It really was a good ole’ internet argument where he was just obnoxiously wrong in his interpretation and remained just as confidently incorrect the entire time.
Ah you know, not the outcome I hoped for but it’s exactly what I expected from humans.
paraphrasing a little more than a half hour of the video: “Man, fuck Thor/Pirate Software for either lying or misunderstanding and signal boosting his incorrect interpretation of the campaign.”
I agreed with Ross previously that Thor taking a really dumb fuck position helped get more attention on the issue that was, IMO, as hopeless as trying to get the masses to care about or understand Net Neutrality. That was what I saw repeated and upvoted at the time even before Thor revealed himself to be a gigantic narcissistic nepo baby bullshitter more recently.
If you watched the vid OP, what changed his opinion? I’ll check it out once I’m home from work regardless.
It’s all incredibly online, but searching the keywords “piratesoftware WoW drama onlyfangs” will get the ball rolling if you want to see a prime example of how a narcissist acts when getting caught out very publicly. He also embellished his past a lot and that got parroted in every thread mentioning him for months, so that shouldn’t be hard to stumble upon.
Don’t forget throwing his LGBT fans under the bus to have a happy conversation with asmongold and basically inviting the cunts fanbase to harass his LGBT viewers.
Then when said viewers tell him that he was wrong for that and now they are being harassed, he said people were trying to cancel him for having a normal conversation with asmongold about a video game.
That shit pissed me off so much. Pretentious cunt…
The metrics on signatures for the citizens’ initiative. If it helped, it would have boosted those too, but it didn’t. He also got word that at least one very large YouTuber/streamer that he did not name decided to stay quiet about SKG because it would have contradicted Thor.
I’ll also reiterate that 1M signatures out of a population of 450M is an absurdly high threshold to have to reach, so getting 1/10th of that is still impressive, even if it’s unsuccessful.
Man, so many influencers do this. It’s really a shame what kind of world we are building. People who actually have reach - influencers, staying quiet about real issues in fear of cutting the hand that feeds them. Off topic but damn if it doesn’t hold true.
He also got word that at least one very large YouTuber/streamer that he did not name decided to stay quiet about SKG because it would have contradicted Thor.
Well it’s a long story, but I had a negative interaction with him personally. I was an active member of his “block game” community, which was a Minecraft server and modpack he was making. The community didn’t agree with some changes he made that negatively impacted the community, and we were having a civil discussion about what to change, why we disagreed, and stuff like that. He didn’t like that we didn’t agree, so he deleted the entire discord channel the discussion was in after getting irate in chat.
It’s a much longer story than that, but he was the only one who was acting that way. Not only did he not want to engage with the community, but he actively threw a hissy fit that I would only expect from the likes of a young child.
I feel like this needs to be spread as far and wide as possible, and for PirateSoftware to be mass reported for misinformation about an ongoing political initiative.
It’s not about having a dumb opinion, it’s about actually spreading false information. He lies consistently about what the movement is about and what the goals are.
The project doesn’t clearly explain what its intentions are. The first time I saw the stop killing games initiative, I thought the exact same as him. Obviously it goes much further and it doesn’t propose any law so europe and each country would be free to set their own limits, but from an external eye it flawed when these questions are not directly and transparently answered on the website
Ah, I see, your one of His. Once more, just lying. The project does clearly explain the goals and intentions if you have the ability to Read, or at least listen to Ross’s multiple videos explaining them. He also explains Why he doesn’t propose an exact law in his videos, and again in his most recent video.
If you can’t possibly imagine that people have their own opinions, you have serious problems. I can’t stand people like you that categorizes people into small boxes, effectively strawmanning them, as a mean to discredit your opponents. Classical manipulation technique. No, you don’t know me better than myself, thanks.
The project does clearly explain the goals and intentions if you have the ability to Read
That is just false. The blue image shared on Ross’ videos should be on the website to better explain what they want.
or at least listen to Ross’s multiple videos explaining them
In that case yes, but then my point was that it wasn’t clear, and having to search the channel of the creator of the initiative is something no one would do if they wrongly interpreted this from the start, as it was for my case. It was only after more coverage that I thought more about it.
I understand why he's frustrated. EU citizens are just so damn lazy and won't help themselves. I've told all my friends and family, brought it up at parties and other gatherings to anybody who plays games. But there are EU gamers (streamers and consumers alike) who are chronically online, on every proprietary platform out there and who don't give 2 shits about the campaign.
Gaming is the biggest entertainment industry on the planet. Globally it generates more money than music and movies . Germany alone had an estimated 49 million players in 2022 (wikipedia), with France 45 million and Italy 36 million. Even if they were wrong by one decimal that would still make more than 12 million in those 3 countries alone.
The vast majority of European gamers are just too lazy to do anything in their own self-interest. It's embarrassing.
Yeah but most gamers don’t care deeply about games. Meanwhile, most gay people care about about not being tortured, and other people can empathise with that. The amount of money in it plays literally no role in whether people would sign a petition.
I am still of the opinion that they aimed too small and focused too narrow. Games are a "luxury" anyone can live without and it's hard to rally grassroots support behind protecting something that people only use for entertainment. Yeah it's low stakes to force them to let you continue to play it after servers shut down but the same low stakes also makes the petition itself pretty ignorable to anyone who's not a very invested "gamer".
Actual right to repair and right to continue to access to the software and services and devices you buy goes SO far beyond mere games, there are other huge impacts to society from exactly the same problem that leads to game servers being shut down, and this petition ignored them completely to focus exclusively on games. I know that was done purposefully, but I think it was a miscalculation.
I'm convinced it could have got a lot of support if it had broader aims. Yes if you go after the big boys who are locking down tractor parts and integrated electronic modules so they become obsolete and unrepairable and directly impacting farmers and our food supply, you're going to REALLY piss off some very big business interests who are going to try and kill your petition, but you're also going to help educate and hopefully get a lot of support from politicians who already know this is a problem and from the general public who doesn't care about games but does care about society (at least once they're properly educated about it, which is hard but also a necessary and positive step to even attempt).
First and foremost: it is an inherently adversarial “movement” name which actively shifts the blame toward developers. One of my gaming buddies was a community manager for one of the studios that got gutted over the past year or so (gotta “love” how that doesn’t narrow it down at all) and he definitely had some Thoughts about getting constant social media spam about how they are “killing games” by not releasing offline versions of old games as they were doing layoffs on the regular.
There is a reason the only dev/“dev” who gave any meaningful feedback was thor the shithead. And while it may suck that he didn’t have the same opinion as the people accusing devs of killing the games they spent the better part of a decade on… Yeah, pirate software is a dipshit who was just trying to put himself as a position of authority because his dad worked at Blizzard.
But most of the key points he raised were sensationalized but not actually wrong if you look at things from a developer perspective. Well, from the perspective of a developer who expects to get fired any second now because funding will arbitrarily dry up. Yeah, the end result will TOTALLY be that you get an extra six months of salary to make the offline client and not that you’ll be held in breach of contract and lose your severance because you couldn’t pound that out in a week.
But even without starting things off at “its just about ethics in game journalism” levels of discourse: Yes, yes, yes, I know that Ross et al intentionally were vague and shut the fuck up. If you push “We need legislature on X” to a governing body without an actionable plan? Schoolhouse Rock doesn’t start blaring and Aaron Sorkin doesn’t… okay, he still gets a boner but for different reasons. What happens is the lobbyists and Jack Thompsons of the world swoop in and make damned sure that those “details get ironed out” the way they want.
It sucks because treating this as part of a larger effort that included actual Game Preservation efforts and worked with policy groups and developers would actually have been awesome AND gotten widespread support even from the studios themselves. Instead it was a flashy campaign that started off by flipping the bird to people getting fired left and right and reveled in its ignorance of how legislature even works. And then managed to get dragged into a slapfight with some jackass who plays wow and sells mobile games.
It was overly narrow in most cases while positioning itself as speaking for some massive swathe of the industry it was actively antagonizing.
There was plenty of off-the-record talk from devs who wanted something to show for the years they put into a project that was shut down in less time than it took to make the game in the first place.
And that always comes up because it is the truth. It is the same problem as “Well, you worked yourself to death for the past five years but decided you needed to take time off for mental health reasons. Unfortunately, we don’t launch until six months from now so go fuck yourself. Hey, send in Fred on your way out so we can tell him he needs to work 90 hour weeks for the next six months but won’t have been here long enough to get in the credits”.
You know what doesn’t get that? Being told you need to architect your game, from the start, to use listen servers while also being unhackable and controlling all progression in the data center AND scaling near infinitely with no host migration issues (oh Warframe…). Or to know that if things even look slightly bad you will have no runway to fix it and will immediately be told to wrap it up and release the “offline mode” in the next month.
People can (and shouldn’t) be nasty about anything. Part of a community manager’s responsibility would be to convey what customers are asking for, and…yeah, games should have listen servers and offline modes and do what they can to prevent cheating. Those are all things that some segment of their customers or potential customers care about. And at the same time, plenty of devs want to make their games live forever but don’t have the ability to make it so. It’s not inherently adversarial, nor does it inherently shift blame toward developers. We all know why we don’t have these things: microtransactions. The people mandating those are the ones with a profit share incentive, which aren’t typically the boots on the ground actually building the game.
No. But “stop killing games” is an inherently adversarial statement. Hell, even a lot of PUBLISHERS would rather keep their games running forever. Let alone the devs who have put their blood, sweat, and tears into it.
People can (and shouldn’t) be nasty about anything. Part of a community manager’s responsibility would be to convey what customers are asking for, and…yeah, games should have listen servers and offline modes and do what they can to prevent cheating.
And here we get to the crux of things. And the good news is that we already fucking went through all of this.
“Nobody should have to put up with harassment. But, really, it is your job to deal with that and we have our demands. So give me what I want and this all goes away”. Am I talking about “Stop killing games and give us an offline server for your MMO” or am I talking about “Fire that bitch and stop talking about woke games because I care about ethics in games journalism”?
And we saw the exact same responses from the dev side (and the smarter/older influencers). Either completely ignoring it because they don’t want to get doxxed or “Yeah… there are parts of that I really like. But I don’t know enough to really comment too much. Anyway, back to talking about the new Silent Hill game”.
Harassment is not an inherent part of Stop Killing Games. If publishers (or really, whoever the financiers are for a given game) wanted their game to live forever, they had the power at the start and opted not to.
Neither time was that my response. I have asked developers via social media for LAN or listen servers or offline modes, and I’ve never been nasty about it. Being doxxed or getting hate campaigns is not okay. Customers asking for features for a video game that are important to them are not harassment, and listening to requests for those features is part of the job. If everyone at a company wanted their game to live forever, from the bottom all the way to the top, and it didn’t launch with an offline mode, then I don’t believe they wanted it to live forever; it simply didn’t make their list of priorities.
Hell, even a lot of PUBLISHERS would rather keep their games running forever.
This is such a shit take that publishers want games running forever. The whole reason they get shut down is because they don’t make a profit and if something that’s not earning them money might as well be something that’s going to take gamers away from their new game. So they’ll of course shut it down. It’s in their incentive.
But most of the key points he raised were sensationalized but not actually wrong if you look at things from a developer perspective.
they were also not really relevant to the campaign, which was the biggest problem with his comments. there was no expectation that studios do extra work to keep servers up, or make offline clients. the expected legislation was to have publishers allow external use of the relevant source code of the product when the publisher deems the work no longer profitable, to spare people the effort of reverse-engineering protocols and building their own servers. a knock-on effect of that would be that future services would have to be built with eventual shutdown procedures in mind, which, let’s face it, they should already have been doing.
thor was saying “this isn’t feasible because it’s a bunch of extra work for the developers”, completely missing the point that this is not on the developers. it’s on the company sitting on the IP. they can publish source trees no problem, no developer involvement necessary. and the legislation would have made sure of that fact.
There is a reason that there are regularly listicles about “top 1000 horrifically angry comments on github” and the like. And that goes up even more when you are working on a closed source product and have been up and pounding through tickets for 26 hours straight.
Not to mention proprietary or re-used code. Like… I think Call of Duty is STILL technically the quake 3 engine if you go deep enough into the source code? And while Q3a (presumably licensed at some point since it is GPL from a google) is open source, there is going to be a lot of code in there that isn’t. It is very common to use other libraries and suddenly needing to open source your account management system because one of your games is dead in the water is a huge problem. ESPECIALLY if the goal is so that “fans” can… reverse engineer it to build their own servers (and nobody would EVER profit from one of those…).
And then you just have the kind of “spirit of the law” shit that Apple et al love to abuse. Is that game fundamentally unplayable “offline” because it did REALLY cool stuff with sharding so that players can drop in and out of a game seamlessly? Or is it a bunch of phone homes for every single achievement for a fully SP game? Because that would NEVER happen.
thor was saying “this isn’t feasible because it’s a bunch of extra work for the developers”, completely missing the point that this is not on the developers. it’s on the company sitting on the IP.
Which can be the difference between “Okay, we’ll give you two months to get this shit popular again” versus “Well, it is going to cost X engineering hours to clean up the source so we are just gonna kill it now and get on that. Oh, and if the source isn’t cleaned up within, let’s say, one month, that is a breach of contract and none of your team gets severance”
The other aspect this tends to ignore is the use of proprietary software libraries and even having expert consultants come out. My understanding is nVidia have mostly stopped doing it (for gaming) but for decades they would fly out a solution engineer or five to look at the game, help optimize the graphics and physics pipelines, and even document what needs to be added to the drivers on release.
Not all of those contractors who have ever touched the code are going to be okay with it being released. Since this would be the equivalent of having potentially entire mega companies worth of software libraries and the like change their license overnight.
that was sort of the point though. a big case with a narrow focus can later be used as a fulcrum for a wider scope, given that the original case has the right spin. it’s also easier than going after the anti-repair people.
But politicians will actually be prepared to get behind right to repair. But they regard games as a bit infantile, and don’t really want to be involved. A point that was made right at the start of all of this and was then completely ignored.
I don’t understand, the arguement is whether or not they should have equated this to the right to repair movement, and then you say you think that’s a bad idea but I don’t understand your justification. Your justification seems to be that people don’t care about software, but my if they do not care about software, then they also do not care about hardware, and therefore your comment is irrelevant.
I literally don’t understand your justification for not equating game preservation to right to repair.
i was on mobile so i was keeping it terse. let’s see if i can expand a bit now that i’m at a keyboard.
the right to repair movement is fighting companies that deliberately make it harder to fix things, so that customers will have to use company services to repair their stuff, or buy new stuff. john deere and apple are two big players here, with cryptographical signatures built into parts that void the warranty if they don’t match. this is actively adversarial behavior and should plainly be illegal. skg, on the other hand, is fighting companies that just leave their stuff to rot. they’re just neglecting their product once there is no profit in it, which you can’t really say about e.g. john deere; they are obligated by law to provide parts for the things they sell for x amount of years after they no longer sell the product itself.
so, the two are in different legal frameworks: right to repair is trying to stop capture of the spare parts market, while skg is fighting for there to even be a spare parts market. and that’s where my previous point comes in: while machines are inherently understood to be repairable (because they used to be) and the fact that companies are trying to clamp down on that is plainly obvious, software has never been generally understood to be changeable by the end user. it has always been an enthusiast/professional-only thing.
so, equating the two may harm either
a) rtr, because of the assumption that only people with the correct credentials should have access to repair parts,
b) skg, because of the assumption that they want companies to provide support for things for up to several years like in the parts market, or
c) both, because of the assumption that they want the same thing, which, if implemented, would make neither side happy.
i’m not 100% sure i’m making sense here, because on some level i do think they share similarities. of course they do. but how do you present that to a group of amateurs (legislators) in a coherent way? i don’t think you can without harming either cause.
this is a big ol’ bummer. understandable why they would struggle to get buy-in from stodgy old men, but disappointing all the same. I really thought they had a good chance when the campaign was kicking off, the excitement seemed to be there. But if even the EU won’t legislate this, it’s hard to imagine any other CPB taking up this idea. Maybe if we’re all still here in 10 years we can try again. Maybe there will be enough millenials in seats of power by then to make this happen. Or maybe the kids will be so used to live service games by then that a majority of gamers will just be blindly accepting the state of the industry.
The campaign was designed to save all future games, The Crew was just a useful catalyst to launch from, since it was a very visible example of what they were fighting against.
But yes, saving games is pretty minor compared to stopping literal fascism. It’s just a shame that PirateSoftware fucked the campaign so hard, and stopped a big influencer from basically pressing the ‘win’ button by talking about it.
But yes, saving games is pretty minor compared to stopping literal fascism.
I don’t know. Fascism hates art, and capitalism only sees value in it when it’s making them money/giving it power, and capitalism and fascism are very closely related. Therefore it’s actually a part of stopping fascism, or at least stopping them from getting what they want entirely.
If you’re specifically talking about The Crew, you’re missing the point. If you’re being flippant, and mean online games in general, God forbid people take an interest in the health of their hobbies.
There can be multiple problems worth fighting for at once. Gaming is an escape for many from the harsh reality we all live in and I also just generally think art should be preserved as much as possible.
Don’t give up hope just yet! Last month a ban on conversion practices got nearly 1 million signatures in the last week!
From an email I received from the ECI recently:
In a stunning final push, the initiative for a ‘Ban on Conversion Practices in the EU’ gathered nearly one million signatures in its final week - closing with over 1.24 million in total on 17 May.
it’s not hard to imagine why a ban on conversion therapy is gaining signatures while a ban on killing live service games is not. Stop Killing Games is noble, but ultimately amounts to media preservation. Meanwhile, conversion therapy is literal torture of vulnerable children. Only hardcore gamers really understand the Stop Killing Games initiative, while most sane people will quickly sign anything that improves the lives of children.
Yeah fair, its just sad that we seem to be giving up with over a month left when this has been in the top 3 most popular initiatives this year.
Hopefully this video and the non-english sponsors he has been working on get more people talking again and hopefully talking in different languages to capture the people who have missed this because of a language barrier.
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