Don't let people who argued against your right to own your games win this!
this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2025
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I'm not a gamer, but gamers have my entire support. That industry, like so many others, needs to be reminded they're not supposed to be making the rules.
Of course it will fail.
The whole movement has seemed a bit silly to me this whole time. And I donโt understand what the appeal is of the guy heading it up.
Just my take on things.
But I also believe the games industry has abusive practices relating to selling games that basically expire without clear warnings and planned dates of expiry.
But I also believe the games industry has abusive practices relating to selling games that basically expire without clear warnings and planned dates of expiry.
That's literally what this is all about...
So why do you think your belief is silly?
How can you call it silly when they fought for what you call abusive practices yourself?! Typical nihilistic cynicism, disregarding the actual hard work that went in to it and the progress that was made.
The approach, and the framing and the legal footing is silly, or not legally sound. I just find this approach, and the person heading it up misguided.
You can want something to happen, AND find a particular effort trying to achieve the goal ineffectual. You can also find the person heading up the effort to be the wrong fit.
If you guys canโt separate the two, then I donโt know what to tell you.
What approach? Because I bet you heard about "the approach" from a very particular ex blizzard employee with a large following that is against it. The approach is reasonable - release the server code so people can host their own when a company abandons them. It is 100% a reasonable ask.
In any other art medium it would be an outrage if they would be destroyed when the owners didn't find them financially sound. We have film, music and other arts preservation agencies or projects. I don't see why videos games can't have the same level of respect.
Did you watch the video? I thought they were very clear and articulate with their intended goal. Which part specifically seems silly or confused you?
Iโve tried to watch previous videos from him on the topic. My response is about the overall approach. Not about what to do next, or anything else.
Maybe give this one a watch and see what you think?
Respectfully, your response appeared to be one of apparent bewilderment and negativity at the very idea of the topic. If you just don't care about it that's one thing but if you think the overall goal (for lack of better words) is "dumb" or "pointless" I'd be really interested to know why you feel that way.
Thanks for getting back to me either way.
Ross is most well known for his very long running series "Freeman's Mind", where he narates as if he was Gordon Freeman during Half-Life (and now Half-Life 2).
He also runs a series called "The Game Dungeon" where he does in depth looks at computer games.
I recommend the Freeman's Mind series, it is funny and very well done when you notice Freeman getting more unhinged through out the series.
I tried, years ago, to watch it. Itโs just not my thing.
It isn't for everyone, the game dungeon however is very different, you may enjoy that
Chet Faliszek, of Valve fame, has been railing against the guy (and this initiative) recently
https://bsky.app/profile/chetsucks.com/post/3lsd7rsd3j22n https://bsky.app/profile/chetsucks.com/post/3lsf4vxbtls2p
I mean, he does have a point. I do think there should be some obligations and disclosures to enable third parties to take over unsupported games, the specifics of how this particular project presents that seem... not super technically or legally sound?
Maybe we can try again in a bit with a project built by people who have a clearer view on both the legal and technical side of what's being asked.
The initiative is not supposed to be all encompassing as this is meant to get the ball rolling on peserving games.
The EU initiative has a character limit of how much Ross can say on it.
Sure, but he has a whole website and a youtube channel, right?
I get that there's some tension between making the materials you present digestible to end users so they will support you and making them technically sound. That's fine.
But legislation does need to be technically feasible. I think the "games need to be able to run on consumer hardware, both server and client" bit is probably past that line. You can't just go "but old games ran on local servers and some games have been reverse engineered" and assume that means this is feasible across the board. And a piece of legislation would, in fact, have to be applicable across the board.
I think there's probably some way towards this. Maybe we need to just create some term of mandatory support, or a mandatory refund policy within some term. Maybe we need to carve some exception to copyright to ensure that abandonware owners can't go after server replacements, or some semi-public repository where users can contribute to paying for a server directly. I do think there needs to be better regulation for this.
"Your server needs to be able to run on the same machine as your client in all cases" is... probably not it? (EDIT: In the guy's defense, and after reviewing the full video in context, he does acknowledge the option of having a proper server at some cost, although his answer to dependencies and shared services still seems to be "well, I guess games need to be made fundamentally differently, then"). Some of the things in that FAQ (which I had already read, by the way) are also outright incorrect, objectively.
I will say for it that the petition itself is super vague and does not include many of these incorrect statements (beyond the characterization of losing functionality in a game as "robbing"). I think the vagueness here helps avoid some of the problems, and as a result I don't have a huge problem with the petition itself as presented.
How the guy visualizaes this working in the rest of his materials and through his online persona is a different story.
Weโre not at that stage yet to hammer out all the details. This is why this initiative needs to succeed so the European Union can initiate the conversation between the advocates and industry to figure out a better situation than the status quo.
The initiative is focused on exposing the problem then having something done about it.
We are absolutely at that stage, though. That's why you make a petition in the first place. Even if knowing what you actually want wasn't a key element in gathering support (which it obviously is), it certainly would be fundamental in the process of advocating for legislation in front of the EU and other governments.
See, I get this feeling that this guy wants to be the Louis Rossman of this issue but perhaps lacks some of the insider knowledge and expertise to take on that role. Which is no defense of Rossman, I disagree with him on a lot of things (political things, primarily), but there's no denying the guy knows the specifics of what he's talking about and can defend them in public. This Ross guy is stuck trying to defend his project with "well, we'll figure it out later, we just want it to work" when developers take issue with it. Even in the places where I think he's right he would benefit from being able to be a lot more specific and accurate about what he wants to do.
Ross is very well spoken on the topic and has gone into detail about a lot things.
Giant FAQ on The European Initiative to Stop Destroying Games!
So you follow Piratesoftware, I presume?
Nope. First time I heard of the guy was watching the bow out video where this Ross guy "reponds" to him. I still don't know who he is. I don't care. This is about policy and business practices, not Youtube drama.
I knew of the petition (and signed it, because as I said above I don't have a problem with the generalities it contains and I agree with the spirit). I don't follow the guy promoting it. Even the Faliszek caveats I only saw this week and I only watched the petition's promoter recent videos in full because people are clearly being dramatic about it and I knew I'd probably have to deliberate it if I mentioned something here. I was right. Good times.
I mean okay, but you had the same talking points as Piratesoftware.
And what do you mean by being dramatic about it? Companies should not allowed to destroy what you owned, simple as that that's the entire spirit of this petition. And then comes peeps like Piratesoftware who outrageously misrepresent the petition and even attacked Ross personally and also declined a discussion with him to clarify the misunderstandings. Instead Piratesoftware used his Plattform to start a counter campaign against this good cause.
Beside this petition is not legislation (also a lie spewed by Piratesoftware), this is an offer for discussion about this topic. Legislation is made by the peeps in the senate not EU Citizens.
Hey, if two separate people look at the same issue separately and raise some of the same concerns there's a possibility that the concerns are legitimate.
I don't know if we're raising the same "talking points", though. I haven't heard his "talking points", beyond a ten second clip in this guy's video. I didn't agree with the clip (a comment about how it's fine for games to end), although I wouldn't be suprised if there was more context to it.
Look, I think preservation of live games is a huge problem. I think there are probably only partial solutions available to it, and I think any solutions will likely impact the business to some extent. I think everybody is going to have to live with that impact at some point, though.
I think the request of legislation to drive consumer protections around this is perfectly legitimate, but perhaps the person driving it as a campaign isn't super aware of what some of those concerns are and is presenting a bit of a distorted picture of what he's asking for and what it'd entail.
Just so you know the process. Ross isn't the one who wrote the petition, as he is American and only EU citizens are allowed to use the platform. So a bunch of peeps gathered together and drafted this petition. He only sparked SKG, but this is a community driven campaign across the entire world.
Hey, if two separate people look at the same issue separately and raise some of the same concerns there's a possibility that the concerns are legitimate.
Or both people don't understand the same thing and misconstrue from there.
I mean... yeah, but when the people in question are professionals or experts in the field (let's say we're talking about Faliszek and whoever the Pirate Software guy is, I'm not filing a resume to this conversation) and the other one is... not, Occam's Razor starts to look perilous.
Because you're all giving me homework I started to listen to the Pirate Software videos referenced in the other guy's videos (and man, we are reaching flat earther levels of Youtube cross-referencing here). It seems that, like Faliszek he's coming at it from the perspective that live games are not the problem here.
I would disagree, this isn't about shutting down single player games or single player components of games. This is about preservation, including preservation of live service games.
That doesn't mean I agree with "Ross" (is that a first or last name? I can't tell). If the problem is preservation, then the requirements aren't what he says they are. The point isn't to keep everybody's game running in some magical rebuilt server somewhere. It's to keep some representative sample of the server code that can either be spun up to recreate the game or used as a starting point for a community server replacement.
But on the flipside... well, yeah, maybe that adds a bunch of cost if you force it on the developer. Maybe the real answer is to let the community reverse engineer the server if they want to, whether the publisher likes it or not. Maybe there's some intermediate body playing a role here.
Of the discussion under Faliszek's post on BS, perhaps the response that makes the most sense to me is this:
The interesting point is, that this petition is not about live service games as Ross again stated in the very linked video. He does not demand Companies to turn those live service games into self hostables or outright single player games. Thats ridiculous.
And no, again, this is not about live service games!! This is about games that can be perfectly played offline but can't "legally" as it has a server component for whatever reason (let it be DRM, or Matchmaking).
Remember the time when games came with the ability to host your own server (unreal tournament, quake, warcraft, trackmania,...) and we somehow lost that ability in the name of profit and monetary incentives?
Forcing the work on developers? They already wrote the server software (otherwise they couldn't host matchmaking eh?) no this is absolutely about the Publishers.
Well, then I disagree with the guy because he doesn't go far enough.
I mean, I disagree with you, because the stuff on his website and on his Youtube channel does not at any point claim that live service games should be allowed to go offline.
But I don't care if he says it, I'm saying it: live games should be preserved in some form.
For the record, games came with the ability to host your own server when the server was not handling matchmaking and handling discrete games with a beginning, an end and a handful of players.
That is still very much a thing. In some cases you can self-host servers (Terraria, since it's in the news today), in others you can rent a server (Conan Exiles, if I remember correctly).
But what you can't do there is run global matchmaking or have oversight over the entire game. This isn't a problem of "writing the server software", it's a problem of having a centralized infrastructure to handle the parts of the game that aren't related to an individual session. "Server software" doesn't come in interchangeable "server software units" you can exchange or move from wherever the developer is hosting them to a local computer. That's not an easy transition to make. That's where saying things like these starts making devs scoff at you and stop taking you seriously.
But that doesn't mean I'm fine with those live service games dependent on a larger infrastructure going away entirely. I do want to find a form of storage and preservation for them. Maybe that form means they're still not playable at all times for people who paid for them, but I do care about them as cultural artifacts existing in some form.
Hey, if two separate people look at the same issue separately and raise some of the same concerns there's a possibility that the concerns are legitimate
I agree, but if one of these persons is piratesoftware I have to do a double take. In fact I originally understood Chet's position but now that I know this guy agrees with him I'm not so sure.
If you didn't know, the guy got into Blizzard thanks to nepotism, worked QA and security, got out, and started an indie game that's been in development hell for 10 years (but he is selling it !). Maybe he knows some stuff about QA and security but as an actual professional gamedev, I have strong opinions about the shit he says in that domain and the sycophants he surrounds himself with to avoid being called out.
I agree, but if one of these persons is piratesoftware I have to do a double take. In fact I originally understood Chet's position but now that I know this guy agrees with him I'm not so sure.
Look, I don't know you, but you must be able to see how that is a horrifying sentence, right?
If we're looking at the issue based on whether we like the people and not on the merits, or on whether people agree with other people we don't like, then it's all pointless. It's just taking sides for no reason, or a popularity contest.
Let me make it absolutely clear: I don't give a crap if Faliszek's writing changed my life and the other guy skins puppies as a hobby. All I was saying earlier is that there seems to be a significant gap in expertise between the people actively having this argument. The fact that they both agree on this has no bearing on whether they are right.
For the record, I think they're not, for similar reasons. I would love to have a chat with Faliszek about it (although I'm pretty sure I'd have better subjects to bring up), but I'd certainly not do so over the Internet because there is nothing to be salvaged from this conversation at this point.
The more you guys talk the more this seems like crappy high school drama transplanted to the Internet and the less interested I am. Game preservation remains important and hard, but at this point I'm just kinda sad that we've wasted the energy debating it with this particular cast of characters and in these particular terms. None of this seems serious or productive at this point.
And I hope you realize I wasn't being entirely serious.
Look, all I can say to keep it short is that I know piratesoftware is full of shit. I was merely half-jokingly pointing out that imo, he is the last person you'd want to support you in that kind of argument.
And I'm saying, very seriously, that you don't "support a person". Either you think the argument is right or you think it's wrong (or somehwere in that spectrum, it certainly isn't a binary choice).
Agreeing with something because you think is right is not a judgement of character. I don't get to choose whether the guy is right, I don't have a particular stake on his personality and my stance is entirely independent of his.
And the same goes for Faliszek, incidentally.
I don't know how entirely serious you were, but those are absolutely the parameters of this conversation, not just with you but with everybody chiming in. And those parameters suck. They are extremely toxic and I reject them entirely. Seriously.
Piratesoftware did not understand the original point of the campaign. Itโs not that weโre throwing out his words because of his character in general but how he specifically approached this. He misrepresented the petition, insulted Ross and deleted his message reaching out to discuss the topic and then gloated about it on stream.
Ross did not want to talk about the drama but he had to address the elephant in the room as people were listening to the bad faith arguments Thor originally made when they asking about Stop Killing Games in skepticism.
OK, so ignore him. Other people who would know are making similar points about "the campaign". Argue with one you like in good faith.
If you make it about the Youtube drama you won't be taken seriously, and some of the points being raised are legitimate. Dismissing them based on the personality of the one guy just because he's more accessible or more susceptible to ad-hominem dismissals like these won't help there.
Thanks for chiming in. You get my point.
I canโt believe how many downvotes I got.
The vast majority of my downvotes come from saying I don't agree with Ross Scott. If only downvotes created signatures!