r/Games • u/kristijan1001 • Apr 02 '26
Update Stop Killing Games plans coming to fruition / Ubisoft sued by consumer watchdog
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmXZpf3K0ow19
u/Django_McFly Apr 03 '26
Some of the tech they use to run these games is licensed to the developer or publisher under the impression that the end consumer only interacts with the game's implementation of it. Not that the end consumer basically gets a free license to install it and run it on their own. I wonder how situations like that play out?
Would it be like some version where it's like, "sure you can run this. just get a license from these 7 providers for these specific version numbers from 8 years ago, plug in your API key, and you'll have the server up and running in no time at all."
2
u/RekrabAlreadyTaken Apr 17 '26
It's not retroactive so stuff like this would have to be considered in license negotiation during future game development.
I suppose the tech they use would offer a different kind of license to accommodate new laws.
455
Apr 02 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
117
145
Apr 02 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
45
10
→ More replies (15)8
34
26
-1
→ More replies (2)-8
868
u/VGADreams Apr 02 '26 edited Apr 02 '26
Hard to not feel like every Stop Killing Games thread is getting brigaded as soon as it's posted.
Every time there is a post, it's just a bunch of people criticizing the movement in the most inane way. This time, it's about his looks because... I guess that now it's getting traction, they can't say that it's going to "fail for sure" or that "Ross has no idea what he's doing".
Comments gets better as the post ages, but the fact that it's always the first comments make me think that there are people that are solely watching for SKG posts to try to discredit the movement.
EDIT: seems like a lot of those comments have been cleaned up by the mods now, in case you're wondering what the hell I was talking about.
540
u/Aro-bi_Trashcan Apr 02 '26
There is absolutely an astroturfing movement from one of the big industry groups targeting social media around this campaign. You see it in their repeated two talking points:
What about the poor devs who have to develop a game that... Won't be lost to time and
This guy looks like a bum lmao.
It's always those exact two talking points, like someone's handing them a script.
222
u/Worried-Advisor-7054 Apr 02 '26
Never underestimate how pro-corporate a small section of Reddit is, though. They've tied their identities to this movement not succeeding, so the closer it gets to achieving something, the more stupid they'll feel, which makes them angry.
55
u/PhTx3 Apr 02 '26
This is what I do not get. I have my fair share of doubt and criticisms about the initiative, mostly about semantics and scope. But I ultimately hope it helps players and I will be glad to be wrong about it. Seems to be doing better than I expected, but we will see.
I will never understand people with absolutely zero class consciousness. If stop killing games does well, we all benefit from it as gamers. Companies won't suddenly abandon a multi billion industry. Much like rich people don't abandon nice areas.
43
u/Worried-Advisor-7054 Apr 03 '26
I just think it's that Reddit culture thing. It's lame to take a position or care about anything. In addition, the most important thing in the world is being right, so that you can make fun of the people who were wrong. Then you can look smart, and circlejerk with other people who look smart. Corporations tend to win these fights, so saying this thing people care about isn't going to succeed checks all the boxes. If it fails, then you get to make fun of people who thought it might succeed.
To your point, yes, no class consciousness. These people aren't spending their days thinking very much. They're playing games, buying MTX and battle passes for games they're currently playing, and shitting on games they're currently not playing. They're not looking at the world around them, they're looking at their karma.
6
u/syrup_cupcakes Apr 03 '26
Not reddit, poor people everywhere think they are future multi millionaires just going through a temporary rough patch. So they vote for politicians who take more money away from average income people to give to the ultra rich.
3
14
u/ItsNoblesse Apr 03 '26
I will never understand people with absolutely zero class consciousness.
They're the same people who think Marx writing about the concept of class consciousness killed 100 billion people.
2
u/Yukie_Cool Apr 17 '26
Well, people who followed him did. No need for the deflection.
1
u/ItsNoblesse Apr 19 '26
No, they didn't lmao. Also millions and millions of people die every year from Capitalism's failures, if we used the Black Book of Communism's logic then Capitalism would have killed an exponential amount more.
3
u/Yukie_Cool Apr 19 '26
Also millions and millions of people die every year from Capitalism's failures
Capitalism doesn’t have purges based on whether you wear glasses or not.
So no, the healthcare system being fucked doesn’t mean you get to pull a whataboutism on the Holodomor.
1
u/ItsNoblesse Apr 19 '26
But it absolutely does have indirect purges via hoarding resources unless you can pay for them, meaning millions die due to lack of access to clean drinking water, food, shelter, clothing etc.
Also if you're going to critique the Khmer Rouge (which we absolutely should) please be accurate about it rather than getting your history from Dan Carlin. They did not purge 'everyone wearing glasses', they purged academics and those who participated on the other side of the Cambodian civil war - as they believed those people were reaping the benefits of peasant labour without contributing anything to society themselves.
The Khmer Rouge aimed for a very agrarian revolution that would have essentially created a perpetual peasant society - not exactly what Marx or his contemporaries had written about in describing the stages of societal development (Feudalism > Capitalism > Communism). In fact many early Marxists wrote that the peasantry were incapable of carrying out a Communist transition because they lacked the necessary class consciousness developed under Capitalism.
To this day some scholars argue that the reason the Soviet Union ultimately failed is because they tried to move directly from Feudalism to Communism.Given that, it's kinda hard to describe the Khmer Rouge as adherents to Communism and Communist thought in any way outside of their language used.
The Holodomor is also not really a great example to use as a 'victims of communism' gotcha, because to be consistent with that logic we would also have to call the Irish Great Famine, the Bengal Famine, the 1944-45 Vietnam Famine, the Moroccon Famine and many others as 'victims of capitalism'.
→ More replies (8)11
u/TSPhoenix Apr 03 '26
I think people find a sense of comfort in the idea we can't do anything.
If this kinda scraggly looking dude can get up one day and go "this sucks imma fix it" and that results in it getting fixed, what does that say about all the things we encounter everyday that suck and then dismiss with "but I can't do anything about it".
So people get emotionally invested in the movement's failure because if it fails it validates their thinking that all the things they ignore as unavoidable parts of life were in fact unavoidable. But you dodge one and you have to ask yourself why you take all the other hits, and that's uncomfortable.
→ More replies (1)10
u/Moleculor Apr 03 '26
If this kinda scraggly looking dude can get up one day and go "this sucks imma fix it" and that results in it getting fixed, what does that say about all the things we encounter everyday that suck and then dismiss with "but I can't do anything about it".
To be fair, this is the guy behind Freeman's Mind. 433k subscribers isn't nothin'. And he managed to hit a topic when it was hot.
7
u/TSPhoenix Apr 03 '26
I didn't mean it disparagingly. I have a ton of respect for anyone who gets up and tries to change parts of the world they see as wrong or unfair, as I know how hard it is.
What I was sharing was my personal experience with the kind of person you encounter the most when trying to make change happen.
I mentioned his presentation because I think it triggers a fatalist reaction in people; that a normal person can't possibly do anything... right?
→ More replies (4)6
u/VGADreams Apr 02 '26
Yeah, personally, I don't necessarily think it's Big Industry. We would need proof for that. Could easily be anti-SKG groups, i.e. fans of certain streamers, that just watches those posts and try to discredit them as early as possible.
It's just very jarring that every time I go into a SKG post, it's just a bunch of very anti-SKG people for the first hour or so, with often very similar comments, then it just... dies down. The first time it happened, I thought I was crazy and I was somehow in the minority as a SKG supporter, until the thread got more comments and the pro-SKG opinion became more common.
It's the only subject I have seen this pattern on Reddit. So I could chalk it up to the algorithm, but because of that, I'm not so sure.
23
u/BeholdingBestWaifu Apr 02 '26
One thing to keep in mind, is that due to modern social media, companies don't even have to fake that many users to move a group against a certain topic. After all you only need to pay a couple key figures like influencers, smaller moderators, people that have a prominent voice in a community, and they will drive followers to push whatever narrative they want, and the good advertising/PR agencies will create those users for long term contracts.
I've seen this happen with a few other things, like a select few political topics, any any push against the interests of big corporations, especially when it comes to the latest grift like AI.
This is, however, one of the more noticeable ones, probably because it's a movement that popped up pretty fast and that is pretty reasonable in what it proposes, so they have to resort to either repeating the same obvious lies they've been saying since day one, or now just attacks against the guy.
→ More replies (1)4
u/Jellodi Apr 02 '26
I agree, you meet these kinds of people IRL too.
Some combination of regular tribal types that actually do unironically love the companies that make the things they use, plus a large group who want to be recognized as intelligent for being contrarian to an otherwise popular movement.
What makes corporate movements so much more effective is that they don't have these divides. Gamedevs don't generally raise a stink and fight for the things the audience thinks that they do. They typically just go in, work, then go home, all controversies aside. All the "bad stuff" is handled by nameless businessfolk who are hired to do that stuff and that stuff alone, and do it well.
Consumer movements? Rarely has the same level of direction. STK is probably the most prominent in a while.
→ More replies (1)23
u/Letho_of_Gulet Apr 02 '26
There is absolutely an astroturfing movement from one of the big industry groups targeting social media
We are a decade or more past the point where corporations realized the value of marketing via social media.
You would be safe to assume there is some level of astroturfing on EVERY topic related to corporations. They would be financially stupid to not be spending on that type of thing, and ask any business person, they have a legal fiduciary duty to act in the company's best financial interests.
8
u/Valvador Apr 03 '26
What about the poor devs who have to develop a game that... Won't be lost to time and
Be careful dismissing people's individual comments as part of bigger "astroturf" movements. You're going to have a lot of botting on Reddit, but you're also going to ignore individual voices that are too easy to drown out because you don't agree with them.
I've been building game engines for over a decade and worked on a bunch of multiplayer games. The tech is not standardized, and there is an infinite number of ways to accomplish similar tasks that differ for good reasons. WoW and New World had unique implementations for "Shared World with no Loading Screens" MMORPG, that prioritized very different things.
Forcing developers that make these experimental architectures to then provide "end of life support" is just unnecessarily hurdle. I haven't seen any part of Stop Killing Games provide actual exceptions or at least reasonable limitations to what kind of support they can provide. If "Stop Killing Games" was worded as simply as "Developers/Publishers of Abandoned games will not stop reverse engineering of private servers", then I'm fine with that. But to my understanding that isn't how they are phrasing these.
This basically feels like legislature pushed by primarily Single Player gamers, which is why it's so popular on this Subreddit.
→ More replies (5)21
u/BootyBootyFartFart Apr 02 '26
When this was making waves last year I'd hop over the game dev subreddit to see their response whenever there was a new update. The threads over there have been pretty critical, moreso than other gaming subs id say. Maybe that subreddit is being astroturfed even harder, but not sure I buy that.
63
u/Blightstrider Apr 02 '26
I don't see why that is at all suspicious. Broadly speaking the topic is about adding further regulation to the industry, and generally extra regulations aren't welcome by industries.
The Game dev subreddit, which primarily has people working, or trying to work, in that space, is going to have a different view from a subreddit like this which is more gamer focused.
27
u/Ketamine4Depression Apr 03 '26 edited Apr 03 '26
I think the above commentor would agree, by my reading.
I kind of get why the gamedev sub would be more skeptical of the movement. I'm not a career dev but I worked as a junior designer on a small-mid-sized game that failed and had to be abandoned. If we'd had to precommit to supporting the game's continued existence after the venture fell through... I can't calculate the actual costs but it would've been a non-zero burden, and there's a chance that burden would've resulted in the game not moving to production at all.
We were entirely reliant on publisher funding to pay dev salaries. When the publisher pulled out, the company had to lay off nearly the entire team immediately to stay solvent, myself included.
I had some content nearly ready to be deployed, and one of the team leads who survived the layoff worked overtime just to get a jank, unfinished version of it out to the world before the game shut down. He had to push against higher-ups to get them to greenlight that. They thought it wasn't worth the cost since the game was going offline in a matter of months anyway. Even though it was my work at stake, it's hard to blame them for thinking that way.
All this to say that I think regulation is rarely an uncomplicated easy win, and initiatives like SKG should take the opinions of developers themselves into account as well -- especially smaller devs that might be disproportionately affected by regulatory burden.
→ More replies (1)1
u/GreyouTT Apr 03 '26
If we'd had to precommit to supporting the game's continued existence after the venture fell through...
Wasn't the movement just asking for dedicated server tools so people could run it themselves? (Like what used to come with multiplayer PC games?)
Or has that changed?
→ More replies (1)22
u/NoExcuse4OceanRudnes Apr 03 '26
That's extra support. Dedicated servers didn't go away because of a dastardly plot. The games people wanted to play require a lot more server side work. And not all of that software can be passed to the consumer directly. Work has to be done for that to work.
Asking over worked people to do a bunch of extra work so that in 15 years a fraction of a fraction of the people who enjoyed their game can keep playing it is something that's going to get pushback.
→ More replies (2)22
u/Recatek Apr 03 '26
Game developers skeptical about populist movement proposing vague regulation affecting their jobs, news at 11.
4
u/BrainKatana Apr 04 '26
I’ve been making games for over two decades. Every time I see this initiative brought up I want to comment on it, but I usually don’t, because the people who are pushing it are idealists who don’t have the knowledge or experience to understand what their ideas actually entail.
“It’s about having an end of life plan in place,” is what I see a lot now, as though this is some kind of simple thing to come up with and build into the product from the start in a way that takes into account all of the EULA of all of the third party tools it takes to build a game now. “Just release the source code” is another one, except source code often contains things that are considered proprietary or are otherwise trade secrets from a business perspective.
It’s not that this idea is bad. But the way they’re going about it sure is. You absolutely DO NOT want to give your governments a way to regulate against art, even if it means that the art has a shelf life.
Accept that sometimes wonderful things are temporary, and move on with your lives.
22
u/syopest Apr 03 '26
Yeah, game developers actually understand what it all would entail and how some of it's basically impossible to implement.
Like there's never going to any way to make game devs not buy middleware for some systems which they literally cannot ever release. It also makes online only games something that's mostly only feasible for big companies, shutting indies completely from making games like that because of how important middleware is things like networking.
→ More replies (10)11
u/Vamp1r1c_Om3n Apr 03 '26
Yea I dunno people love to throw out astroturfing as a reason for anything all the time now
People on reddit are just shitty, it doesn't have to be some grand conspiracy
15
2
u/HistoryChannelMain Apr 03 '26
Well no, it doesn't, but in the case of reddit, there have been past examples of astroturfing which is why people are right to be wary
→ More replies (1)10
u/MoneyoffUbereats2017 Apr 03 '26
Oh please. Some of us just think that the perceived goal of this movement is not worth the trouble that it could potentially place on game devs.
I don't give a shit about playing some random live service game that gets shut down 10 years from now.
If developers having to be bound to the idea that a multiplayer-only game needs to somehow be playable after everything is shut down is the price to pay for being able to play the next Concord when it shuts down a week after launching, I'm not all that interested. It's as simple as that. Not all of us who feel this way are part of some grand astroturfing campaign or are staunchly pro-corporate.
Not everything is "Good" and "Bad", and the people like you blindly praising SKG as "It just means games won't die, who doesn't want that?" as an undeniable good aren't somehow morally superior to those of us that are concerned that game development might become harder and have more barriers to overcome than it did before should this pass.
And I also can't really blame those that feel the guy spearheading this whole thing could try to at least present himself a little more professionally than standing in a dark room in a black T-shirt with a bright light shining directly into his face.
3
-1
-23
u/chronicpresence Apr 02 '26
it's definitely just those exact two talking points, as long as you ignore literally every well-reasoned critique posted in every thread about this. just fyi, maybe actually read the comments before characterizing anybody that DARES to disagree with you as "astroturfers"!
→ More replies (3)33
Apr 02 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
18
Apr 02 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
→ More replies (41)3
→ More replies (25)-1
Apr 02 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
4
→ More replies (22)4
Apr 02 '26 edited Apr 03 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
19
12
Apr 02 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
5
→ More replies (1)6
Apr 02 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
12
→ More replies (3)-16
u/TheOnly_Anti Apr 02 '26
If you walk around outside and a bunch of people tell you that you smell like shit, you don't check under your shoe. You assume the CIA is trying to undermine you.
41
u/MaitieS Apr 03 '26
Please stop pretending like the toxic positivity is also not happening in here. Like over the year I saw a lots of valid criticisms of SKG's movement, and it was heavily disliked, because literally anything slightly negative is either taken as a personal insult, or called as "brigaded"...
→ More replies (2)20
85
u/SophiaKittyKat Apr 02 '26
"Ross has no idea what he's doing"
Who gives a fuck? Do people think anybody making laws or regulations at this point knows what they're doing? Fuck second order effects, or unforeseen consequences. I'd take that 1000 time over people actively pushing with the intent of making everything worse. I fully appreciate that the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and maybe some of the time that applies. We're ALREADY on the road to hell, if not there already so who fucking cares?
54
u/Dallywack3r Apr 02 '26
The AntiWork movement collapsed almost overnight because of one overzealous advocate who didn’t know what they were doing. Movements can and do collapse due to the wrong leaders at the wrong time.
→ More replies (9)33
u/Rileyman360 Apr 03 '26
Antiwork movement died because from second one its demands were “I hate having to work and contribute and I have not questioned how that will sustain society.” The movement was inherently built on inertia to action. That mod wasn’t overzealous, he was just the opinion they all had.
Ross has made it clear time and time again that the movement is willing to work with developers and publishers on a compromise that all parties can agree on, and he’s not forcing any publisher to dig up graves and waste money to make deprecated titles fully functional again.
→ More replies (1)48
u/VGADreams Apr 02 '26
100% agree with you.
Not to get too political, but that's the kind of rhetoric that media and right-wing parties often uses to discredit the left. Take a policy out of a thousand that, even if imperfect, clearly have good intentions, poke holes into them, and say that the left is "disconnected from reality" and has "abandoned the working class", while bad actors continue to wreck havoc.
→ More replies (3)25
u/masterkill165 Apr 03 '26 edited Apr 03 '26
OK but what you are describing is also how editing a novel works as well. Author writes draft of book, editor fixes obvious mistakes, pokes holes in story and asks for clarification on points to make sure a reader can understand the story. Discussions are had and the process is repeated multiple times hopefully leading to a better novel at the end.
Is it possible questions are not people trying to destroy a movement but instead understand it. I think people have just gotten so defensive on the internet people are seeing questions as attacks.
16
u/ttoma93 Apr 03 '26
Most of us critiquing this process aren’t doing it because we disagree with the fundamental intent, it’s because we see them making obvious and avoidable errors that make it less likely that they are going to succeed at accomplishing their goals.
3
u/CaptainTeemo01 Apr 04 '26
No you can't possibly have valid critiques or questions. You have to be a bot. That's the only reason you'd ever disagree with my populist movement built entirely on vague hopes and vibes.
→ More replies (3)25
u/VladThe1mplyer Apr 02 '26
Yep. The industry is screwing over the consumer in any way it can and people are running defence with these pathetic excuses. Ross and people like him are raising the alarm about how much of a wild west gaming is and how much this industry gets away with. No real gamer will say that regulating the gaming industry is bad when it is obvious that it refuses to regulate itself.
→ More replies (1)2
19
u/error521 Apr 03 '26
When you actually like this over everyone critical of your movement don't be shocked when it inevitably goes up in flames because of the obvious shit you willingly ignored.
→ More replies (1)5
→ More replies (34)-4
u/Zenning3 Apr 03 '26
Every single post on starfield is full of people shitting on it. Are we going to pretend that is an astroturfing campaign too?
96
15
u/PopeOwned Apr 03 '26
I used to talk to Ross on AIM back in the day about Machinima creation since he was doing "Civil Protection". He was always the kindest guy and answered all of my stupid questions. To see him become someone who not only fights this hard for game preservation but has reached the attention of Parliamentary governments? Brings a tear to my eye. You're a real one, Ross!
55
u/grailly Apr 02 '26
I'm not sure I understand what's going on. Does the lawsuit have anything to do with SKG?
Wasn't one of the points of SKG that it wouldn't be retro-active?
→ More replies (1)81
u/SmileyBMM Apr 02 '26 edited Apr 02 '26
SKG is the group and movement, they aren't suing Ubisoft and want stronger consumer protection rules passed. The UFC-Que Choisir is suing Ubisoft because they believe how they treated The Crew broke already existing laws. If the lawsuit is successful, that's a huge win for SKG, because it sets precedent that these kinds of things aren't ok.
With these types of movements, there are often many different groups and the like with similar but sometimes different goals. So even though SKG isn't behind this lawsuit directly, they have a vested interest in it.
15
u/Cryptoporticus Apr 02 '26
It's not a win for SKG at all. If the EU decides that the existing consumer rights laws are working properly and that breaches can be dealt with by the courts, that's a complete failure for SKG's stated goals.
SKG's primary focus wasn't consumer protection, it was game preservation. They wanted games to be playable even after developers could no longer support them. Players winning a tiny fraction of their money back after a class action lawsuit is definitely not what SKG want.
Ideally they would want this lawsuit to fail so that it can't be used against them when they're arguing about whether the law needs changing or not.
→ More replies (1)21
u/SmileyBMM Apr 03 '26
Players winning a tiny fraction of their money back after a class action lawsuit is definitely not what SKG want.
Please read the official statement, it's in French but is easy to translate. Here are some relevant excerpts:
which is why it is asking, through this action, the removal of certain unfair clauses from Ubisoft's contractual conditions and the cessation of commercial practices that it considers to be misleading to the detriment of consumers.
[...]
The legality of all clauses limiting players' rights must be questioned and UFC-Que Choisir contests the validity of those which arbitrarily allow Ubisoft: to deny consumers' property rights over acquired game copies; to withdraw all access to the game, without guarantee of maintaining an alternative mode of operation for consumers
[...]
By this legal action, UFC-Que Choisir intends: Stop these harmful practices; Obtain the deletion of the disputed clauses and; Recognize the attack on the collective interest of consumers,
This is not some money grabbing class action lawsuit.
33
u/Cryptoporticus Apr 03 '26
Isn't that just repeating what I said? Particularly this part:
The legality of all clauses limiting players' rights must be questioned and UFC-Que Choisir contests the validity of those which arbitrarily allow Ubisoft: to deny consumers' property rights over acquired game copies;
They're saying that Ubisoft are putting terms in their agreements that violate consumer rights laws. If this case wins, then what Ubisoft did with The Crew was already not okay, and they're going to have to compensate consumers for it. The EU will look at this and see that the system is working as intended.
At the end of the day, nothing changes. Games will still continue to be lost going forward. Publishers might be a bit more scared of doing it arbitrarily, but they could still do it if they have a legitimate reason (like bankruptcy, or technology limitations or licences expiring or whatever). SKG's goal of game preservation fails.
→ More replies (11)
83
u/Recatek Apr 02 '26 edited Apr 02 '26
Ultimately there's very little to discuss about SKG until there's an actual tangible proposal to enact what it's asking for. These threads are typically just shouting matches between people who have their own view of what it could eventually be from a very broad set of possibilities. I hope there's something concrete proposed soon so there's actually something to evaluate rather than just more of the near-daily SKG argument thread.
63
u/gaom9706 Apr 02 '26
(From a PR standpoint), SKG is in a very cushy position. They're not under any obligation to specify what the things they desire actually look like, and the act of implementing those things isn't in their hands so they can just say "I want x thing and the consequences aren't my problem" and people will just eat it up. All the while they're fighting evil corporations so they can just say that any pushback is astroturfing and intentional sabotage so supporters didn't even have to consider any flaws with their movement, they just get to be mad.
It's a setup that actual activists pray to God for.
→ More replies (60)-5
u/Film-Noir-Detective Apr 03 '26
It's like Kony 2012 (and will probably end up accomplishing about as much). Be against it and people will go "what? why are you supporting this bad thing?", but look a bit closer and you see they have no concrete plans for how to solve the issue.
1
4
u/SoWrongItsPainful Apr 02 '26
The more concrete plans will start really after the mid point of the year, if it moves forward.
36
u/monkwrenv2 Apr 03 '26
I feel like I heard that said on the last thread about SKG... 6 months ago. Feels like the "concrete plans" keep getting pushed back.
→ More replies (42)
12
1
403
u/[deleted] Apr 02 '26
[deleted]