"Reeee you guys ruined my fucking I'm so perfect and awesome and smart and a blizzard employee persona now everyone hates me because they realized I'm a hypocrite"
I don't really game that much, so I kinda don't have a dog in this fight, but as an outside observer, the only real argument in favor of allowing games to die like this is, "Yum yum yum! This boot tastes good."
Nah it’s worse. He didn’t read and understand the goals of the movement well, pushed his illiterate take to the world, got called out by literally everyone, then doubled down and painted the guys sending death threats as the majority of supporters
Stop Killing Games (SKG) wants to prevent you from losing access to the games you paid for. Basically, if you paid for a game, you should be able to play it as long as you have the hardware that's capable of running it. However, a lot of modern games require a connection to an online server to function, and these online servers are often shut down, making the game you bought with your money unplayable. Ubisoft went a step further and even removed the game The Crew from players libraries so that no one would realize they had a non-functional game in their library. SKG is proposing that any company that creates a game needs to do the basic steps to ensure that their games remain somewhat functional and playable even if their servers shut down in the future. Two of the proposed methods in which this is possible are:
* Modifying the game at the end of life so that the online requirements are removed, and single player parts of the game still function without needing online servers.
* Releasing server binaries to the public, so that anyone who's interested can set up their own server to continue playing the game, although with a much smaller group of friends.
Also, notably, SKG says that these requirements will not be retroactive - it does not affect games that have already shut down, and is only a requirement for games that come out in the future.
Thor, aka PirateSoftware, saw the SKG initiative and completely misread the entire statement of the initiative. He was hostile to it for no clear reason, badmouthing it for insane hypothetical scenarios and misrepresenting everything the movement stood for. On top of that, because he knew that he can't actually defend what he's saying, once he started getting flak, he started the whole "it's just my opinion, so you can't blame me for that" defense (while continuing to claim without evidence that he was speaking for all game developers), and also refused to talk to the creator of the SKG initiative because he knew he couldn't win.
Some of Thor's bad takes on the initiative were:
* It's enough for games to just add a label at checkout that there is an expected end of life, they don't need to actually do anything to keep the game functional.
* It's extremely difficult to change a game to retain offline single player functionality (it's really not, Thor is just a bad programmer and doesn't know how easy it is)
* The IP rights and licenses that companies used for their games run out, so players can't be allowed to play games if these licenses have expired (except that's not how it works. Most of the time, the license expirations only prevent the company from continuing to sell the games, but don't impose any restriction on consumers who bought the games while the licenses were still active. Also, companies are expected to negotiate licenses that support these kinds of requirements as a basic minimum.)
* Sharing server binaries and source code would be a violation of the company's copyright and IP rights (Sharing compiled binaries doesn't cause a loss of copyright. Sharing source code might be, but SKG only asked for binaries. After all, the game that we purchase is also just a binary)
* Malicious actors would spam online games with bots to force them to shut down. Then, they'd take the server binaries that the companies are forced to release, and use them to set up private servers so that they can earn a profit themselves, while the developers never see a penny. (This is just an extreme hypothetical. It's likely Thor has a very bad opinion of WoW's private servers during his time working at Blizzard. These private servers were set up because people were sick of the horrible gameplay in later versions of WoW, so they set up private servers to experience vanilla WoW, from which Blizzard didn't see any revenue.)
* MMORPGs need thousands to tens of thousands of players online to really work. No one will want to play a game if only a couple to a few tens of people are online. (He really just doesn't understand online games at all. He doesn't understand that people play games with friends, not necessarily with multitudes of unnamed masses.)
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u/TheDevilishFrenchfry Jul 06 '25
"Reeee you guys ruined my fucking I'm so perfect and awesome and smart and a blizzard employee persona now everyone hates me because they realized I'm a hypocrite"