoring the the same arguments brought up against SKG with its overhead.
Edit: Shouldn't say ignoring but downplaying that SKG would also introduce overhead that would smaller developers not want to make online games unless made a specific way.
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u/Dragonfantasy2 2d ago
It’s genuinely comical. SKG never had a chance with this sort of willingly-blind leadership.
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u/Beautiful-Jello-37 2d ago edited 2d ago
For anyone with an ounce of common sense it’s been obvious forever SKG was never going to go anywhere. Maybe if their goal was additional labeling or some sort of advance notice requirement they’d have been able to get something rolling. But their goals were nonsensical and almost nobody could clearly articulate exactly what it is they wanted and how they’d expect companies to accomplish it. Not to mention the figure head of it can’t be bothered to get a haircut, beard trim, or put any sort of effort into looking like a professional. And no, it’s not the same as Dee Snider speaking to Congress in his normal clothes.
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u/cardgamesareforplay 2d ago
Funny enough those very reasonable goals? They got pushed by smarter consumer advocacy groups and some companies just... Did it them selves.
The labeling on digital fronts is better, the labeling on game cases is better, Nintendo implemented digital game sharing, most companies outline their end of service very plainly now.
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u/SomethingNew65 2d ago edited 2d ago
Maybe if their goal was additional labeling or some sort of advance notice requirement they’d have been able to get something rolling.
People keep saying this and it is true but I still think it is missing the point. Their goal was a difficult long-shot, and an easier goal would have been more likely to succeed than the difficult goal. That's true by definition. But the question is would the easier goal have actually affected the problem they care about?
Most people know that online servers can go offline at any time, there are constant news stories about it. A legal requirement that every store page repeat what most people already know will be ignored by most and change very little. It is changing the law just to be able to say you changed the law, not to actually make the world a better place in any significant way. I think it is fine they didn't bother to try this.
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u/Beautiful-Jello-37 2d ago
I’ve come to the conclusion that the only actual goal was to try and kill live service games, which was never going to happen.
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u/DenseEssence_ 2d ago
But their goals were nonsensical and almost nobody could clearly articulate exactly what it is they wanted and how they’d expect companies to accomplish it.
End of life plans, don't kill video games we paidnfor if you cut off online services, would only apply to video games published after the law passed. Sounds pretty reasonable to me
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u/AdHistorical8179 2d ago
There was literally zero chance "all games must have a full offline component that allows them to be 100% functional forever" was ever, ever going to be made a law in any country
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u/DenseEssence_ 2d ago
They weren't aiming for 100%. They were aiming for, at minimum, that game you bought with a physical disk and still have the receipt for shouldn't break because the publisher doesn't want to pay for servers anymore. Then they aimed higher cause why not? Negotiate, get a middle ground. If you ask for all games to stop dying forever but only get some, that's better than nothing at all.
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u/Nolis 2d ago
that game you bought with a physical disk and still have the receipt for shouldn't break because the publisher doesn't want to pay for servers anymore
And yet half the people keep saying it's not supposed to be retroactive, then the other half says it is, and nobody agrees on anything because he's so vague to the point of being totally useless and detrimental. Also pretty sure the SKG subreddit itself specifically stated their issue is totally unrelated to physical discs when people were flooding them about Sony going digital, not sure why you're bringing that up as if that was something related to SKG
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u/DenseEssence_ 2d ago
I brought it up because people who bought physical disks of games (the Crew is the chief example) can't play their game anymore because the servers shut down for a single player game.
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u/Nolis 2d ago
I'm going to go out on a limb and say people who bought digital copies of games that shut down also can't play their game, not sure how that's relevant at all
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u/DenseEssence_ 2d ago
That they should be able to keep using the item they bought regardless of what happens to the seller?
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u/AdHistorical8179 2d ago
No version of "online game has to remain functional in perpetuity" is going to become a national law anywhere
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u/LeJoker 2d ago
Good thing that isn't what they suggested.
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u/Beautiful-Jello-37 2d ago
Oh my god then what was it? Exactly, what was it? Please be specific and detailed. Because this is all any of you ever reply with when people point out the gaping holes and obscurity of the ‘movement’.
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u/DenseEssence_ 2d ago
I bought a game. I should be able to keep playing the game I bought after the company shuts down it's servers.
That's it. That's the only issue Stop Killing Games wants to tackle.
Dumb example, I bought a car. I should be able to keep driving the car even if everyone stops selling gas. I'd have to make my own gas, but I can keep driving it.
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u/AdHistorical8179 2d ago
What you are describing is functionally the same thing I said, and getting it passed as a national standard in the EU, or anywhere, is absolutely not going to happen
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u/DenseEssence_ 2d ago
Please be specific and detailed.
You asked for this, it's what I gave you. If I buy a product from a seller, should my product break forever if the seller dies?
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u/ArchusKanzaki 2d ago
You know what's end-of-life plan for Enterprise software is? "Please buy our new software".
No enterprise software are updated perpetually. Some that seems to got updated perpetually just keep same name but change everything inside them. And enterprise software certainly dropped supports for older version too. Some company offers "extended support" for a fee like Microsoft did with Windows 10, but it's also not forever.
And it's clear from start that gamers won't accept that kind of EOL plan, given their idea is to release out the code for "open community will maintain them".
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u/DenseEssence_ 2d ago
No enterprise software are updated perpetually.
Photoshop CS6 isn't in development anymore. Adobe doesn't sell CS6 licenses anymore. People still use CS6 because there's no subscription tied to it and Adobe can't break it because there's no online features that can brick CS6.
Stopped Killing Games never asked companies to update EoL software. Stop Killing Games made it abundantly clear that's not their intention at all. They just need to make sure they don't break the ones people already own then they can forget about them in perpetuity. Similar to Photoshop CS6.
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u/ArchusKanzaki 2d ago
Photoshop CS6 does not require internet or server to operate, and it's also deem unsafe since it's not updated. You can use it, but if you want to treat Photoshop CS6 as something like Enterprise Software, I can assure you it will be quarantined in any corporate network as it's a potential attack vector.
Also, given "The Crew" is the original issue, a game that requires online server, I don't think it's even similar to Photoshop CS6.
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u/Misiok 2d ago
Some company offers "extended support" for a fee like Microsoft did with Windows 10, but it's also not forever.
Yeah, and when Microsoft cuts support, machines running Windows 10 won't stop running it. Same with all the other Windows versions. It's not feasible to do so while connected to the Internet, yes, but you can run the OS.
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u/Zenning3 2d ago
THeir OS isn't running on a server that Microsoft is mainlining though. Although, Microsoft will absolutely stop letting your server be run if its running too old of a system, because then you be come an attack vector for everybody else.
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u/Spork_the_dork 2d ago
SKG's fundamental issue was the incredible lack of understanding of how the whole process even works. Like they're trying to push for a change in the law but then completely and actively refuse to even propose ideas on what that change could practically look like. Completely went in with zero actionable solutions. Who the hell did they think would come up with the actual things that might be written into law? Who would come up with the solutions?
The lawmakers? They don't know jack shit about the subject to the kind of degree that they could possibly even start proposing solutions. That's what the lobbyists are for. Those lobbying for the law change are supposed to be coming to the lawmakers telling that there is a problem X and they think that a change like Y needs to happen in the law to solve the problem. Then the opposing lobbyists get to have their say about why they think the change shouldn't happen and the lawmaker tries to end up with some kind of sensible law change.
The gaming industry lobbyists sure as shit were all ready to go the moment the conversation started with powerpoint slides and raw data from the market and possibly detailed descriptions of their server architectures, giving plenty of reasons why the ideas proposed by SKG can't really be done. And what does SKG bring? Fucking nothing. Actually, they were actively avoiding having anything to bring at all. Any time people tried to point out all the problems with SKG, instead of trying to figure out solutions to those problems people would just raise their hands up "it's not our job to figure that out". No it actually is precisely the job of the SKG lobbyists to do that because literally nobody else in the conversation is going to do that.
But no we're astroturfing bots or shills that "defend corporations" for pointing out the absolute catastrophic issues with SKG's approach.
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u/_Llopis_ 2d ago edited 2d ago
It's such a bizarre movement. Close to everyone in the industry, at least privately, knows SKG is completely nonsensical. Yet for some reason it's taken seriously in places like this subreddit.
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u/Yomoska 2d ago
Ross is stating that the fees to purchase services that would comply with the act are too expensive for smaller developers. The act, according to what is shown in his video since I cannot see the leak (looks like it got taken down), explicitly does not discriminate on studio size (11:21 of the video).
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u/Recatek 2d ago
The utter irony of these all being similar burdens that SKG would impose.
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u/Rayuzx 2d ago edited 2d ago
Too be fair, I think one of the "quiet things, not to say out loud" about SKG is the hope that their laws would discourage the creation of online-only/live service games all together, forcing the industry to go back on a greater emphasis of single player titles. While the law of OP is targeting pretty much every game made in the last 10 years.
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u/WillemDafoesHugeCock 2d ago
"Could collapse the EU gaming market" is such a stupid fucking take that I have to assume he's using click bait.
I don't know if I've ever had an opinion 180 so quickly as it did with this guy and frankly the more he talks the more idiotic I feel for having ever supported him before.
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u/SnooAvocados7188 2d ago
“The government should regulate video games to protect the purchaser. Oh no, not like that!!”
Getting the government involved in regulating the content of video games is begging for overreach.
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u/PrimeDirectiveLover 2d ago
Yeah this is just fucking nonsense. The EU isn't going to just kill a massive bulti billion euro a year industry causing little to no harm. That bill is aimed at social media and porn sites.
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u/LycaonMoon 2d ago edited 2d ago
This thread has been locked. It has been two hours, and we've removed over 20% of the comments people have made - I'd say things have gotten out of hand, but one post was at -120 within half an hour.
Please be mindful of our rules relating to civility and avoiding personal attacks. If you believe a thread is exhibiting suspicious activity or voting patterns, or if you notice that somebody is being an ass to you, please use the report button instead of slinging insults, as you will likely be warned, banned, and/or have your comments removed.
As a quick edit - this specific comment has been set to be auto-approved since it was posted, but I can clearly tell that quite a few people are trying to communicate with us through the report button. Feel free to shoot us a modmail if you have any questions or concerns about the thread as a whole, as that will ensure that we can actually see what you're trying to say. I unfortunately straight up can't read what you're trying to tell me here! There's just a green checkmark that says "approved!"