Battlefield games used to come with 2 .exe files: Client and Server one. That is now a problem somehow. I am very disappointed with Thor about this. Also most of the laws are not retroactive anyway.
6:58 Remember guys; Thor is not just a developer. He is a publisher and owner. Here, he’s demonstrating that his interests don’t align with consumers, players, you and me.
Yes, and many people take him as authority because he is a developer and therefore must know things. No, hes is definitely being biased towards developers but if you are not developer yourself it may be hard for you to recognize what is fearmongering and what is not. Instead sign that initiative and leave worrying about developers for EU. Have developers ever worried about us? Have developers ever been sorry that we permanently loose our hard earned money when they shutdown their servers? The point is if we don't stand up for our rights, no one will.
@@test-rj2vl Sorry, this is a little bit misguided. Developers don't typically decide anything about the lifespan and runtime of a game, especially a live service game. That's a playground for publishers to throw sand out of the sandbox, not developers. I also cannot attribute the opposite feeling to developers either. I cannot claim that they do worry about consumers or that they feel bad or sorry about servers shutting down. We lack the information. But we do know that publishers and corps don't care about anything but line goes up, as it is their fiduciary duty to shareholders to prioritize the income of capital. They are legally required to do so, and signed binding contracts expressly signaling intent to strip mine its properties for cash. Developers are just as much in this boat as we consumers are, probably.
My problem isn't necessarily that Thor disagrees with the initiative, it's the odd behavior/ overactions surrounding it all. 1.) Either Thor just recently picked this up, and has no idea the Ross has been doing this for a while... 2.) ...or Thor is being extremely disingenuous, cherry-picking, and feigning ignorance to the obvious problems with the industry. 3.) If Thor is simply misinformed, which is the best-case scenario, then his strong response to Ross was uncalled for. 4.) Thor refuses to even speak to Ross and allow him to defend himself, which is even more gross than Thors accusations. 5.) Thors follow-up video, in an attempt to justify his position was extremely weak, and the issues he brought up (such as coding, server rights and physics patents, purchased by the developer being private) were already addressed in the initiative. If Thor was some big, thumping, opinionated, talking-head like so many other content creators, I don't think anyone would care, but he's not an idiot, and he doesn't seem like the type of person to give a half-cocked take on an issue this complex. Somethings extremely off here, and I think every involved can 'feel' it.🧐
It's not that he can't imagine it, but peer to peer and private hosting doesn't work for every type of game. FFXIV or Apex wouldn't exist without the developer hosting servers. There is no good solution to keeping that game alive outside of live service. Making it dangerous to develop live service games will deprive people of games like FFXIV or Apex in the future. That's his point.
@@gman1515that was the point of the initiative, wasn't it? make devs provide community with tools so that they can still play and host their own servers after devs axe the support
@@gramfero FFXIV or Apex wouldn't be the same game on private servers. Imagine dropping into an apex lobby with 1 other person on the entire map, or trying to run a savage raid in FFXIV with less than 8 people online. It's just not the same game anymore anyway. Much better if games like that can die naturally when the player base is gone. Because the alternative is that you have people trying to kill the company early so they can profit off of private servers.
But his point is proven false by there existing private servers for live service games such as mmo's and other types. It seems to me he has strong reactions against these things due to having worked of blizzard, being a developer and an owner of a publishing company. I got a feeling he has an interest in developing live service games in the future, but this regulation might inconvenience him.
@jeremybonner6259 right? Ross is such a chill and thoughtful person, and the tone he took with Ross was off. It actually makes me want to undo all of my likes piratesoftware's videos.
Ross's comment on his Thor's video was removed. Ross was responding to his video saying he misunderstood/misinterpreted the initiative and says he doesnt condone the harassment against Thor. I feel Thor doesnt want ross to be the reasonable person in this situation. Thor is straight up wrong on the initiative.
@@tonyh9102 my take was the misinterpretation was deliberate on Thor's part, which is why he deleted Ross's comments. Little hard to make a point about something someone isn't saying when they are visibly trying to clarify with you.
The real kicker here is that Ross has addressed most of the issues that Thor has brought up in regards to this initiative before in other videos he's put out and has pretty expertly refuted the arguments.
That's what the farms are for. You wouldn't believe some of the disgusting BS I've read about this guy. There are receipts and everything. Just look up the name Maldavius Figtree. This dude being a closet furry is the least weird thing about him. Gross.
I am so sad you did not comment his "If we want to rearchitect" 1:43. What he said, whether intentional or not, is very manipulative. He implies that we don't want server, we want some distributed session. Which is not what we want.
This. This so much. Later he argued that getting server binaries would mean that malicious actors would try to bot the game into oblivion to acquire the server blobs to profit out of it... Which was again, ridiculus argument.
@@by010 yeah. After watching second part I see it is not ignorance, it is intention. He starts second part from take "so many developers supported in comments", which is false. I've seen comment from automotive developer completely in support of this initiative. And his pretending to disagree with phrasing as if there is better way to achieve goal, but he fails to see(or doesn't want to see) that there are only two sections: Objectives and Annex. And he doesn't like Objectives. He is literally moving goal here.
Right off the bat Thor is pretending not to understand the nature of the initiative. He knows damn well that Ross isn't looking to hold developers and publishers hostage and keep a game online indefinitely. He's asking that the community be given the tools needed to pick up the ball and run with it once official online support ends.
Right off the bat you're pretending Thor said something he didn't. It's not that he thinks Ross is being malicious. He is saying that the initiative isn't actually set up to do what Ross wants, and that the way Ross is pushing it is counter productive.
What "he is looking for" and what he is wrriting are completely different things. (Which honestly, with the history of Ross and its "live service is fraud" saying that he does not mean all of the now is disingenuous)
@@MetalHead-ff9ozwell I mean if you pay money to a product and do not own it That’s effectively fraud where I stand So the core idea that the audience who fund gatchas or whatever else you want to dress up live service micro transactions shutting down Shouldn’t own anything of these games or have the ability to have private servers during a shutdown is just being anti consumer by default
@@tylerulfmann4586 Thor is specifically stating that games that can be single-player-only - should be. And that that point should be the main and very specific point. The games that require pvp HAVE to be licensed instead of purchased, since they would not be able to ban cheaters if cheaters bought the game - that would come as restricting cheaters from using "their property". For those games people should be informed with huge banners that they are buying a license, not a game, instead of prohibiting selling licenses.
I don't really think that live service should be killed off, nor is it the intent here, however this initiative will put in proper safeguards for the consumer in my opinion. A company will have to think twice before turning their single player game into some live service that can be killed off later, and the more successful ones will either be supported longer or get a playable version after they fail.
But the former is pretty much exactly Thors point tho, the part which he specifically agrees with. For which he points out that it is not what the initive is saying. Of course initives don't have to have completely accurate legal languages or anything, but they are still just too vague in what they say they want to do nonetheless. - Which I honestly really don't get how so many people don't understand the difference and that you can still be reasonably accurate while staying away from legal and within normal language.
@@HamsterBaddy Don't forget it is an initiative. If this goes trough we will only see proper law around 2028 at best, everyone will be informed of it as well so big corpos will have all time in the world to prepare what they need. Laws here in Europe are not retroactive. Meaning games that ended before the law was in place are excempt from it. Seeing those points above, the momment law comes into place we will see a shift as to how big corpos are handling their contracts and how they are preparing for game terminations. Games would be build from start to work within it. Older games wouldn't need to care about it. Nothing else it only brings quality of life to costumers and a proper way to archive culture.
@@draganoidept you're missing the point that the way the initiative is worded is just starting the wrong conversation in the first place. As it's worded, live service games would/should never be allowed to die. As a consumer, I don't agree with this. It's important that live service games are able to die naturally. Forcing developers to make their games perpetually available will either completely stop live service games from existing or open the devs up to blatant abuse. People will already just try to destroy a game for no particular reason, like the bot attacks on TF2. If a company shutdown means the server bins go public then that gives these people a financial incentive to do similar attacks so they can profit off of private servers. The other option is that the dev is never allowed to shut a game down for any reason, and they need to somehow keep investing time and money into keeping servers up.
@@gman1515 "The other option is that the dev is never allowed to shut a game down for any reason, and they need to somehow keep investing time and money into keeping servers up." Like that was explicitly stated not to be the case. It's about providing communities tools (code) to remake the servers or hand out versions not relent on the servers.
When I saw his video I thought for sure Thor was going to promote it, bring attention to it. No. He threw Ross under the bus with no real critique or solution to the problems he presented.
The critique of a legal proposition, IS the solution, hes telling ross its to vague because once they start talking about it, it will either be dropped or wont be what you or ross wanted. Thor wants what ross wants, thor just doesnt like how ross has said it, also ross cracking jokes and insulting the politicians who will see the vid when looking into who propositioned it, will make this go even worse, thats why thor doesnt like ross, cause ross despite wanting this so badly is wording it horribly and isnt approaching this like he wants it.
@@nappygrimm6411 Hasn't Ross literally passed laws and set precedents for Right to repair? People will always complain "how" you do something to try and limit you. People need to do more actually doing stuff. Also Thor 100% does not align with Ross. How you can watch both their videos and think that is mind blowing that I dont even know how to respond since you just state it like a fact.,
@TheKastellan wrong Ross, there's Ross Scott of the game dungeon and freeman's mind. And then there's repair guru and right to repair activists Louis Rossman. Confusing I know
really good form actually linking to the original videos. too many channels who actually do this kind of content as their main focus refuse to do that.
The playerbase are the people who bought the game. Active players are just the number of people who have played the game in a specified timeframe. Over 12 million people bought the game, and now they don't have access to what they bought. Even when games are sold with the requirement of online access to play the game that only mentiones online access from the player side. I think most people who bought the game still have access to the internet. I cannot assume ingnorance from Thor in his statements, the closest would be willful ignorance of the things he's misrepresenting. I don't mind that he doesn't like or agree with the idea, the issue is that when he speaks it's so obvious he's not willing to even try to understand or be even slightly unbiased.
Comenting to boost this video! You have hit Thor with the hammer here. I think Thor really missunderstood the whole situation, Accursed Farms has SO many videos explaining every minute detail and how everything is happening and then Thor comes along and talks about only 1 video (Which requires a lot of knowledge from the previous videos). Thor needs to sit down and watch all others, I'd love to see him talk to other people about this. Louis Rossman put out a great video debunking what Thor said as well.
I get the feeling he has his reasons for wanting live service games to be unregulated going forwards. Like for his own game, or for games he sponsors through his publishing company.
@@piau9000 I haven't managed to find any evidence it'll be online only but if you do keep me updated, I know a friend that's really excited for that one and I'd prefer for him to know if it is
@@infectedanimal9830The multiplayer would be live service. My guess is he doesn't want the company to have to go back and pay for all the work to make the game correctly since it may be affected not being out before the law.
Thor really didn't handle the situation well at all. Especially when Ross agreed with him on World of Warcraft and offered to talk which Thor rejected and then deleted his comment making thing's a thousands times worse than the process.
the signs of an egotistical know it all are starting appear for everyone to see (with Thor). I've been catching onto the way Thor thinks and acts, and I'm kinda hoping the rest of the net catches on soon, because honestly, we're better off not listening to the guy.
@@wfd87 lol lies smart one. none of what ross talked about would even trigger the youtube filters. I should know I actually say stuff that triggers it.
Why is he defending publishers? Edit: question was answered in another comment, he's a publisher, and now it makes sense He's benefiting from predatory practices and he's here to defend them now. What a shame.
I'm not sure why he brings up free to play phone games. The whole debate is about games you PAY for. I paid for The Crew and Ubisoft remotely destroyed it and removed it from my library. Even if the servers are gone, I should still have access to the game, but I don't. Pokemon GO is a free game. If they shut down the servers and removed it from my phone remotely then no skin off my butt. I didn't pay a cent on that game.
its cause, due to how google play and apply play set up the store, phone game are in the blanket of online service games, this is off of memory dont copy this verbatim
I've been saying this for a long time, Thor is legitimate astroturf. He makes a couple of good takes here and there, usually on bullshit topics so that he can get people to his side. Then as soon as any controversy comes up he is taking the least consumer friendly position possible. At this point the pattern is too clear and I am completely convinced that pirate software is an influencer that was planted into the industry by corporations to sway opinions. His method is formulaic at this point. Every single time he's arguing on consumer rights he is always favoring the protection of the company over the consumer, every single time he does this he's doing it by straw manning the consumer protection position. Then when the backlash comes he proceeds to engage in a motte and Bailey argument where he's obfuscating his initial statement by creating false dichotomies like "live service games should not have to give up their server binaries At end of life" when that's not even a requirement to keep a private server going. This is completely ignoring his arguments on preservation in general when he's talking about Apex and whatnot. People should really wake the fuck up on this guy, He's actually just corporate astroturf.
That was exactly my impression, you can smell these kind of guys pretty easily by using rarional thought like you did. But in order to do that you must be able to see through their charisma and personality, and this is something that many people are not able to.
After this whole event started, the rose tinted glasses came off. Analyzing his other takes on things more and more, it honestly seems like he's basically been a libertarian corpo this entire time. I mean, take one look at the game he actually made. Maybe it's because of what I know now, but it seems so, souless.
@@majormissile5596he's an arrogant rude hack. He barley knows anything about anything. But acts as an authority on literally everything (you can see why he fitted right in at blizzard). He refers to himself as a dev in all contexts and super Uber smart techno wizard. Yet he struggles to understand how a game can have dedicated yet community servers without cheaters even though many games have had them and still have them, valheim has the server binaries on the steam page FFS. He's also the guy that said he walked into his bank and tells them he's a big streamer so people could fake his voice and gets them to sign a legal contract that if someone phones up the bank pretending to be him with an ai voice and they give away all his money it's there fault. I guarantee this conversation never happened and is made up ego stroking, and he also has no idea how banks work so the story is not credible. Banks do not use your voice as a form of security check, like ever. Banks also don't sign custom liability contracts with peasantry twitch streamers, they just don't.
@mikecray-z5r Yeah, the bank thing was one of the events that made me start seeing through him. Also, when he said, "Just don't pay the hospital, and they'll get it as a tax write-off," which is also not how it works. I didn't follow his content that closely until he was suddenly opposed to this when he came off as someone who should be on board. It seems way more likely that no one was innocent at Blizzard and they simply started eating each other after the allegations of abuse came out and their previous targets were protected. He's just one of the people who got eaten by his co-workers, even if before he was helping them steal breast milk.
he also appeals to emotions heavy, hes always posting some feel good shorts which is perfectly fine i appreciate the positivity, but it feels hella parasocial esp how his fans react to it like this is a character on the internet you do not know this man at all
12:10 it's not even so much that I want the company to provide further support for their game despite the support ending. I want companies to be unable to stop owners of these games from repairing them themselves. There's countless games out there that people are able to bring back to life with no real cost to the company where that simply won't happen. Presumably because the companies may want to use those games in the future for a re-release or out of pure greed.
Remember the times when you had a friend who had a game on disc but the game requires the disc to start so you asked your friend to bring over the disc with him, you installed the game and then went to the internet to search for a "patch" that allowed you to play the game without a disc? Yeah, such cracks would be awesome for some games, especially if they could just be added to platforms like Steam so when there is an official workaround, everyone can see it easily😅
@@akdreamer6497 While I completely disagree with Thor here, I still want to be fair. He did work for Blizzard as an offensive security specialist and he was also part of the quality control department. He also worked at Amazon Games Studios as a Python developer. The U.S. Government also hired him to hack power plants in order to fortify their security. And he has three black badges (highest award) at DEF CON which is a hacker convention. His game dev and computer knowledge is definitely above the average joe. That being said tho.... I don't think he's a consumer rights or legal expert. Which is what this is about.
I've advocated for stopkillinggames, but it's good to have some push back so that when push really comes to shove, the kinks have been ironed out and we put forward a rock solid proposal
technically a lot of mmorpgs are just linear single player games anyway that just happen to have other players. its the end content like coop raid dungeons and pvp arenas that make the multuplayer aspect worthwhile. sandboxes in particular became popular because they inherently have all the best aspects of mmorpgs without the drawbacks of live service games.
The main problem here is that it's mostly Americans discussing *European* govt. Americans on avg don't understand our own govt let alone foreign govts. 90% of the convo is people talking out of their asses and imaginations. Thor likes live service and seems to believe most new games in the future will be live service. He's going to do whatever mental gymnastics possible to be disingenuous, move the goal posts, etc, so that he doesn't have to confront the world of less live service games existing.
Suggestions incoming 1. Every game, where multiplayer is not main focus of the game (coop and single with online checks), or games which had a single-player company without needing other players - should have possibility to play even after server shut down (dedicated servers, bots, single player mode) with online-check disabled in last update. Like genshin and other things. Its clearly NOT a multiplayer game. And it could be a huge waste to lost Genshin 10 years into the future. If game shuts down, i could accept not being able to play online, but why i should give up on existing single-player company? Imagine of minecraft shutting down tomorrow, and all servers instantly die, and those who don't would be under lawsuit. It's cringe, right? 2. Games, where multiplayer is main focus of the game, should have possibility to start dedicated server with friends/bots, with all calculations transfer to client (host) added in last update of the game if it's not meaning to send entire code to players for free OR if there is a code on server-side, users should have possibility to unite and buy it with reasonable (for dead game) price, making it free-ware. Companies should make special web page with donate bar, and if fans fill it, code becames free-ware. (Because all devs already have money for their work, and now it's just company who have benefits and copyright, hurting player base). FF14ARR is still cool game, even if there are no players - just make simple bots for dungeons, so i could enjoy cool cutscenes and speak with NPC's. Also, i'm strongly against a direct buy of things, cuz we will have one monopolist again. Code better became freeware, and we'll have 5 competing servers, than this one IP holder, which would do nothing other than copyright-strike other fan's works. 3. After company shutting down online game or not updating existing more than 3 years (or 10 years after releasing single-player game), they lose all rights to shut down fan projects, based on this exact game, if fans made significant code change and added significant new functions (not just add donate shop, but include alot of dungeons, items and other fun content), or changed a game engine entirely (in other words - make significant impact to the original game). So companies forced to continue to support existing online games, or give it up, and let fans do their work without any issues. 3 years not updating a MMO, and 10 years for single player is MORE THAN ENOUGH to suck up all the juice and money from player base, and make a huge profits. But fearing to make a remake to Dino Crisis or Final Fantasy 9 !!!25!!! years after original game's release cuz of the copyright and probability of lawsuit is ULTRA CRINGE. If there is some bad things it this or possibility to abuse (im not a layer, so it's just a suggestion), let's just start a conversation, and together came up with better ideas.
Look I understand the fear of government getting involved it always is a really shit thing to have to do but when companies refuse to listen to reason and are going down the worst possible path for us as consumers and for the industry as a whole then what choice do we have but to force the government to make them listen to reason.
Those stupid liars think we are all stupid. We had lan support before. That's why diablo 1, starcraft, quake, etc are all still playable today. If they are going to stop support a game, release the server code and let players continue to enjoy games. It's all greed.
Nice and well thought-out arguments. Well formulated and beautifully presented. Keep up the good work and if you strive for subscribers, I hope you get them. If you don't want unnecessary attention, I hope this video still reaches the ears of its intended audience. P.S. Seriously, I thought that this was going to be a recap or retelling of the most popular takes under Thor's and Ross's videos, but it's quite original and well made.
That being said, I have a small personal beef against PirateSoftware's attitude and the points he made last 3-4 months. There's a huge comment I wrote which I won't post here because youtube keeps removing it due to it having three links to Pirate Software's videos. And I don't want any drama, I just want a popular influencer with an auditory of 2 million easily swayed and manipulated kids to be put in his place. For him to stop gaslighting people and start acting responsibly.
It's truly astounding to me that he can be this seemingly obtuse about the initiative, when ultimately, what it's based on is the fact that the practice of remotely killing games *seems to already be against the law*, and simply has not been examined by government yet.
I guess it isn't if you're clinically disabled and need someone else to sign your documents for you. Fortunately, not everyone is like you, and if they agree to it, it's legal. I guess you think TOS's aren't legally binding either?
@C-d7o9q they aren't they quite literally aren't a legally binding contract as stated multiple times by multiple judges someone clicking agree without reading what they've agreed to is not informed consent thus cannot be legally binding and TOS' aren't the law You seem to think that companies are the government and can just decree through TOS whatever they want
I hope you won't sign anything before reading it when you turn 18, but sorry to say, if you select "I Agree" when there is small text that details you are buying something that can be taken away, means "You Agree" and understand it can be taken away. Link the court case that a judge says, " Even though you checked the box saying you read the TOS and proceeded to click I Agree, it doesn't matter. As any contract no matter the size are irrelevant because 2 state judges said so."
@@C-d7o9q ah yes the ignorant one who clings to it like arrogance you can't give your rights away in a contract you can literally take someone to court for misleading terms in a contract the small text stuff doesn't actually work because if you literally couldn't tell it was there that's a legal slam dunk in contract law you cannot hide things in contracts it is actually against the law and people have won lawsuits over that just because you believe bad TV doesn't mean things actually work that way
Customers* stop killing CUSTOMERS* Consumers are treated like cash cows on the conveyor belt off to become a nice burger after the milk has dried up CUSTOMERS have agency and gets to stand up for themselves.
The issue here is with copyright infringement. Especially popular AAA games will have communities that reverse engineer the game servers. But publishers can strike them down even after the game is no longer online.
go make a game if you dont get it, look into it walking in their shoes, if what they are doing sucks try to make a game the way you want players to have fun, then see how it goes
@@nappygrimm6411 why don't you try buying something with your cold hard cash then have it taken away from you and make completely useless. this is not about the consumers ability to make or fix games, it's about the developers putting in the effort to keep games playable in some shape or form. but if you really want to go there then don't try to preach to the choir and to try walking in their own shows and finally it isn't exactly hard to implement landline for privet community run servers for triple A studios.
You say that, but his top mod is a lawyer you'd think someone who actively worked in the government(thor) specifically security, and his friend(the mod) in law would know about the danger of a, vague legal document, for stuff they do want in an industry that they love, and just don't like how its written out, this document is meant to start conversations it shouldn't be set in stone, but it should still be clear in what it wants, & why it wants it.
I am software engineer / dev. Pirate software is not talking for me, he is crazy and unhinged. Had to unsubscribe from his channel for the L take on this...
@@nappygrimm6411well I mean the core idea is pretty solid If you support a live service game you should own the possibility of a single player option when the game shuts down Now there’s a lot of interpretation of how that gets enforced but just having the starting point of digital protection having that as the core start is what matters The enforcement and legal ability to pursue cases could then be examined by what is a shutdown But I think just setting this groundwork that there could be consequences if you shut down a game with no access to any option to play it should be legally prosecutable Especially if you bought micro transactions since the game developers effectively committed fraud
Regardless of concurrent players being low, it doesn't mean the game isn't worth playing and moving on to the next game, i still wanna play the game later on. Developers should provide a way for people to set up their own private servers to play the game. The developers don't always have to rearchitect the game to let players continue playing the game. Thor's coming across as closed mind to the perservation to games and shifts the argument to developers and publishers, letting the customers know that a live service game will eventually die. Thor clearly doesn't want to understand what the initiative really stands for.
Many of these "live service" games also don't even need that many players to remain healthy and sustain themselves, either. If a game has reached EOL in some official capacity, a few hundred players is absolutely enough when a single player is only ever in contact with only a dozen or so other players at a time, and good games should have no problem maintaining a few hundred dedicated fans. Last I checked, the community servers for Need For Speed World had 100-200 players at any given time on them, and that game has basically been forgotten outside of its diehard fans.
One thing I haven't seen anyone mention is that when a long dead game gets revived there is always a surge of interest from old returning players and new players who missed their chance to play the first time for whatever reason.
@@jcm2606which funnily enough Ross Bill doesn’t even say that companies have to provide servers and they own all copyright It’s just that the player when a game shuts down main servers presumably in the EU That they have to provide the ability for the fan base to make a single player version I’m very open to critiques about enforcement but the core idea of this isn’t too insane to me
I thought that Thor was a honest well spoken guy. After this I'm not so sure. He missed the point so obviously, created a straw man out of this, "because it's too vague" and then jumped into facts and logic why it's bad and "disgusting". I don't know for sure but it seems like he deleted Ross' comment and refused to engage in any form of dialog. Now, I'm no expert but it sure feels like Thor is using his 1337 haxor skills to do some social engineering and push Ross under the bus and shut this whole thing down. To me feels like he's pushing an agend. I don't know what that is but don't like it. I really don't think that he just misunderstood I think there is more at play here. A well spoken guy with a decent reputation can get away with a lot and now I'm very skeptical of him. Aside from that, I bough a game. I want to play it when ever I decide to. If this basic thing causes the whole games industry to collapse than maybe, just maybe it should never have gotten to this point. Also I'm in oil and gas engineering, before you do ANYTHING you need to have a plan for decommissioning what ever you are doing (think oil rigs and stuff like that) so I'm sorry that you're gonna have it so bad as a programmer to uphold some basic human decency.
bruh that shit is so ez to do. lets take the live service game fall guys for example. there are three points of interest here: 1. accounts with their achievements and what they got so far. shouldnt be a big deal. go with a local save file for what you have achieved and have a new account with brought over achievements for each own server. or just have it completely server sided. 2. seasons. can be turned off once the game aint supported by the devs anymore. since it doesn't make money for 'em it also shouldn't be a problem to give everyone access to past items the game offered before, which plays well with interest nr.1 where you can just have that save file with all the items in it alr. and just have to create a name for your character to play in a server. 3. making the game playable on community servers. in fall guys term it would simply be the map packs they have to infuse into the server and obviously a stable and strong server to support a given amount of players to play on + security features to prevent players from being hacked (*cough i see you fromsoft!). it really isn't too much of a big deal. OFC it becomes difficult for the devs if they hard code their games in such a shitty way, that modularity is off the table. but thats THEIR PROBLEM to begin with. and let's be honest: most people won't blink an eye if live service games cease to exist. most are pure cancer and as you said cause insane problems due to lootboxes and other scummy practices. so if the byproduct of said petition is the death of live service games: oh nooo, ...anyway. also thor has ZERO knowledge about europe. politicians do like easy wins! cause it gives em cheap votes for the next election. and gamers are a big pool of voters. could ofc go the ez way and simply give the community the source code of said game like pumpkin studio did back then with warzone 2100 to preserve this game ^^.
I will like and watch all videos that SHIT on Thor's bad take on this. It is like he lobotomized himself when he rolled up on this take. I welcome all small and large creators telling him why he is wrong.
Honestly the guy is a hack. He shows up out of nowhere, and just rockets in views and the like, yet his streams barely have much real interactions, which leads me and others to think he came out of nowhere because he bought views and bots to occupy free space, so he could cheat the algo. Also his rip-off Undertale game tells me he has no creative talents, another sign of an egotistical know it all like Thor. I've seen so many indie devs with passion and talent, and Thor, a guy who worked at Blizz, has next to none, and acts like he knows everything and is right about everything (which really just comes off as a waste of a person, because they won't admit fault, nor are they productive).
@@dirge7459 you and others need to learn how to communicate your disagreements better then. Thor has a lot of content explaining how he optimizes his streaming schedule to get the most out of different social media algorithms, and the idea that he acts like he knows everything is honestly ridiculous. most people would be 100x the egomaniac he is if they had his qualifications.
@COLOSSAL.E so you admit he is an ego maniac. 100 x what (his currently huge ego). He is suffering from Neil Degrass Tyson syndrome. Thinking being smart is immunity from being incredibly stupid. I have no opinion on the botting allegations. Honestly, I enjoy his insight on a lot of topics, but he isn't the end all be all. His smugness is what sours me on the subject. It feels like his thoughts are half-baked and lack proper consideration for the facts. Deleting Ross's response from his youtube comment section. Is proof his ego is so big that it's fragile.
@@COLOSSAL.E what the fuck are his qualifications except for being a blatant nepo baby who uses a voice changer and having a shitty undertale ripoff on early access for 8 years?
@@TomBoulevard_ bro i think you have an ego that's 100 times larger than his. his humility and generosity with his time and knowledge, when he could easily choose to instead be smug or condescending, is one of the reasons i watch his content regularly. he didn't even delete the comment either, yt algos did that. if you can't actually think of how he could have presented his opinion without offending you personally, maybe it's a you problem
I like to remind myself that, no matter how much I admire someone, if I haven't yet found something we disagree on, it's because I haven't listened to them long enough. Thors just crossed that threshold for me.
Not only that. His second video was also a bad take. Yeah, sure. A group with malicious intent could bot someone or use exploits and then they would need to invest time and money to fix or ban and then rather have to close down their game because it isn't worth anymore. The things are for one, that the malicious group alone wouldn't have access to host a server. All other people that had a game copy would have similar access so it wouldn't be one monetized private server but rather multiple ones. And if you dislike the public ones, you can set up one on your own for you and your friends. Second, groups that can easily create bots already do use that power to make RMT with ingame items that are simply farmed by those bots. Metin2 or Path of exile are good examples. And those RMT groups would rather have a wider range of customer on an official server than to have some small amount of people on their monetized protected server. So yepp, Thors explanation is not a good take. But it is funny to see how many people are taking that and trying to spread it throughout the internet. And when you confront them, they nearly never reply anymore.
@@theinfernity1799 Yeah, and what you said is not even new. I remember playing in a private server of both L2 and WoW. And that was back in 2005. He even says in his shorts and streams that he banned a lot of people for botting in WoW, so nothing new even for him.
Thank you so much for arguing the correct point: I bought the game I should be able to play it. I don't like seeing bigtime youtubers like Rossman misdirect the conversation by making it about being honest about renting it out rather than selling it. That should not be our aim. A robber is more honest than a thief but they're both dispossesing me which is the fundamental problem. Similarly, this live service model is bad, regardless of how honest the publisher is about it. It should be restrained as much as possible.
He doesn't want the wording changed, he wants it to be totally thrown out. The only thing he's not been clear about is *why* he wants it thrown out, which is because he has a financial incentive in backing Rivals of Aether 2.
3:00 yeah we are dealing with the government. Specifically the EU government... That whole pitch he's reading, it's an initiative. Not even a proposed law bill. It has a word limit and serves only to showcase the basics of the proposition. It literally will be worked out down the line, that's the entire point of an initiative. We just have to sign and show that we care about what it has to talk about. Really bad take from Thor, not to mention he's just plain wrong about a lot of things in those videos, like LoL not being able to function client side.
To quote Blizzard: "Offline mode is available in Starcraft: Remastered, StarCraft II, Diablo 2: Resurrected, and Warcraft III: Reforged." "RESTRICTIONS" "You must have logged in to the game at least once within the last 30 days before you can launch it in offline mode." In other words, if you cannot log in these games will become unplayable. Meanwhile, according to 'Thor' there's just a 'small number' of games like that. Right. Small number. Sure.
Thor conflating the "easy win" as the main point of the initiative is so damn slimy. Now, maybe I'm not catching the social cues here, but I'm almost certain Ross said that specifically because he knows a lot of gamers would be doomers about this.
"Funny" thing is... In some EU contries, all licences are "private property", so if you buy the game, you should never be left in a state where you can no longer download it (looking at playstation). Now, enabling for licence owners to play them is still not defined (sadly). Basicly, Playstation and Sony stole more than half of my library on PS3 and All the games I had on my Vita
His argument about mobile games is completely asinine. Mobile "games" designed for use primarily on mobile devices are not games, they are virtual storefronts dressed up to look like games in order to hook people into the cash shop. Including mobile games in this conversation is like include suicides in gun violence statistics for gun control debates
Honestly, I'm finding out more each day, on Thor coming off as more of a hack. A nobody that came out of nowhere, acts like he knows everything under the known sun, and ridicules any other thoughts besides his own. Like I get that he's a game dev, but that doesn't make him objectively correct all the time, nor a god, and yet he exhibits this a lot in his streams and the way he talks. I feel like his father has more credibility than Thor himself ever would have, because Thor at this current time, is basically making a crappy Undertale ripoff game, all while using his own anti piracy measures, a guy who literally tells ppl to pirate software if need be (just not his). I think Thor should just take the L, simmer down and focus on his own game, instead of constantly poking his nose around where it doesn't belong. Also as someone said recently in another vid about Thor's bad take: "you can take the man out of the Blizzard, but you can't take the Blizzard out of the man", which ends up ringing true with Thor, because he's more for studios/corps than he ever will be the consumer (because he's looking at most situations/scenarios from his game dev pov, not a consumer based one).
You know. I’ve always felt a bit odd about Thor. This is why. I couldn’t articulate it well, but you are absolutely correct. He seems to hold a lot of anti-consumer views on gaming and it’s frustrating how disingenuous he is about it.
so some notes on this 1. he does agree with points that ross has said, and he will change his mind given proper reason, but ross worded some of his stuff horribly, thor wont stand by it because of said wording, as it puts a un needed strain on an entire industry which means i wont pass the way it is, it might not even get to the talking phase cause of some foolish remarks insulting the politicians. 2. id say 20+ years of work in security + making 2 games means he kinda gets to talk about it, especally since this is an industry hes working in right now, 2/2. im not even gonna try to untangle this mess of insults, cause thats more opinions, and just being rude instead of fixing or helping said problem. 3. Saying thor should stop poking his nose in gaming business, when his business is gaming, is kinda a stupid statement, thats like telling gordan ramsey that hes needs to shut up about cooking, and go back to making his cook book and restaurants. 4. hes taking the side of devs right now cause most devs CANT TALK ABOUT IT, if they do they get hit with death threats (really reasonable from some people btw ) and can be fired cause be corpo didnt like what they said in private. 5. he worked on blizzard back when it didnt suck, before the devs/publishers/rest if themn become a bunch of sa's and creeps, he left due to being abused by said company, and started working for amazon, didnt like amazon and then did government, stopped doing government and went indie, also the stuff for blizzard, amazon,and the feds was security not game dev he was there to stop cheaters from ruining YOUR experience in games. 5/2. he likes consumers hes still a consumer he wants people to enjoy making and playing games, if you want to know how much he wants people to enjoy/play games, he runs a mmo minecraft server out of his own pocket, no pay to win, no pay to play, nothing just play the game and have fun, also to add to this, he saw players fishing in a dungeon, stopped the dungeon fishing for a day or two, and added in an entire fishing class with cool fish(which players got to name). 6. he has never said hes a god or that hes above anyone, he has achievements that he took time and effort to get, which id say hes owed to get to talk about 7. last thing i swear cause it needs to be addressed, the way to talks about ross was not good, i wont excuse it at all, but i will say that was like day 3 of death threats and insults, and id think you'd be pretty ticked too, especially since he does 12 hours streams almost every day except thursday, so thats a 30min there and back drive to deal with that for 12 hours want to say again i dont excuse it but id like to show why it happened thor should apologize for calling ross greasy.
@@nappygrimm6411 he makes (and as of yet still didnt finish) borderline rpg maker game that has no gameplay for 6 years now. Thats his credentials as "a game dev". Being 20 years in the industry is worth nothing.
Usually thor has reasonable takes, the issue is this take feels like he's quoting blizzard, is he making a live service game or something? Like the proposal is just to make it so games can be installed and played on your computer and maybe a bit of peer to peer, just so at end of service you get to keep playing. For most games this is the default state, you should be able to just strip the drm out and possibly setup an internal server function for online only games. Like are we asking too much here? There's games from 20 years ago ran on your pc and did peer to peer day 1.
"is he making a live service game or something?" He sort of is. He's the marketing director of offbrand games, which are publishing a live-service game Rivals 2.
Voting with your wallet does something. It factually does something. Do not dismiss that. The problem is the millions upon millions of human waste that fund the bad practices in the industry. We can't rely on govt. for everything.
Thanks for making this commentary on the matter, a lot of what you've said was better explained than I ever could. It's rather disappointing to see PS's take on this to be rather on the malicious side as well as being absolutely uncouth. Really does show how he is as a person too.
on second life he was Maldavius Figtree. he was always drama. with his history I don't get why he is starting trouble with others. he will be one of those popular TH-camrs who says the wrong thing then all the secrets come out.
This Thor dude has such a massive ego. Imagine making a reasonable contribution to further help SKG instead of making yourself look like you're the authority of all things video games.
does live service games need to be killed off? this is what I'm getting from this video. it will remove a fair amount of games we wouldn't be able to get in any other way of hosting an online game. beside, thinking of how the game should work 15 years after launch (possibly 20 to 25 years with dev time) how many would like to think that far into the future, when so much could happen with a game in that time span? I know I wouldn't be up for a task to create a game with that much foresight needed before even starting any storyboarding work.
@@saycrain Don't. We really don't need any more people like you "creating" anything. But others will come forward. Just 20 years ago we didn't have to deal with any online services. It'll come back.
Finally someone who has sensible arguments rather than trying to argue with him through trying to discredit his experience as a game developer. I get where Thor is coming from, but his arguments is ignoring a lot of possible solutions out there by thinking that the game has to be ported from multiplayer server authoritative to sigleplayer client authoritative when you can just release the server software (like Mojang did with Scrolls, and fans have done with games they loved but didn't receive that treatment from the developers). Also I get where he is coming from with the arguments against having the initiative be created the way it is now, since government tends to be filled with people who doesn't understand tech, but as far as I understand it, the EU initiative becoming a thing won't put it into law, it will plan for how it could be put into law, by people who know a lot about the subject. Also, I don't know how he thinks The Crew was required to be multiplayer, yeah it may be developed to be multiplayer and may be hard to port, but as mentioned earlier a simple solution is to release the server binaries, but the bigger issue is that The Crew functioned very closely to a singleplayer game. Yes you could see other players and somewhat interact with them, but the story mode, missions, etc were all against NPCs, but still required an online connection. I used to play the game a lot, and it felt a lot like a singleplayer game with some multiplayer added on. Though I do disagree with you on banning live service games entirely. They should be regulated, by for example giving the players a way to continue playing when the game is gone, by for example giving them the server binaries, among other regulations like banning the dark patters often used in live service games. But banning them seams like a weird thing to do as live service games can from time to time actually be something good, the issue is the dark patters done in addition to having it be a live service game, not that it is a live service game. Also, for stuff like what happened with The Crew where it is essentially a singleplayer experience placed in a multiplayer world, there could possibly be regulations on requering there to be some kind of singleplayer mode, and you may not even need to do that much work for it to work, for example: in minecraft, there is multiplayer and singleplayer, but singleplayer is essentially running a multiplayer server in the background so that it doesn't have to reimplement everything just for the singleplayer experience. The core of the issue is required online only (where it doesn't make sense), no way to continue playing it after it shuts down, and the large amount of dark patterns used in many live service games. This is what should be regulated and discussed, though Stop Killing Games is focused on fixing the first two, but the latter should also be discussed and regulated at some point.. And lastly, if anyone who is reading this believes that Thor is being malicious, please read this quote: "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." - Hanlon's razor It may not be stupidity, but it seams like there may be some ignorance or misunderstanding.
Overall well written. Not going into too much detail here. I am pro the petition but have also read a few things that are good arguments against it. Releasing the server binaries would allow others to check through it to find possible exploits for either attacking other servers or, if the publisher/dev has a new game, try to use old exploits in the new game since Code can be reused. This is just one of the few technical arguments that I have read. There was also a well-written argument for game engines and why they can hinder the usage of the game after EoL. But overall I would say that there are many possible options as you have said. There are current games that have proven that. Last epoch, added an offline mode to their online game. Wayfinder, got changed from MMO to Singleplayer. Palworld, came with a tool in steam to set up your own dedicated server. And if you go to your steam library and go to tools instead of games/software/soundtrack, there are probably many other games that do offer dedicated server tools. Those are of course no indie games. But I am looking forward to if the petition will reach 1m signatures and if yes, what will happen. Especially since EU law is easily getting leaked, see the copyright change a few years ago and especially how Germany demonstrated against the different versions😅
Theodore is probably acting in bad faith. He's circumvents a lot of the points by drawing attention to things that don't have anything to do with them.
I find it a little odd that he gets hung up on the initiative talking about video games in general and not the specific kind it would apply to. If this initiative is successful and years down the line some regulations get implemented as a result, they would have no effect on games that don't require online services to function. That's literally the whole point of the thing. If a game works offline anyway, then there's no extra work for anyone involved. Politicians are far more likely to grasp "video games" than "video games that have been designed to only work with an online service and lose all their function when the online service is shut down."
15:00 and that's why live service games should not exist, you paid for the product, you deserve to keep the product, and god forbid you try to charge someone $70 and to say you don't own the experience? Hopefully that gets addressed soon enough. "You'll own nothing, and you'll be happy." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27ll_own_nothing_and_be_happy
Why do people care so much about what he thinks? He released one full game and have one in early access since 2018. His strength is not game development, his strength is streaming.
Personally I think the furry with the "Pirate Software" name that's REEEEEing at the first sign of consumers striking back against the pro corporation market is the one that looks silly here.
He has one game on which he works on a regular basis during his stream. I think it was called hearthbound or so. He is rather more known for his TH-cam shorts where he mainly takes things out of his livestream.
I dont see corporations rolling with this and just eating the costs, they will either stop making live service games entirely or stop distribution wherever this becomes law.
He is explaining how the business operates because most people here are not developers, haven't worked at major software companies, or own a business. Many here think they know the answers even without any experience or knowledge. Stop acting like Andey-know-it-all because you aren't. Perhaps it's better for once to shut up and learn to listen, so you can understand what the consequences are and know what you are talking about.
Fun fact: If The Crew was still playable offline (officially, I mean), Ubisoft could still sell the game in that state... yes, it would probably make very little money, like most old games do, but it's a perspective that Thor completely overlooks in this specific context. And by the way, most people played The Crew through Ubisoft Launcher or Ubisoft Connect, as it's now called. We just don't know how many players there were. It could have been a few hundred, it could have been a few thousand. But even a few hundred players per hour adds up to a few thousand players per day (because nobody plays 24/7) and maybe 10,000 or more unique players per month. That's the way to look at it. Not "the game died, that's normal".
From an Intellectual Property and Copyright perspective the online portion of a game should never be sold as a product but as a service and cannot be forced to be made open source from a sustainable economical perspective. If developers are going to get force to open up their source code for online games then online games and multiplayer games will cease to exist because the risk and incentive to make a profit will implicitly be removed. In other words, the moment a game stops being profitable, anyone can make money off of that game, and the creator loses their creation to public ownership. This disincentivizes innovation because there is no security in holding ownership of your creation. The moment you lose financial footing, all your work is taken away from you.
@@TealJosh While you are somewhat correct that open source doesn't inherently mean others can profit directly from the code, the situation is more nuanced and depends on the specific license. Some licenses do allow for commercial use (MIT, Apache), while others restrict it (GPL, CC NC). Also on further inspection the initiative states "leaving it in a reasonably functional (playable) state.". This could also be binary files for server code which could obfuscate the intellectual property. In such cases, binary reverse engineering might be necessary to retrieve the underlying code. Even if the license prohibits direct profit from the code, practically, there's nothing stopping someone from using publicly available code as a foundation, making modifications, and potentially obfuscating their work to create a new product. This scenario can undermine the competitive advantage gained through innovation. Being forced to release the source code or even binaries(although to a lesser degree) can indeed disincentivize innovation because the unique efforts and investments made by the original developers are democratized. This loss of exclusivity and competitive edge can make it less appealing for companies or developers to invest in creating new and innovative online and multiplayer games or other products in general where such laws would be to apply. The breach of licenses for profit is not unheard of (VMware vs Linux, Samsung vs BusyBox etc).
@@TealJosh Open source in general is a good thing as a collaborative community of developers that shares and builds upon each others benefits all which does foster innovation. However we live in a capitalist system and the world cannot run on charity alone. Open source must be profittable or piggy back on non open source for it to be sustainable financially. Unsustainable open source does stiffle innovation
Originally I had a very long comment on what I agree and disagree, I decided against it because it was way too damn long and it was fairly harsh of your criticism which I wouldn't have been surprised if it was just deleted. First off, Thor has just straight up misunderstood what the initiative is because it's worded incredibly poorly and he took it at face value. Which he shouldn't because it's designed to be amended a significant amount of times before passing. Second your attitude when you called him Naive because of his reaction to Ross, Don't do that it makes you look bad, If that was at the start of the video I would have clicked off immediately that was a very poor display. Thor's problems with that section is how it portrays the people who believe in the Initiative or why you should support it. It is not dissimilar to manipulation tactics I have seen from Abusive Partners. Not to say that Ross is wrong, I think his points have some truth but to outwardly say it in such a manner felt incredibly unprofessional and predatory in my opinion. Third, Saying that "it can't be that hard" based on the League of Legends thing and WoW Private servers is incredibly disingenuous it is incredibly difficult to make a game let alone completely reverse engineer it. Forth, What you should have said is "Live Service games are not inherently good or evil" because stating otherwise is just bias based on taste. Not everything needs to be live service but live service brought us Hell Divers.
In regard to your points "First off, Thor has just straight up misunderstood what the initiative is because it's worded incredibly poorly and he took it at face value." Hard to agree with that. Not only Thor avoids every single instance of any point that does not agree with his POV (private servers/mostly singleplayer games with artificial connection requirement) he also actively refuses to talk with Ross or anyone on that matter. "Second your attitude when you called him Naive because of his reaction to Ross, Don't do that it makes you look bad, If that was at the start of the video I would have clicked off immediately that was a very poor display." I would say telling Thor is naive is naive itself. It's literally impossible for someone who live in any part of western culture and at least hear how thing are going in US or EU to assume that this person would be able to really think Thor truly believes that Ross tries to do anything else than use already corrupt system to do something good for a change. "Third, Saying that "it can't be that hard" based on the League of Legends thing and WoW Private servers is incredibly disingenuous it is incredibly difficult to make a game let alone completely reverse engineer it." LoL and WoW are one of few standing online games that actually have hugely custom built infrastructure from code-side. This means that if for any game it should be impossible to built user-ran server, it should be those 2. These two are prime examples that it is possible anyway, even without access to source code or server binaries, just by reverse engineering. There are not the only examples, mind you. Another was Return of Reckoning, which was full server rewrite of MMORPG 'Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning'. In any case, if for LoL and WoW it can be done by fans, so should devs of the game be able to. It doesn't mean there will be no work to be done on that, but at the end of the day, developing is THE work of the dev teams. "Not everything needs to be live service but live service brought us Hell Divers." - yeah, and how did it end up? locking alrge part of the world out of the game due to artificial requirement of PS account, even after they bought and played the game. If server binaries would be available, you wouldn't have this problem in the first place.
with assassins creed example why doesn’t the initiative itself call them out then? Thor is only talking about the crew because the initiate calls it out. If the initiative called out assassins creed he would have talked about it
I just don't agree. And there were also just a few factual error e.g. and first and foremost, the licensing vs buying stuff - Which I've seen a real baffling amount of confusion and such of in the last few days. Also, unlucky timing, but he did put out another video about this, about 13 hours later, which does also address a few of the points you raised, which he didn't really talk about in the last one. For example the whole "Then make servers available"-Thing, which I have to admit, I did agree with. Before hearing his counter-arguments, which were things I just didn't think about before. Because that was another big point of yours, which he also addressed in the new vid, and I just especially disagree with, heavily at that - It's totally fine if you dislike life service games, but there are also a ton of people who really like them, a lot. It's just simply not your place to decide that for literally everyone else. That it should be made more clear what you are buying and agreeing to etc., again, yes, that should change, because it's actively deceiving customers. But that's a completely different story. I have to say, the video and audio quality was pretty good nonetheless, especially for not usually doing this, if I understood that part correctly.
Except in no good faith interpretation or honest reading of any transaction on steam or any other online storefront would one say this is a limited time license that can be pulled at the whims of the developer from the legal side I don't care what Thor explains how it works this is game companies playing in the grey like how youtube and social media platforms for years have been playing in the grey of publisher and public platform because it hasn't been force into court and they have had to declare what they are
@@michaelkeha isn't that part of Thor's point though - that it should be required to be clear about what we are buying at the time of purchase; a license or a product.
@@michaelkeha @michaelkeha Seeing you start off with "Except" - You did neither really read my comment or listened to Thor, didn’t you? Cause we both specifically mentioned and criticized that exact point and said that it should be tackeled and changed. Also, no, with most life service games it is not ambigous what the are. It's just not really made clear to the consumer. And in the cases where it isn't, well, he and I denounced that, too.
@@HamsterBaddy No with how steam and other online stores present themselves I am saying this it's a license that can be revoked for no reason is deliberately being avoided and thus it is technically illegal under fraud laws it just sits in the grey because it hasn't gone to court this includes Thor's game and every game the company he works with has put out are guilty of this so his denouncement of it means nothing it will continue to mean nothing unless they actually make the corrections needed and I have listened to his points rather throughly between the two videos I can firmly say Thor has made up a crazy scenario in his head and ran with it
We don't need a measure like this. In my opinion developers should only be oblige to market their game as selling a license to a service (doesn't need to be a subscription, one time purchase is fine). This way you know exactly what you're paying for. A button for purchase a license with a big warning they can revoke your license - if you disagree with this just don't pay and don't play the game. If people aren't buying this sort of games because the publisher is unreliable, they have to make non-service games. It's that simple.
Ah yes, the vote with you wallet argument. I'm sure it works this time, after billion failed attempts, of which many issues were in the end fixed by regulations anyways.
@@TealJosh this actually fixes the issue for Ubisoft but if there's a new company with their new game you can't predict when they're going to shut down their game. Voting with wallet doesn't work here, unfortunately.
"In my opinion developers should only be oblige to market their game as selling a license to a service (doesn't need to be a subscription, one time purchase is fine). This way you know exactly what you're paying for." If you know the exact date at the time of purchase as to when the game is going to die, then yes, you know "exactly what you're paying for". As soon as that date is indeterminate, _that's_ when it becomes consumer fraud. "A button for purchase a license with a big warning they can revoke your license" ...should be inherently illegal. "If people aren't buying this sort of games because the publisher is unreliable, they have to make non-service games." "If car manufacturers refuse to add seatbelts and airbags, people shouldn't buy automobiles." "If restaurants refuse to use gutter oil and make people sick, people shouldn't go to restaurants." "If cotton plantation owners refuse to not use slave labor, people shouldn't buy cotton products."
@@roadent217 Okay, you make a point. If you buy a car, that company can't just steal it back whenever they want (Like that GTAV mission) because it's illegal and it makes sense to be. So yes, it should be mandatory in a planning process to figure out what will they do at the end of the lifespan. In other therms, if a company goes under, they should have already made a version in a playable state without their servers. But if a company goes under who will they sue? This is problem since a company can shut itself and start a new one by different name.
They can go this route also: since when developers stop supporting a game it shuts down, from now on every live service game must be a subscription model.
Your confusing ~ A few things; Don't think *You're getting it* *AAA;* Company-Laws or *Indie Gaming;* I.P. Laws. *Mobiles are seperate;* __________ Piracy = NOT equal *Piracy* despite what you Believe. *EU:* Have G.D.P.R. U.S.A. Doesnt. - Shooting the messenger is very silly. And you know it.
@@159tonythen the vagueness shouldn't be a problem. You know everything will be specified as it is written. An initiative is not a proposed as is addition to the law.
You are completely ignorant to a large portion of gaming. Call of Duty, Fortnite, League of Legends, World of Warcraft, all of these are live service games. Live service games are games that require connection to a server to run. Be that single player or multiplayer. So saying these are bad is completely deaf to the entire argument. Tor isn't saying that things shouldn't change. He is saying this is the wrong attack surface to go after to solve the problems we have. Dark patterns are monetization factors. This initiative doesn't address those. It only addresses killing games. This is literally Thor's entire point. If you want to end Dark Patterns in games, go after that problem. Create an initiative to work on fixing monetization in games and the effects on children and the vulnerable. Don't go after one specific section and then when in negotiations just say "oh by the way...". That isn't how this works, nor is it how it should work. If you want to come to the table in good faith, then make a good faith argument about the topic that is actually bothering you.
You and your little blizzard nepo baby overlord just whine and complain, never doing anything about it. But the worst part of all is the fact that you actively try to sabotage the people ACTUALLY doing something.
killing games is what Ross and the rest of us care about. There's people already working on the predatory monetary practices by the way. one miracle at a time. Thor is simply being a burden here. Whatever criticism he has, the fact that he refuses to provide his input with the SKG team who is more than open to it, along with him purposefully not mentioning he has conflicts of interests.... and he is supposed to be the one acting in good faith?
Battlefield games used to come with 2 .exe files: Client and Server one. That is now a problem somehow. I am very disappointed with Thor about this.
Also most of the laws are not retroactive anyway.
6:58 Remember guys;
Thor is not just a developer. He is a publisher and owner. Here, he’s demonstrating that his interests don’t align with consumers, players, you and me.
Yeah as a publisher he doesn't want any chance of him losing grip of his IP's, abandoned or not
@@kusog3 which, if the initiative is implemented, wouldn't happen.
Unfortunately I have to agree
Yes, and many people take him as authority because he is a developer and therefore must know things. No, hes is definitely being biased towards developers but if you are not developer yourself it may be hard for you to recognize what is fearmongering and what is not. Instead sign that initiative and leave worrying about developers for EU. Have developers ever worried about us? Have developers ever been sorry that we permanently loose our hard earned money when they shutdown their servers? The point is if we don't stand up for our rights, no one will.
@@test-rj2vl Sorry, this is a little bit misguided. Developers don't typically decide anything about the lifespan and runtime of a game, especially a live service game. That's a playground for publishers to throw sand out of the sandbox, not developers.
I also cannot attribute the opposite feeling to developers either. I cannot claim that they do worry about consumers or that they feel bad or sorry about servers shutting down. We lack the information.
But we do know that publishers and corps don't care about anything but line goes up, as it is their fiduciary duty to shareholders to prioritize the income of capital. They are legally required to do so, and signed binding contracts expressly signaling intent to strip mine its properties for cash.
Developers are just as much in this boat as we consumers are, probably.
My problem isn't necessarily that Thor disagrees with the initiative, it's the odd behavior/ overactions surrounding it all.
1.) Either Thor just recently picked this up, and has no idea the Ross has been doing this for a while...
2.) ...or Thor is being extremely disingenuous, cherry-picking, and feigning ignorance to the obvious problems with the industry.
3.) If Thor is simply misinformed, which is the best-case scenario, then his strong response to Ross was uncalled for.
4.) Thor refuses to even speak to Ross and allow him to defend himself, which is even more gross than Thors accusations.
5.) Thors follow-up video, in an attempt to justify his position was extremely weak, and the issues he brought up (such as coding, server rights and physics patents, purchased by the developer being private) were already addressed in the initiative.
If Thor was some big, thumping, opinionated, talking-head like so many other content creators, I don't think anyone would care, but he's not an idiot, and he doesn't seem like the type of person to give a half-cocked take on an issue this complex. Somethings extremely off here, and I think every involved can 'feel' it.🧐
He's releasing his own live service game so it's 2 and 4. He is not misinformed he is purposely misleading as many people as he can.
Almost all of his takes are misinformed. He likes to make out that he is a lot smarter than he actually is.
thor can't imagine a multiplayer game that's not live service
Jason is too much of a child to remember that we can have both. There used to be a time hosting your own servers were the norm.
It's not that he can't imagine it, but peer to peer and private hosting doesn't work for every type of game. FFXIV or Apex wouldn't exist without the developer hosting servers. There is no good solution to keeping that game alive outside of live service. Making it dangerous to develop live service games will deprive people of games like FFXIV or Apex in the future. That's his point.
@@gman1515that was the point of the initiative, wasn't it?
make devs provide community with tools so that they can still play and host their own servers after devs axe the support
@@gramfero FFXIV or Apex wouldn't be the same game on private servers. Imagine dropping into an apex lobby with 1 other person on the entire map, or trying to run a savage raid in FFXIV with less than 8 people online. It's just not the same game anymore anyway. Much better if games like that can die naturally when the player base is gone. Because the alternative is that you have people trying to kill the company early so they can profit off of private servers.
But his point is proven false by there existing private servers for live service games such as mmo's and other types.
It seems to me he has strong reactions against these things due to having worked of blizzard, being a developer and an owner of a publishing company. I got a feeling he has an interest in developing live service games in the future, but this regulation might inconvenience him.
Thor assigning malicious intent onto Ross bugs me the most about this.
@jeremybonner6259 right? Ross is such a chill and thoughtful person, and the tone he took with Ross was off.
It actually makes me want to undo all of my likes piratesoftware's videos.
Ross's comment on his Thor's video was removed. Ross was responding to his video saying he misunderstood/misinterpreted the initiative and says he doesnt condone the harassment against Thor. I feel Thor doesnt want ross to be the reasonable person in this situation. Thor is straight up wrong on the initiative.
@@tonyh9102 my take was the misinterpretation was deliberate on Thor's part, which is why he deleted Ross's comments. Little hard to make a point about something someone isn't saying when they are visibly trying to clarify with you.
@@jeremybonner6259 when did he assign malicious intent?
@@Floriellegaming thor has already said multiple times that youtube chat bot took it down not thor
The real kicker here is that Ross has addressed most of the issues that Thor has brought up in regards to this initiative before in other videos he's put out and has pretty expertly refuted the arguments.
Jason is currently flagging videos that criticize him and reveal his past.
That's what the farms are for. You wouldn't believe some of the disgusting BS I've read about this guy. There are receipts and everything. Just look up the name Maldavius Figtree. This dude being a closet furry is the least weird thing about him. Gross.
I am so sad you did not comment his "If we want to rearchitect" 1:43. What he said, whether intentional or not, is very manipulative. He implies that we don't want server, we want some distributed session. Which is not what we want.
This. This so much. Later he argued that getting server binaries would mean that malicious actors would try to bot the game into oblivion to acquire the server blobs to profit out of it...
Which was again, ridiculus argument.
@@by010 yeah. After watching second part I see it is not ignorance, it is intention. He starts second part from take "so many developers supported in comments", which is false. I've seen comment from automotive developer completely in support of this initiative.
And his pretending to disagree with phrasing as if there is better way to achieve goal, but he fails to see(or doesn't want to see) that there are only two sections: Objectives and Annex. And he doesn't like Objectives. He is literally moving goal here.
Almost everything he said REEKED of this kind of BS. Glad you pointed it out.
8:26 Singleplayer is literally written right there next to Thor, its also on the box cover of the game.
It is only labeled as single player on the wiki. The XBOX360 box has a label "online only".
Right off the bat Thor is pretending not to understand the nature of the initiative. He knows damn well that Ross isn't looking to hold developers and publishers hostage and keep a game online indefinitely. He's asking that the community be given the tools needed to pick up the ball and run with it once official online support ends.
Right off the bat you're pretending Thor said something he didn't. It's not that he thinks Ross is being malicious. He is saying that the initiative isn't actually set up to do what Ross wants, and that the way Ross is pushing it is counter productive.
@@gman1515"car salesman" says otherwise
What "he is looking for" and what he is wrriting are completely different things. (Which honestly, with the history of Ross and its "live service is fraud" saying that he does not mean all of the now is disingenuous)
@@MetalHead-ff9ozwell I mean if you pay money to a product and do not own it
That’s effectively fraud where I stand
So the core idea that the audience who fund gatchas or whatever else you want to dress up live service micro transactions shutting down
Shouldn’t own anything of these games or have the ability to have private servers during a shutdown is just being anti consumer by default
@@tylerulfmann4586 Thor is specifically stating that games that can be single-player-only - should be. And that that point should be the main and very specific point. The games that require pvp HAVE to be licensed instead of purchased, since they would not be able to ban cheaters if cheaters bought the game - that would come as restricting cheaters from using "their property". For those games people should be informed with huge banners that they are buying a license, not a game, instead of prohibiting selling licenses.
I don't really think that live service should be killed off, nor is it the intent here, however this initiative will put in proper safeguards for the consumer in my opinion. A company will have to think twice before turning their single player game into some live service that can be killed off later, and the more successful ones will either be supported longer or get a playable version after they fail.
But the former is pretty much exactly Thors point tho, the part which he specifically agrees with. For which he points out that it is not what the initive is saying.
Of course initives don't have to have completely accurate legal languages or anything, but they are still just too vague in what they say they want to do nonetheless.
- Which I honestly really don't get how so many people don't understand the difference and that you can still be reasonably accurate while staying away from legal and within normal language.
@@HamsterBaddy Don't forget it is an initiative. If this goes trough we will only see proper law around 2028 at best, everyone will be informed of it as well so big corpos will have all time in the world to prepare what they need.
Laws here in Europe are not retroactive. Meaning games that ended before the law was in place are excempt from it.
Seeing those points above, the momment law comes into place we will see a shift as to how big corpos are handling their contracts and how they are preparing for game terminations. Games would be build from start to work within it. Older games wouldn't need to care about it. Nothing else it only brings quality of life to costumers and a proper way to archive culture.
@@draganoidept you're missing the point that the way the initiative is worded is just starting the wrong conversation in the first place. As it's worded, live service games would/should never be allowed to die. As a consumer, I don't agree with this. It's important that live service games are able to die naturally. Forcing developers to make their games perpetually available will either completely stop live service games from existing or open the devs up to blatant abuse. People will already just try to destroy a game for no particular reason, like the bot attacks on TF2. If a company shutdown means the server bins go public then that gives these people a financial incentive to do similar attacks so they can profit off of private servers.
The other option is that the dev is never allowed to shut a game down for any reason, and they need to somehow keep investing time and money into keeping servers up.
@@gman1515 "The other option is that the dev is never allowed to shut a game down for any reason, and they need to somehow keep investing time and money into keeping servers up."
Like that was explicitly stated not to be the case. It's about providing communities tools (code) to remake the servers or hand out versions not relent on the servers.
@@Utrilus re read my entire comment, specifically the part right before what you quoted.
When I saw his video I thought for sure Thor was going to promote it, bring attention to it. No. He threw Ross under the bus with no real critique or solution to the problems he presented.
The critique of a legal proposition, IS the solution, hes telling ross its to vague because once they start talking about it, it will either be dropped or wont be what you or ross wanted. Thor wants what ross wants, thor just doesnt like how ross has said it, also ross cracking jokes and insulting the politicians who will see the vid when looking into who propositioned it, will make this go even worse, thats why thor doesnt like ross, cause ross despite wanting this so badly is wording it horribly and isnt approaching this like he wants it.
@@nappygrimm6411 Hasn't Ross literally passed laws and set precedents for Right to repair? People will always complain "how" you do something to try and limit you. People need to do more actually doing stuff. Also Thor 100% does not align with Ross. How you can watch both their videos and think that is mind blowing that I dont even know how to respond since you just state it like a fact.,
@@nappygrimm6411 What you're doing, and what Thor did, is called tone-policing. This video addressed it as "civility politics."
@@nappygrimm6411 Sounds like Thor should have a civil discussion with Ross.
Let's ask Thor.
@TheKastellan wrong Ross, there's Ross Scott of the game dungeon and freeman's mind. And then there's repair guru and right to repair activists Louis Rossman. Confusing I know
really good form actually linking to the original videos. too many channels who actually do this kind of content as their main focus refuse to do that.
The playerbase are the people who bought the game. Active players are just the number of people who have played the game in a specified timeframe.
Over 12 million people bought the game, and now they don't have access to what they bought.
Even when games are sold with the requirement of online access to play the game that only mentiones online access from the player side. I think most people who bought the game still have access to the internet.
I cannot assume ingnorance from Thor in his statements, the closest would be willful ignorance of the things he's misrepresenting. I don't mind that he doesn't like or agree with the idea, the issue is that when he speaks it's so obvious he's not willing to even try to understand or be even slightly unbiased.
Its a shame that Thor's videos have gotten way more attention then Ross's videos and he's basically turned the movement onto himself.
Given that almost everyone is shitting on Thor I feel like it's actually a net positive.
Maybe he understood that he will have to finally work on and finish Heartbound if this initiative passes😂
Comenting to boost this video!
You have hit Thor with the hammer here. I think Thor really missunderstood the whole situation, Accursed Farms has SO many videos explaining every minute detail and how everything is happening and then Thor comes along and talks about only 1 video (Which requires a lot of knowledge from the previous videos). Thor needs to sit down and watch all others, I'd love to see him talk to other people about this.
Louis Rossman put out a great video debunking what Thor said as well.
I get the feeling he has his reasons for wanting live service games to be unregulated going forwards. Like for his own game, or for games he sponsors through his publishing company.
any one know if thor is launching a live service game ? cause he sounds extremly disingenuous
Yes, he is. It's called Rivals 2.
@@piau9000 I haven't managed to find any evidence it'll be online only but if you do keep me updated, I know a friend that's really excited for that one and I'd prefer for him to know if it is
@@infectedanimal9830The multiplayer would be live service. My guess is he doesn't want the company to have to go back and pay for all the work to make the game correctly since it may be affected not being out before the law.
Well, depending on what you count, yes, two at that.
But also, even if not currently, he worked on multiple big ones before.
What part about this was disingenuous?
Everybody who started playing The Crew with the 2023 sequel, had less than a year before shutdown, yatzee!
Thor really didn't handle the situation well at all. Especially when Ross agreed with him on World of Warcraft and offered to talk which Thor rejected and then deleted his comment making thing's a thousands times worse than the process.
the signs of an egotistical know it all are starting appear for everyone to see (with Thor).
I've been catching onto the way Thor thinks and acts, and I'm kinda hoping the rest of the net catches on soon, because honestly, we're better off not listening to the guy.
slight correction, Thor never deleted his comment -- it was caught by TH-cam's filters
@@wfd87 the screenshot of Ross's comment that's available was up for 3 hours and you can see that.
@@wfd87 lol lies smart one. none of what ross talked about would even trigger the youtube filters. I should know I actually say stuff that triggers it.
But where did Thor even talk about WoW?
Certainly not in the original vid, so where did this happen?
Great reaction. Quick, straight to the point and making sure your points are clear.
Why is he defending publishers?
Edit: question was answered in another comment, he's a publisher, and now it makes sense
He's benefiting from predatory practices and he's here to defend them now. What a shame.
I'm not sure why he brings up free to play phone games.
The whole debate is about games you PAY for. I paid for The Crew and Ubisoft remotely destroyed it and removed it from my library. Even if the servers are gone, I should still have access to the game, but I don't.
Pokemon GO is a free game. If they shut down the servers and removed it from my phone remotely then no skin off my butt. I didn't pay a cent on that game.
Ross includes free games that include micro-transactions, since the things you paid for are lost when the game is killed.
its cause, due to how google play and apply play set up the store, phone game are in the blanket of online service games, this is off of memory dont copy this verbatim
@@paulaccuardi9071so games that aren't actually free
Thor´s statement might be the most "sleeper" application to the industry ever
"this would kill live service games"
Oh, you meant for that to make me change my mind...
I've been saying this for a long time, Thor is legitimate astroturf. He makes a couple of good takes here and there, usually on bullshit topics so that he can get people to his side. Then as soon as any controversy comes up he is taking the least consumer friendly position possible. At this point the pattern is too clear and I am completely convinced that pirate software is an influencer that was planted into the industry by corporations to sway opinions. His method is formulaic at this point. Every single time he's arguing on consumer rights he is always favoring the protection of the company over the consumer, every single time he does this he's doing it by straw manning the consumer protection position. Then when the backlash comes he proceeds to engage in a motte and Bailey argument where he's obfuscating his initial statement by creating false dichotomies like "live service games should not have to give up their server binaries At end of life" when that's not even a requirement to keep a private server going. This is completely ignoring his arguments on preservation in general when he's talking about Apex and whatnot. People should really wake the fuck up on this guy, He's actually just corporate astroturf.
That was exactly my impression, you can smell these kind of guys pretty easily by using rarional thought like you did.
But in order to do that you must be able to see through their charisma and personality, and this is something that many people are not able to.
After this whole event started, the rose tinted glasses came off. Analyzing his other takes on things more and more, it honestly seems like he's basically been a libertarian corpo this entire time.
I mean, take one look at the game he actually made. Maybe it's because of what I know now, but it seems so, souless.
@@majormissile5596he's an arrogant rude hack. He barley knows anything about anything. But acts as an authority on literally everything (you can see why he fitted right in at blizzard). He refers to himself as a dev in all contexts and super Uber smart techno wizard. Yet he struggles to understand how a game can have dedicated yet community servers without cheaters even though many games have had them and still have them, valheim has the server binaries on the steam page FFS.
He's also the guy that said he walked into his bank and tells them he's a big streamer so people could fake his voice and gets them to sign a legal contract that if someone phones up the bank pretending to be him with an ai voice and they give away all his money it's there fault.
I guarantee this conversation never happened and is made up ego stroking, and he also has no idea how banks work so the story is not credible. Banks do not use your voice as a form of security check, like ever. Banks also don't sign custom liability contracts with peasantry twitch streamers, they just don't.
@mikecray-z5r Yeah, the bank thing was one of the events that made me start seeing through him. Also, when he said, "Just don't pay the hospital, and they'll get it as a tax write-off," which is also not how it works. I didn't follow his content that closely until he was suddenly opposed to this when he came off as someone who should be on board.
It seems way more likely that no one was innocent at Blizzard and they simply started eating each other after the allegations of abuse came out and their previous targets were protected. He's just one of the people who got eaten by his co-workers, even if before he was helping them steal breast milk.
he also appeals to emotions heavy, hes always posting some feel good shorts which is perfectly fine i appreciate the positivity, but it feels hella parasocial esp how his fans react to it like this is a character on the internet you do not know this man at all
12:10 it's not even so much that I want the company to provide further support for their game despite the support ending.
I want companies to be unable to stop owners of these games from repairing them themselves. There's countless games out there that people are able to bring back to life with no real cost to the company where that simply won't happen.
Presumably because the companies may want to use those games in the future for a re-release or out of pure greed.
Remember the times when you had a friend who had a game on disc but the game requires the disc to start so you asked your friend to bring over the disc with him, you installed the game and then went to the internet to search for a "patch" that allowed you to play the game without a disc?
Yeah, such cracks would be awesome for some games, especially if they could just be added to platforms like Steam so when there is an official workaround, everyone can see it easily😅
Great reaction. Guy's just not as all-knowing as he pretends to be.
I always have a problem with him. He's so confidently wrong about literally everything he says.
@@akdreamer6497 While I completely disagree with Thor here, I still want to be fair. He did work for Blizzard as an offensive security specialist and he was also part of the quality control department. He also worked at Amazon Games Studios as a Python developer. The U.S. Government also hired him to hack power plants in order to fortify their security. And he has three black badges (highest award) at DEF CON which is a hacker convention. His game dev and computer knowledge is definitely above the average joe.
That being said tho.... I don't think he's a consumer rights or legal expert. Which is what this is about.
@@tengkuadam1399 yeah he is an idiot in every field that isn't specifically his own
He a great guy but nobody's perfect
I've advocated for stopkillinggames, but it's good to have some push back so that when push really comes to shove, the kinks have been ironed out and we put forward a rock solid proposal
technically a lot of mmorpgs are just linear single player games anyway that just happen to have other players. its the end content like coop raid dungeons and pvp arenas that make the multuplayer aspect worthwhile. sandboxes in particular became popular because they inherently have all the best aspects of mmorpgs without the drawbacks of live service games.
The main problem here is that it's mostly Americans discussing *European* govt. Americans on avg don't understand our own govt let alone foreign govts. 90% of the convo is people talking out of their asses and imaginations. Thor likes live service and seems to believe most new games in the future will be live service. He's going to do whatever mental gymnastics possible to be disingenuous, move the goal posts, etc, so that he doesn't have to confront the world of less live service games existing.
Suggestions incoming
1. Every game, where multiplayer is not main focus of the game (coop and single with online checks), or games which had a single-player company without needing other players - should have possibility to play even after server shut down (dedicated servers, bots, single player mode) with online-check disabled in last update. Like genshin and other things. Its clearly NOT a multiplayer game. And it could be a huge waste to lost Genshin 10 years into the future. If game shuts down, i could accept not being able to play online, but why i should give up on existing single-player company? Imagine of minecraft shutting down tomorrow, and all servers instantly die, and those who don't would be under lawsuit. It's cringe, right?
2. Games, where multiplayer is main focus of the game, should have possibility to start dedicated server with friends/bots, with all calculations transfer to client (host) added in last update of the game if it's not meaning to send entire code to players for free OR if there is a code on server-side, users should have possibility to unite and buy it with reasonable (for dead game) price, making it free-ware. Companies should make special web page with donate bar, and if fans fill it, code becames free-ware. (Because all devs already have money for their work, and now it's just company who have benefits and copyright, hurting player base). FF14ARR is still cool game, even if there are no players - just make simple bots for dungeons, so i could enjoy cool cutscenes and speak with NPC's. Also, i'm strongly against a direct buy of things, cuz we will have one monopolist again. Code better became freeware, and we'll have 5 competing servers, than this one IP holder, which would do nothing other than copyright-strike other fan's works.
3. After company shutting down online game or not updating existing more than 3 years (or 10 years after releasing single-player game), they lose all rights to shut down fan projects, based on this exact game, if fans made significant code change and added significant new functions (not just add donate shop, but include alot of dungeons, items and other fun content), or changed a game engine entirely (in other words - make significant impact to the original game). So companies forced to continue to support existing online games, or give it up, and let fans do their work without any issues. 3 years not updating a MMO, and 10 years for single player is MORE THAN ENOUGH to suck up all the juice and money from player base, and make a huge profits. But fearing to make a remake to Dino Crisis or Final Fantasy 9 !!!25!!! years after original game's release cuz of the copyright and probability of lawsuit is ULTRA CRINGE.
If there is some bad things it this or possibility to abuse (im not a layer, so it's just a suggestion), let's just start a conversation, and together came up with better ideas.
Not to mention making the game available after the servers shut down would keep sales of the game going after they stop dumping money into it.
But then who is going to buy their newest product that is twice the price of the previous versions a few years ago😂
@@theinfernity1799 good point 🤔 gotta think of the shareholders!
Look I understand the fear of government getting involved it always is a really shit thing to have to do but when companies refuse to listen to reason and are going down the worst possible path for us as consumers and for the industry as a whole then what choice do we have but to force the government to make them listen to reason.
Those stupid liars think we are all stupid. We had lan support before. That's why diablo 1, starcraft, quake, etc are all still playable today.
If they are going to stop support a game, release the server code and let players continue to enjoy games.
It's all greed.
Nice and well thought-out arguments. Well formulated and beautifully presented.
Keep up the good work and if you strive for subscribers, I hope you get them. If you don't want unnecessary attention, I hope this video still reaches the ears of its intended audience.
P.S. Seriously, I thought that this was going to be a recap or retelling of the most popular takes under Thor's and Ross's videos, but it's quite original and well made.
That being said, I have a small personal beef against PirateSoftware's attitude and the points he made last 3-4 months. There's a huge comment I wrote which I won't post here because youtube keeps removing it due to it having three links to Pirate Software's videos. And I don't want any drama, I just want a popular influencer with an auditory of 2 million easily swayed and manipulated kids to be put in his place.
For him to stop gaslighting people and start acting responsibly.
It's truly astounding to me that he can be this seemingly obtuse about the initiative, when ultimately, what it's based on is the fact that the practice of remotely killing games *seems to already be against the law*, and simply has not been examined by government yet.
EULAs aren't legally binding
I guess it isn't if you're clinically disabled and need someone else to sign your documents for you. Fortunately, not everyone is like you, and if they agree to it, it's legal. I guess you think TOS's aren't legally binding either?
@C-d7o9q they aren't they quite literally aren't a legally binding contract as stated multiple times by multiple judges someone clicking agree without reading what they've agreed to is not informed consent thus cannot be legally binding and TOS' aren't the law
You seem to think that companies are the government and can just decree through TOS whatever they want
I hope you won't sign anything before reading it when you turn 18, but sorry to say, if you select "I Agree" when there is small text that details you are buying something that can be taken away, means "You Agree" and understand it can be taken away.
Link the court case that a judge says, " Even though you checked the box saying you read the TOS and proceeded to click I Agree, it doesn't matter. As any contract no matter the size are irrelevant because 2 state judges said so."
@@C-d7o9q ah yes the ignorant one who clings to it like arrogance you can't give your rights away in a contract you can literally take someone to court for misleading terms in a contract the small text stuff doesn't actually work because if you literally couldn't tell it was there that's a legal slam dunk in contract law you cannot hide things in contracts it is actually against the law and people have won lawsuits over that just because you believe bad TV doesn't mean things actually work that way
@@C-d7o9q also yes judges have clearly said TOS isn't the law and only the law matters in court
Customers* stop killing CUSTOMERS*
Consumers are treated like cash cows on the conveyor belt off to become a nice burger after the milk has dried up
CUSTOMERS have agency and gets to stand up for themselves.
The issue here is with copyright infringement. Especially popular AAA games will have communities that reverse engineer the game servers.
But publishers can strike them down even after the game is no longer online.
I don’t get why developers don’t just let us run these games via landline so we can still play them with other people
go make a game if you dont get it, look into it walking in their shoes, if what they are doing sucks try to make a game the way you want players to have fun, then see how it goes
@@nappygrimm6411 why don't you try buying something with your cold hard cash then have it taken away from you and make completely useless. this is not about the consumers ability to make or fix games, it's about the developers putting in the effort to keep games playable in some shape or form. but if you really want to go there then don't try to preach to the choir and to try walking in their own shows and finally it isn't exactly hard to implement landline for privet community run servers for triple A studios.
the whole Pirate software's video is basically "Software engineer doesn't understand legal system (funny)"
You say that, but his top mod is a lawyer you'd think someone who actively worked in the government(thor) specifically security, and his friend(the mod) in law would know about the danger of a, vague legal document, for stuff they do want in an industry that they love, and just don't like how its written out, this document is meant to start conversations it shouldn't be set in stone, but it should still be clear in what it wants, & why it wants it.
@@nappygrimm6411European lawyer? What kind of lawyer? Or is this just some weak appeal to authority.
I am software engineer / dev. Pirate software is not talking for me, he is crazy and unhinged. Had to unsubscribe from his channel for the L take on this...
@@nappygrimm6411well I mean the core idea is pretty solid
If you support a live service game you should own the possibility of a single player option when the game shuts down
Now there’s a lot of interpretation of how that gets enforced but just having the starting point of digital protection having that as the core start is what matters
The enforcement and legal ability to pursue cases could then be examined by what is a shutdown
But I think just setting this groundwork that there could be consequences if you shut down a game with no access to any option to play it should be legally prosecutable
Especially if you bought micro transactions since the game developers effectively committed fraud
@@nappygrimm6411 "You say that, but his top mod is a lawyer"
Then said mod should have advised Thor not to say such nonsense.
Regardless of concurrent players being low, it doesn't mean the game isn't worth playing and moving on to the next game, i still wanna play the game later on. Developers should provide a way for people to set up their own private servers to play the game. The developers don't always have to rearchitect the game to let players continue playing the game. Thor's coming across as closed mind to the perservation to games and shifts the argument to developers and publishers, letting the customers know that a live service game will eventually die. Thor clearly doesn't want to understand what the initiative really stands for.
Many of these "live service" games also don't even need that many players to remain healthy and sustain themselves, either. If a game has reached EOL in some official capacity, a few hundred players is absolutely enough when a single player is only ever in contact with only a dozen or so other players at a time, and good games should have no problem maintaining a few hundred dedicated fans. Last I checked, the community servers for Need For Speed World had 100-200 players at any given time on them, and that game has basically been forgotten outside of its diehard fans.
One thing I haven't seen anyone mention is that when a long dead game gets revived there is always a surge of interest from old returning players and new players who missed their chance to play the first time for whatever reason.
@@jcm2606which funnily enough Ross Bill doesn’t even say that companies have to provide servers and they own all copyright
It’s just that the player when a game shuts down main servers presumably in the EU
That they have to provide the ability for the fan base to make a single player version
I’m very open to critiques about enforcement but the core idea of this isn’t too insane to me
I thought that Thor was a honest well spoken guy. After this I'm not so sure.
He missed the point so obviously, created a straw man out of this, "because it's too vague" and then jumped into facts and logic why it's bad and "disgusting". I don't know for sure but it seems like he deleted Ross' comment and refused to engage in any form of dialog.
Now, I'm no expert but it sure feels like Thor is using his 1337 haxor skills to do some social engineering and push Ross under the bus and shut this whole thing down. To me feels like he's pushing an agend. I don't know what that is but don't like it.
I really don't think that he just misunderstood I think there is more at play here. A well spoken guy with a decent reputation can get away with a lot and now I'm very skeptical of him.
Aside from that, I bough a game. I want to play it when ever I decide to. If this basic thing causes the whole games industry to collapse than maybe, just maybe it should never have gotten to this point.
Also I'm in oil and gas engineering, before you do ANYTHING you need to have a plan for decommissioning what ever you are doing (think oil rigs and stuff like that) so I'm sorry that you're gonna have it so bad as a programmer to uphold some basic human decency.
bruh that shit is so ez to do. lets take the live service game fall guys for example.
there are three points of interest here:
1. accounts with their achievements and what they got so far. shouldnt be a big deal. go with a local save file for what you have achieved and have a new account with brought over achievements for each own server. or just have it completely server sided.
2. seasons. can be turned off once the game aint supported by the devs anymore. since it doesn't make money for 'em it also shouldn't be a problem to give everyone access to past items the game offered before, which plays well with interest nr.1 where you can just have that save file with all the items in it alr. and just have to create a name for your character to play in a server.
3. making the game playable on community servers. in fall guys term it would simply be the map packs they have to infuse into the server and obviously a stable and strong server to support a given amount of players to play on + security features to prevent players from being hacked (*cough i see you fromsoft!).
it really isn't too much of a big deal. OFC it becomes difficult for the devs if they hard code their games in such a shitty way, that modularity is off the table. but thats THEIR PROBLEM to begin with.
and let's be honest: most people won't blink an eye if live service games cease to exist. most are pure cancer and as you said cause insane problems due to lootboxes and other scummy practices. so if the byproduct of said petition is the death of live service games: oh nooo, ...anyway.
also thor has ZERO knowledge about europe. politicians do like easy wins! cause it gives em cheap votes for the next election. and gamers are a big pool of voters.
could ofc go the ez way and simply give the community the source code of said game like pumpkin studio did back then with warzone 2100 to preserve this game ^^.
Liked just for the thumbnail
I will like and watch all videos that SHIT on Thor's bad take on this. It is like he lobotomized himself when he rolled up on this take. I welcome all small and large creators telling him why he is wrong.
Honestly the guy is a hack. He shows up out of nowhere, and just rockets in views and the like, yet his streams barely have much real interactions, which leads me and others to think he came out of nowhere because he bought views and bots to occupy free space, so he could cheat the algo.
Also his rip-off Undertale game tells me he has no creative talents, another sign of an egotistical know it all like Thor. I've seen so many indie devs with passion and talent, and Thor, a guy who worked at Blizz, has next to none, and acts like he knows everything and is right about everything (which really just comes off as a waste of a person, because they won't admit fault, nor are they productive).
@@dirge7459 you and others need to learn how to communicate your disagreements better then. Thor has a lot of content explaining how he optimizes his streaming schedule to get the most out of different social media algorithms, and the idea that he acts like he knows everything is honestly ridiculous. most people would be 100x the egomaniac he is if they had his qualifications.
@COLOSSAL.E so you admit he is an ego maniac. 100 x what (his currently huge ego).
He is suffering from Neil Degrass Tyson syndrome. Thinking being smart is immunity from being incredibly stupid.
I have no opinion on the botting allegations.
Honestly, I enjoy his insight on a lot of topics, but he isn't the end all be all. His smugness is what sours me on the subject. It feels like his thoughts are half-baked and lack proper consideration for the facts.
Deleting Ross's response from his youtube comment section. Is proof his ego is so big that it's fragile.
@@COLOSSAL.E what the fuck are his qualifications except for being a blatant nepo baby who uses a voice changer and having a shitty undertale ripoff on early access for 8 years?
@@TomBoulevard_ bro i think you have an ego that's 100 times larger than his. his humility and generosity with his time and knowledge, when he could easily choose to instead be smug or condescending, is one of the reasons i watch his content regularly.
he didn't even delete the comment either, yt algos did that.
if you can't actually think of how he could have presented his opinion without offending you personally, maybe it's a you problem
shoutout to maldavius figtree
I like to remind myself that, no matter how much I admire someone, if I haven't yet found something we disagree on, it's because I haven't listened to them long enough.
Thors just crossed that threshold for me.
The lack of knowledge from Thor about how laws are made, and the lack of research before talk about "how government works" its sad. Such a bad take.
Not only that. His second video was also a bad take. Yeah, sure. A group with malicious intent could bot someone or use exploits and then they would need to invest time and money to fix or ban and then rather have to close down their game because it isn't worth anymore.
The things are for one, that the malicious group alone wouldn't have access to host a server. All other people that had a game copy would have similar access so it wouldn't be one monetized private server but rather multiple ones. And if you dislike the public ones, you can set up one on your own for you and your friends.
Second, groups that can easily create bots already do use that power to make RMT with ingame items that are simply farmed by those bots. Metin2 or Path of exile are good examples. And those RMT groups would rather have a wider range of customer on an official server than to have some small amount of people on their monetized protected server.
So yepp, Thors explanation is not a good take. But it is funny to see how many people are taking that and trying to spread it throughout the internet. And when you confront them, they nearly never reply anymore.
@@theinfernity1799 Yeah, and what you said is not even new. I remember playing in a private server of both L2 and WoW. And that was back in 2005.
He even says in his shorts and streams that he banned a lot of people for botting in WoW, so nothing new even for him.
Thank you so much for arguing the correct point: I bought the game I should be able to play it. I don't like seeing bigtime youtubers like Rossman misdirect the conversation by making it about being honest about renting it out rather than selling it. That should not be our aim. A robber is more honest than a thief but they're both dispossesing me which is the fundamental problem. Similarly, this live service model is bad, regardless of how honest the publisher is about it. It should be restrained as much as possible.
Basically:
Initiative is a good thing, but we should change the wording.
That’s all I heard.
He doesn't want the wording changed, he wants it to be totally thrown out.
The only thing he's not been clear about is *why* he wants it thrown out, which is because he has a financial incentive in backing Rivals of Aether 2.
Products and services represents different types of goods in the market.
W video.
3:00 yeah we are dealing with the government. Specifically the EU government...
That whole pitch he's reading, it's an initiative. Not even a proposed law bill. It has a word limit and serves only to showcase the basics of the proposition.
It literally will be worked out down the line, that's the entire point of an initiative. We just have to sign and show that we care about what it has to talk about.
Really bad take from Thor, not to mention he's just plain wrong about a lot of things in those videos, like LoL not being able to function client side.
To quote Blizzard: "Offline mode is available in Starcraft: Remastered, StarCraft II, Diablo 2: Resurrected, and Warcraft III: Reforged."
"RESTRICTIONS"
"You must have logged in to the game at least once within the last 30 days before you can launch it in offline mode."
In other words, if you cannot log in these games will become unplayable. Meanwhile, according to 'Thor' there's just a 'small number' of games like that. Right. Small number. Sure.
Woah, four examples from an already shitty company that Thor left behind. I don't know man, 4/1000s of games is pretty small.
Thor conflating the "easy win" as the main point of the initiative is so damn slimy. Now, maybe I'm not catching the social cues here, but I'm almost certain Ross said that specifically because he knows a lot of gamers would be doomers about this.
"Funny" thing is... In some EU contries, all licences are "private property", so if you buy the game, you should never be left in a state where you can no longer download it (looking at playstation). Now, enabling for licence owners to play them is still not defined (sadly).
Basicly, Playstation and Sony stole more than half of my library on PS3 and All the games I had on my Vita
Also at 13:26 Thor said "and why this is important", but Ross was not talking about why this is important, only why this may pass. Manipulative again.
How is that sift going? It's a human mistake. Doesn't detract from what he said
@@g3ar75 still nothing passed sieve, there is only bullshit. Especially in second part.
7:11 I believe this is a quote from a firaxis dev and isn't about mmo players explicitly but about players in general
His argument about mobile games is completely asinine. Mobile "games" designed for use primarily on mobile devices are not games, they are virtual storefronts dressed up to look like games in order to hook people into the cash shop. Including mobile games in this conversation is like include suicides in gun violence statistics for gun control debates
Nice, clean audio
Honestly, I'm finding out more each day, on Thor coming off as more of a hack. A nobody that came out of nowhere, acts like he knows everything under the known sun, and ridicules any other thoughts besides his own.
Like I get that he's a game dev, but that doesn't make him objectively correct all the time, nor a god, and yet he exhibits this a lot in his streams and the way he talks. I feel like his father has more credibility than Thor himself ever would have, because Thor at this current time, is basically making a crappy Undertale ripoff game, all while using his own anti piracy measures, a guy who literally tells ppl to pirate software if need be (just not his).
I think Thor should just take the L, simmer down and focus on his own game, instead of constantly poking his nose around where it doesn't belong.
Also as someone said recently in another vid about Thor's bad take: "you can take the man out of the Blizzard, but you can't take the Blizzard out of the man", which ends up ringing true with Thor, because he's more for studios/corps than he ever will be the consumer (because he's looking at most situations/scenarios from his game dev pov, not a consumer based one).
I wish I had something to add to this, but you hit the nail on the head.
You know. I’ve always felt a bit odd about Thor.
This is why. I couldn’t articulate it well, but you are absolutely correct. He seems to hold a lot of anti-consumer views on gaming and it’s frustrating how disingenuous he is about it.
@@mostlyjovial6177 Raised by Blizzard. It suddenly makes so much sense.
so some notes on this 1. he does agree with points that ross has said, and he will change his mind given proper reason, but ross worded some of his stuff horribly, thor wont stand by it because of said wording, as it puts a un needed strain on an entire industry which means i wont pass the way it is, it might not even get to the talking phase cause of some foolish remarks insulting the politicians.
2. id say 20+ years of work in security + making 2 games means he kinda gets to talk about it, especally since this is an industry hes working in right now,
2/2. im not even gonna try to untangle this mess of insults, cause thats more opinions, and just being rude instead of fixing or helping said problem.
3. Saying thor should stop poking his nose in gaming business, when his business is gaming, is kinda a stupid statement, thats like telling gordan ramsey that hes needs to shut up about cooking, and go back to making his cook book and restaurants.
4. hes taking the side of devs right now cause most devs CANT TALK ABOUT IT, if they do they get hit with death threats (really reasonable from some people btw ) and can be fired cause be corpo didnt like what they said in private.
5. he worked on blizzard back when it didnt suck, before the devs/publishers/rest if themn become a bunch of sa's and creeps, he left due to being abused by said company, and started working for amazon, didnt like amazon and then did government, stopped doing government and went indie, also the stuff for blizzard, amazon,and the feds was security not game dev he was there to stop cheaters from ruining YOUR experience in games.
5/2. he likes consumers hes still a consumer he wants people to enjoy making and playing games, if you want to know how much he wants people to enjoy/play games, he runs a mmo minecraft server out of his own pocket, no pay to win, no pay to play, nothing just play the game and have fun, also to add to this, he saw players fishing in a dungeon, stopped the dungeon fishing for a day or two, and added in an entire fishing class with cool fish(which players got to name).
6. he has never said hes a god or that hes above anyone, he has achievements that he took time and effort to get, which id say hes owed to get to talk about
7. last thing i swear cause it needs to be addressed, the way to talks about ross was not good, i wont excuse it at all, but i will say that was like day 3 of death threats and insults, and id think you'd be pretty ticked too, especially since he does 12 hours streams almost every day except thursday, so thats a 30min there and back drive to deal with that for 12 hours want to say again i dont excuse it but id like to show why it happened thor should apologize for calling ross greasy.
@@nappygrimm6411 he makes (and as of yet still didnt finish) borderline rpg maker game that has no gameplay for 6 years now. Thats his credentials as "a game dev". Being 20 years in the industry is worth nothing.
Usually thor has reasonable takes, the issue is this take feels like he's quoting blizzard, is he making a live service game or something?
Like the proposal is just to make it so games can be installed and played on your computer and maybe a bit of peer to peer, just so at end of service you get to keep playing. For most games this is the default state, you should be able to just strip the drm out and possibly setup an internal server function for online only games. Like are we asking too much here? There's games from 20 years ago ran on your pc and did peer to peer day 1.
"is he making a live service game or something?"
He sort of is. He's the marketing director of offbrand games, which are publishing a live-service game Rivals 2.
It's not even that I would disagree with J. It's the mentality of "I don't and no one else should either". It got old.
I don't do heroin and no one else should either.
What, You want to do heroin now?
Voting with your wallet does something. It factually does something. Do not dismiss that. The problem is the millions upon millions of human waste that fund the bad practices in the industry. We can't rely on govt. for everything.
It really doesnt. Case in point: the MW3 boycott.
Thanks for making this commentary on the matter, a lot of what you've said was better explained than I ever could. It's rather disappointing to see PS's take on this to be rather on the malicious side as well as being absolutely uncouth. Really does show how he is as a person too.
on second life he was Maldavius Figtree. he was always drama. with his history I don't get why he is starting trouble with others. he will be one of those popular TH-camrs who says the wrong thing then all the secrets come out.
Very good video highlighting that Thor is a ''''
Good video. I remember watching Thor's video and thinking he was using se flawed logic.
Oh what would you have expected from someone who bought himself into TH-cam with pre-recorded shorts and cooperations.
Ask him about the hobbits going to isengard.
This Thor dude has such a massive ego. Imagine making a reasonable contribution to further help SKG instead of making yourself look like you're the authority of all things video games.
does live service games need to be killed off?
this is what I'm getting from this video. it will remove a fair amount of games we wouldn't be able to get in any other way of hosting an online game.
beside, thinking of how the game should work 15 years after launch (possibly 20 to 25 years with dev time) how many would like to think that far into the future, when so much could happen with a game in that time span?
I know I wouldn't be up for a task to create a game with that much foresight needed before even starting any storyboarding work.
You just described how some people feel about it.
Okay? So don't create games then if you can't provide the costumer who paid for it.
@@Visimecus why create anything then?
@@saycrain Don't. We really don't need any more people like you "creating" anything. But others will come forward. Just 20 years ago we didn't have to deal with any online services. It'll come back.
@@Visimecus damn ok >.>
Finally someone who has sensible arguments rather than trying to argue with him through trying to discredit his experience as a game developer.
I get where Thor is coming from, but his arguments is ignoring a lot of possible solutions out there by thinking that the game has to be ported from multiplayer server authoritative to sigleplayer client authoritative when you can just release the server software (like Mojang did with Scrolls, and fans have done with games they loved but didn't receive that treatment from the developers). Also I get where he is coming from with the arguments against having the initiative be created the way it is now, since government tends to be filled with people who doesn't understand tech, but as far as I understand it, the EU initiative becoming a thing won't put it into law, it will plan for how it could be put into law, by people who know a lot about the subject.
Also, I don't know how he thinks The Crew was required to be multiplayer, yeah it may be developed to be multiplayer and may be hard to port, but as mentioned earlier a simple solution is to release the server binaries, but the bigger issue is that The Crew functioned very closely to a singleplayer game. Yes you could see other players and somewhat interact with them, but the story mode, missions, etc were all against NPCs, but still required an online connection. I used to play the game a lot, and it felt a lot like a singleplayer game with some multiplayer added on.
Though I do disagree with you on banning live service games entirely. They should be regulated, by for example giving the players a way to continue playing when the game is gone, by for example giving them the server binaries, among other regulations like banning the dark patters often used in live service games. But banning them seams like a weird thing to do as live service games can from time to time actually be something good, the issue is the dark patters done in addition to having it be a live service game, not that it is a live service game.
Also, for stuff like what happened with The Crew where it is essentially a singleplayer experience placed in a multiplayer world, there could possibly be regulations on requering there to be some kind of singleplayer mode, and you may not even need to do that much work for it to work, for example: in minecraft, there is multiplayer and singleplayer, but singleplayer is essentially running a multiplayer server in the background so that it doesn't have to reimplement everything just for the singleplayer experience.
The core of the issue is required online only (where it doesn't make sense), no way to continue playing it after it shuts down, and the large amount of dark patterns used in many live service games.
This is what should be regulated and discussed, though Stop Killing Games is focused on fixing the first two, but the latter should also be discussed and regulated at some point..
And lastly, if anyone who is reading this believes that Thor is being malicious, please read this quote:
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." - Hanlon's razor
It may not be stupidity, but it seams like there may be some ignorance or misunderstanding.
Overall well written.
Not going into too much detail here. I am pro the petition but have also read a few things that are good arguments against it. Releasing the server binaries would allow others to check through it to find possible exploits for either attacking other servers or, if the publisher/dev has a new game, try to use old exploits in the new game since Code can be reused.
This is just one of the few technical arguments that I have read. There was also a well-written argument for game engines and why they can hinder the usage of the game after EoL.
But overall I would say that there are many possible options as you have said. There are current games that have proven that. Last epoch, added an offline mode to their online game. Wayfinder, got changed from MMO to Singleplayer. Palworld, came with a tool in steam to set up your own dedicated server. And if you go to your steam library and go to tools instead of games/software/soundtrack, there are probably many other games that do offer dedicated server tools.
Those are of course no indie games. But I am looking forward to if the petition will reach 1m signatures and if yes, what will happen. Especially since EU law is easily getting leaked, see the copyright change a few years ago and especially how Germany demonstrated against the different versions😅
Dude is possibly false flagging videos about his past in Second life.
Theodore is probably acting in bad faith. He's circumvents a lot of the points by drawing attention to things that don't have anything to do with them.
I find it a little odd that he gets hung up on the initiative talking about video games in general and not the specific kind it would apply to. If this initiative is successful and years down the line some regulations get implemented as a result, they would have no effect on games that don't require online services to function. That's literally the whole point of the thing. If a game works offline anyway, then there's no extra work for anyone involved. Politicians are far more likely to grasp "video games" than "video games that have been designed to only work with an online service and lose all their function when the online service is shut down."
thank goodness everyone else is wisening up to this clown
Thor is a pathological lier, thats all you need to know
15:00 and that's why live service games should not exist, you paid for the product, you deserve to keep the product, and god forbid you try to charge someone $70 and to say you don't own the experience? Hopefully that gets addressed soon enough. "You'll own nothing, and you'll be happy."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/You%27ll_own_nothing_and_be_happy
Why do people care so much about what he thinks? He released one full game and have one in early access since 2018. His strength is not game development, his strength is streaming.
bro had to have a 10s intro lol
I feel like people in these comments are quick to witch hunt thor and over exaggerate his perspective or assume his intentions. You look silly.
Personally I think the furry with the "Pirate Software" name that's REEEEEing at the first sign of consumers striking back against the pro corporation market is the one that looks silly here.
real
I hope you get more subs my guy
What is this guy even do?
I didn't see any game worth naming after him
He has one game on which he works on a regular basis during his stream. I think it was called hearthbound or so.
He is rather more known for his TH-cam shorts where he mainly takes things out of his livestream.
Ad blockers violate TH-cam’s Terms of Service
Try TH-cam premium
I dont see corporations rolling with this and just eating the costs, they will either stop making live service games entirely or stop distribution wherever this becomes law.
It depends on the shutdown timeline
But discouraging live service products I’m gonna be blunt would be a general benefit to the industry
that's a win for the consumers either way
great take, thank you, instasub!
stop using the word 'consumer'
He is explaining how the business operates because most people here are not developers, haven't worked at major software companies, or own a business.
Many here think they know the answers even without any experience or knowledge. Stop acting like Andey-know-it-all because you aren't. Perhaps it's better for once to shut up and learn to listen, so you can understand what the consequences are and know what you are talking about.
Fun fact: If The Crew was still playable offline (officially, I mean), Ubisoft could still sell the game in that state... yes, it would probably make very little money, like most old games do, but it's a perspective that Thor completely overlooks in this specific context. And by the way, most people played The Crew through Ubisoft Launcher or Ubisoft Connect, as it's now called. We just don't know how many players there were. It could have been a few hundred, it could have been a few thousand. But even a few hundred players per hour adds up to a few thousand players per day (because nobody plays 24/7) and maybe 10,000 or more unique players per month. That's the way to look at it. Not "the game died, that's normal".
From an Intellectual Property and Copyright perspective the online portion of a game should never be sold as a product but as a service and cannot be forced to be made open source from a sustainable economical perspective.
If developers are going to get force to open up their source code for online games then online games and multiplayer games will cease to exist because the risk and incentive to make a profit will implicitly be removed.
In other words, the moment a game stops being profitable, anyone can make money off of that game, and the creator loses their creation to public ownership. This disincentivizes innovation because there is no security in holding ownership of your creation. The moment you lose financial footing, all your work is taken away from you.
That's not what open source means. Open source doesn't mean you can go off and profit off of random code you found.
@@TealJosh While you are somewhat correct that open source doesn't inherently mean others can profit directly from the code, the situation is more nuanced and depends on the specific license. Some licenses do allow for commercial use (MIT, Apache), while others restrict it (GPL, CC NC).
Also on further inspection the initiative states "leaving it in a reasonably functional (playable) state.".
This could also be binary files for server code which could obfuscate the intellectual property.
In such cases, binary reverse engineering might be necessary to retrieve the underlying code.
Even if the license prohibits direct profit from the code, practically, there's nothing stopping someone from using publicly available code as a foundation, making modifications, and potentially obfuscating their work to create a new product. This scenario can undermine the competitive advantage gained through innovation.
Being forced to release the source code or even binaries(although to a lesser degree) can indeed disincentivize innovation because the unique efforts and investments made by the original developers are democratized. This loss of exclusivity and competitive edge can make it less appealing for companies or developers to invest in creating new and innovative online and multiplayer games or other products in general where such laws would be to apply.
The breach of licenses for profit is not unheard of (VMware vs Linux, Samsung vs BusyBox etc).
@@BlueSquareInWhiteCircle does open source stifle innovation in general?
@@TealJosh Open source in general is a good thing as a collaborative community of developers that shares and builds upon each others benefits all which does foster innovation. However we live in a capitalist system and the world cannot run on charity alone. Open source must be profittable or piggy back on non open source for it to be sustainable financially. Unsustainable open source does stiffle innovation
@@BlueSquareInWhiteCircle "Unsustainable open source does stifle innovation" - explain, what do you mean by unsustainable open source?
Originally I had a very long comment on what I agree and disagree, I decided against it because it was way too damn long and it was fairly harsh of your criticism which I wouldn't have been surprised if it was just deleted.
First off, Thor has just straight up misunderstood what the initiative is because it's worded incredibly poorly and he took it at face value.
Which he shouldn't because it's designed to be amended a significant amount of times before passing.
Second your attitude when you called him Naive because of his reaction to Ross, Don't do that it makes you look bad, If that was at the start of the video I would have clicked off immediately that was a very poor display.
Thor's problems with that section is how it portrays the people who believe in the Initiative or why you should support it.
It is not dissimilar to manipulation tactics I have seen from Abusive Partners.
Not to say that Ross is wrong, I think his points have some truth but to outwardly say it in such a manner felt incredibly unprofessional and predatory in my opinion.
Third, Saying that "it can't be that hard" based on the League of Legends thing and WoW Private servers is incredibly disingenuous it is incredibly difficult to make a game let alone completely reverse engineer it.
Forth, What you should have said is "Live Service games are not inherently good or evil" because stating otherwise is just bias based on taste.
Not everything needs to be live service but live service brought us Hell Divers.
In regard to your points
"First off, Thor has just straight up misunderstood what the initiative is because it's worded incredibly poorly and he took it at face value." Hard to agree with that. Not only Thor avoids every single instance of any point that does not agree with his POV (private servers/mostly singleplayer games with artificial connection requirement) he also actively refuses to talk with Ross or anyone on that matter.
"Second your attitude when you called him Naive because of his reaction to Ross, Don't do that it makes you look bad, If that was at the start of the video I would have clicked off immediately that was a very poor display." I would say telling Thor is naive is naive itself. It's literally impossible for someone who live in any part of western culture and at least hear how thing are going in US or EU to assume that this person would be able to really think Thor truly believes that Ross tries to do anything else than use already corrupt system to do something good for a change.
"Third, Saying that "it can't be that hard" based on the League of Legends thing and WoW Private servers is incredibly disingenuous it is incredibly difficult to make a game let alone completely reverse engineer it." LoL and WoW are one of few standing online games that actually have hugely custom built infrastructure from code-side. This means that if for any game it should be impossible to built user-ran server, it should be those 2. These two are prime examples that it is possible anyway, even without access to source code or server binaries, just by reverse engineering. There are not the only examples, mind you. Another was Return of Reckoning, which was full server rewrite of MMORPG 'Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning'.
In any case, if for LoL and WoW it can be done by fans, so should devs of the game be able to. It doesn't mean there will be no work to be done on that, but at the end of the day, developing is THE work of the dev teams.
"Not everything needs to be live service but live service brought us Hell Divers." - yeah, and how did it end up? locking alrge part of the world out of the game due to artificial requirement of PS account, even after they bought and played the game. If server binaries would be available, you wouldn't have this problem in the first place.
with assassins creed example why doesn’t the initiative itself call them out then? Thor is only talking about the crew because the initiate calls it out. If the initiative called out assassins creed he would have talked about it
This is a fair point, that being said I think it harms everyone to make perfect the enemy of good.
I just don't agree. And there were also just a few factual error e.g. and first and foremost, the licensing vs buying stuff - Which I've seen a real baffling amount of confusion and such of in the last few days.
Also, unlucky timing, but he did put out another video about this, about 13 hours later, which does also address a few of the points you raised, which he didn't really talk about in the last one.
For example the whole "Then make servers available"-Thing, which I have to admit, I did agree with. Before hearing his counter-arguments, which were things I just didn't think about before.
Because that was another big point of yours, which he also addressed in the new vid, and I just especially disagree with, heavily at that - It's totally fine if you dislike life service games, but there are also a ton of people who really like them, a lot. It's just simply not your place to decide that for literally everyone else.
That it should be made more clear what you are buying and agreeing to etc., again, yes, that should change, because it's actively deceiving customers. But that's a completely different story.
I have to say, the video and audio quality was pretty good nonetheless, especially for not usually doing this, if I understood that part correctly.
I did see that and have put a response to his response up. I normally don't make content so I appreciate the positive feedback.
Except in no good faith interpretation or honest reading of any transaction on steam or any other online storefront would one say this is a limited time license that can be pulled at the whims of the developer from the legal side I don't care what Thor explains how it works this is game companies playing in the grey like how youtube and social media platforms for years have been playing in the grey of publisher and public platform because it hasn't been force into court and they have had to declare what they are
@@michaelkeha isn't that part of Thor's point though - that it should be required to be clear about what we are buying at the time of purchase; a license or a product.
@@michaelkeha @michaelkeha Seeing you start off with "Except" - You did neither really read my comment or listened to Thor, didn’t you?
Cause we both specifically mentioned and criticized that exact point and said that it should be tackeled and changed.
Also, no, with most life service games it is not ambigous what the are. It's just not really made clear to the consumer.
And in the cases where it isn't, well, he and I denounced that, too.
@@HamsterBaddy No with how steam and other online stores present themselves I am saying this it's a license that can be revoked for no reason is deliberately being avoided and thus it is technically illegal under fraud laws it just sits in the grey because it hasn't gone to court this includes Thor's game and every game the company he works with has put out are guilty of this so his denouncement of it means nothing it will continue to mean nothing unless they actually make the corrections needed and I have listened to his points rather throughly between the two videos I can firmly say Thor has made up a crazy scenario in his head and ran with it
We don't need a measure like this. In my opinion developers should only be oblige to market their game as selling a license to a service (doesn't need to be a subscription, one time purchase is fine). This way you know exactly what you're paying for. A button for purchase a license with a big warning they can revoke your license - if you disagree with this just don't pay and don't play the game. If people aren't buying this sort of games because the publisher is unreliable, they have to make non-service games. It's that simple.
Ah yes, the vote with you wallet argument. I'm sure it works this time, after billion failed attempts, of which many issues were in the end fixed by regulations anyways.
@@TealJosh this actually fixes the issue for Ubisoft but if there's a new company with their new game you can't predict when they're going to shut down their game.
Voting with wallet doesn't work here, unfortunately.
"In my opinion developers should only be oblige to market their game as selling a license to a service (doesn't need to be a subscription, one time purchase is fine). This way you know exactly what you're paying for."
If you know the exact date at the time of purchase as to when the game is going to die, then yes, you know "exactly what you're paying for". As soon as that date is indeterminate, _that's_ when it becomes consumer fraud.
"A button for purchase a license with a big warning they can revoke your license"
...should be inherently illegal.
"If people aren't buying this sort of games because the publisher is unreliable, they have to make non-service games."
"If car manufacturers refuse to add seatbelts and airbags, people shouldn't buy automobiles."
"If restaurants refuse to use gutter oil and make people sick, people shouldn't go to restaurants."
"If cotton plantation owners refuse to not use slave labor, people shouldn't buy cotton products."
@@roadent217 Okay, you make a point.
If you buy a car, that company can't just steal it back whenever they want (Like that GTAV mission) because it's illegal and it makes sense to be.
So yes, it should be mandatory in a planning process to figure out what will they do at the end of the lifespan. In other therms, if a company goes under, they should have already made a version in a playable state without their servers.
But if a company goes under who will they sue? This is problem since a company can shut itself and start a new one by different name.
They can go this route also: since when developers stop supporting a game it shuts down, from now on every live service game must be a subscription model.
When live service games have no players then it's best to shut it down nothing last forever
Rhetoric! And you believe it? Not every video game is burning man. People should be able to play what they paid for, that's how goods work
My copy of Alien(1979) is going to last extremely long, decades. Other people's copies will together last virtually forever. None of us own the IP.
Your confusing ~ A few things;
Don't think *You're getting it*
*AAA;* Company-Laws
or
*Indie Gaming;* I.P. Laws.
*Mobiles are seperate;*
__________
Piracy = NOT equal *Piracy*
despite what you Believe.
*EU:* Have G.D.P.R.
U.S.A. Doesnt. - Shooting the messenger is very silly. And you know it.
Thors underlying point makes sense since the language of the initiative is a little bit too vague for my taste too
This is intentional and how EU initiatives work. Experts from each side work out the details with politicians after interest has been proven.
@@Voyajer. I am aware, I live in an EU country
@@159tonythen the vagueness shouldn't be a problem. You know everything will be specified as it is written. An initiative is not a proposed as is addition to the law.
You are completely ignorant to a large portion of gaming. Call of Duty, Fortnite, League of Legends, World of Warcraft, all of these are live service games. Live service games are games that require connection to a server to run. Be that single player or multiplayer. So saying these are bad is completely deaf to the entire argument. Tor isn't saying that things shouldn't change. He is saying this is the wrong attack surface to go after to solve the problems we have. Dark patterns are monetization factors. This initiative doesn't address those. It only addresses killing games. This is literally Thor's entire point. If you want to end Dark Patterns in games, go after that problem. Create an initiative to work on fixing monetization in games and the effects on children and the vulnerable. Don't go after one specific section and then when in negotiations just say "oh by the way...". That isn't how this works, nor is it how it should work. If you want to come to the table in good faith, then make a good faith argument about the topic that is actually bothering you.
You and your little blizzard nepo baby overlord just whine and complain, never doing anything about it. But the worst part of all is the fact that you actively try to sabotage the people ACTUALLY doing something.
killing games is what Ross and the rest of us care about. There's people already working on the predatory monetary practices by the way. one miracle at a time.
Thor is simply being a burden here. Whatever criticism he has, the fact that he refuses to provide his input with the SKG team who is more than open to it, along with him purposefully not mentioning he has conflicts of interests.... and he is supposed to be the one acting in good faith?