Videos

I often agree with Jason, but he is completely missing the point, to such an extent that I will say he is either being intentionally misleading, or is displaying an extreme amount of ignorance/laziness/intellectual dishonesty.

He's a game dev, he is obviously familiar with how game architecture works, and he just is not even reading the entire text of the initiative, nor does he seem to be at all familiar with the specific solutions Ross has proposed.

Jason is acting like this initiative will require that all future games with online servers will be prevented from being made, because the servers would be required to just be kept up, forever...

Or that multiplayer games would have to somehow be made into entirely single player games before a server shutdown.

That is not what this is calling for.

What is being called for is that if a game is online only, and its servers go down someday...

... you have to freely release the dedicated server tools, so that a group of enthusiasts at least have the possibility of running their own servers.

Obviously it would be ludicrous to demand a business keep operating servers at a loss in perpetuity.

Fucking obviously duh, this is one of the first things Ross explains in his earlier videos on this.

...

Jason cherry picks from Ross's later videos on the subject, which focus on 'how could we actually implement these solutions' without including the actually pretty specific solutions Ross lays out in detail in his earlier videos on the subject.

Jason tows the line of 'well technically you're not purchasing a product, you are licesnsing a service'... when the whole entire point is that this is a bullshit paradigm, which allows businesses an insane amount of leverage when compared to consumers, who have basically 0 rights under this paradigm.

...

Jason repeatedly says that this initiative is trying to kill all live service games, all multiplayer games, when it very much is not, and he is either being intentionally misleading about this, or somehow has not actually read the text of the initiative he is confidently critiquing, nor watched any of Ross's videos other than than the one he spliced in.

What this proposes is that if you buy a multiplayer or live service game, that when the official servers for that game go down, the developer/publisher must release some kind of server code so that people could run their own servers legally, without having to resort to hacking together or reverse engineering a server emulator, which is currently something that often gets such players/server operators into legal trouble.

There is no text anywhere that says what Jason says it does. He has not read the text, he doesn't actually read more than a few sentences.

This is like your average science illiterate person cherry picking a sentence or two from a 40 page peer reviewed paper and just critiquing only that.

...

Jason spends a lot of time critiquing Ross's reasoning behind the strategy for pursuing Ross's previously outlined, detailed proposals... and Jason bases basically all of his criticisms off of a total non understanding of those actual proposals, by basically making up his own extremely misleading interpretation.

He calls them disgusting and gross, because the language is vague and damaging, and there's no way you'll change his mind on this... but he doesn't actually even read the language he calls disgusting.

If he spent 10 minutes reading the actual text, a few hours watching all of Ross's videos, he would know he is spouting a completely bullshit misrepresentation.

He is strawmanning, and I find it highly unlikely that he does not know he is doing so.

This is Jordan Peterson freaking the fuck out over C16 throwing people in jail for accidentally misgendering someine... when the law does not actually do that, at all.

...

What Jason proposes is simply making it obvious to players that they're not actually acquiring a perpetual liscense.

Ross has already addessed this!

It doesn't solve the problem!

It actual codifies the practice of making killable games further into law!

... I find it very hard to believe Jason's video is in good faith.

...

Video game publishers do not like the idea of having to deal with competiton from already existing, older, often cheaper games.

They want everyone to be forced to keep buying their new products, and they'll murder their old products to force people into doing this, into upgrading their hardware and their OS to keep up with games that are increasingly unoptimized, buggy as fuck, shoved out the door as a product 6 months or a year before they're actually ready for release.

If you did that with any other physically tangible consumer good, it would be considered fraud, selling a defective product, using deceptive and misleading marketing, etc.

As the head of a publishing studio, Jason obviously directly stands to benefit from intentionally not understanding the actual proposal here, strawmanning it, and spreading disinfo.

...

EDIT: A whole other swath of shady, shitty game publisher practices that this addresses is not having broken, no longer maintained, always online DRM verification bullcrap for single player games.

Games for Windows Live, anyone?

Anything on PC that uses that, when GFWL ate shit you literally had to rely on cracked, pirated exes until GoG came around.

Oh you wanna play your legit purchased PC version of Halo 2, Fable 3?

Fuck you, impossible.

Oh you wanna play your legit purchased Steam version of GTA IV?

Oops, GFWL filled its pants and drowned in it, now you gotta buy the game again after Rockstar releases it again with GFWL stripped out.

There is no defence for making games completely unplayable.

https://youtu.be/x3jMKeg9S-s