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.
…
EDIT 2:
Another entire element of this, when it comes to online, and now even many offline games, is the ephemerality of microtransactions.
The business model of such games is very often not that the game itself is the product.
The business model actually is the game is a platform for a monopolized market, where the core point of the game existing is merely to be good or popular enough that a large amount of revenue can be made off of mtx.
The game is thus either a free or paid voucher that allows you access to a localalized monopoly market, where the monopolist has the legal ability to evaporate, at any point in time, all the goods sold in that market.
From a user/consumer pov, when a live service game shutsdown, all of your mtx have now just vanished into the ether.
If you mandate that dedicated server tools be released upon EoL of such a game, as well as a PII (name, banking data, etc) sanitized version of the db that connects userids to their game inventory, you can now, if people are willing to split the bill or otherwise cover server costs, actually keep people’s persistent accounts alive.
If you do not actually mandate this, then functionally what this means is that in addition to the game itself being a total write off for the consumer, so are all the ingame items they purchased.
This would also massively negate the basically FOMO drive that causes many people to buy the sequel of a live service game, or a new one that is fairly similar.
If there actually exists an option to just keep playing your favored game, keep all your ingame purchases, there is more likely to be a cadre of people who would prefer to just stick with their old game, and not buy or switch over to a new one.
Game publishers don’t like this, they do like having the ability to evaporate your old account and a release of an official new one.
Imagine if Warframe just nuked your account every 3 or 5 years, forcing you to start over in Warframe 2 and 3 and 4.
That is unfortunately, basically the existing industry norm.
https://youtu.be/ioqSvLqB46Y
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.
…
EDIT 2:
Another entire element of this, when it comes to online, and now even many offline games, is the ephemerality of microtransactions.
The business model of such games is very often not that the game itself is the product.
The business model actually is the game is a platform for a monopolized market, where the core point of the game existing is merely to be good or popular enough that a large amount of revenue can be made off of mtx.
The game is thus either a free or paid voucher that allows you access to a localalized monopoly market, where the monopolist has the legal ability to evaporate, at any point in time, all the goods sold in that market.
From a user/consumer pov, when a live service game shutsdown, all of your mtx have now just vanished into the ether.
If you mandate that dedicated server tools be released upon EoL of such a game, as well as a PII (name, banking data, etc) sanitized version of the db that connects userids to their game inventory, you can now, if people are willing to split the bill or otherwise cover server costs, actually keep people’s persistent accounts alive.
If you do not actually mandate this, then functionally what this means is that in addition to the game itself being a total write off for the consumer, so are all the ingame items they purchased.
This would also massively negate the basically FOMO drive that causes many people to buy the sequel of a live service game, or a new one that is fairly similar.
If there actually exists an option to just keep playing your favored game, keep all your ingame purchases, there is more likely to be a cadre of people who would prefer to just stick with their old game, and not buy or switch over to a new one.
Game publishers don’t like this, they do like having the ability to evaporate your old account and a release of an official new one.
Imagine if Warframe just nuked your account every 3 or 5 years, forcing you to start over in Warframe 2 and 3 and 4.
That is unfortunately, basically the existing industry norm.
There is no defence for making games completely unplayable.
https://youtu.be/x3jMKeg9S-s
The reason why publishers force the older games to become unplayable these days is to force you to buy their newer stuff.
https://youtu.be/TF4zH8bJDI8
https://youtu.be/0A1CCc_DClY
It’s ironic that people in the comments are defending Ross.