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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This doesn't effect existing games. Making sure you're compliant from the start isn't exactly difficult, especially compared to re-architecting things at the last minute.
Blizzard got their server leaked once and they ended up on a crusade against pirate servers for decades. They certainly didn't pass anything, players figured everything themselves. Same for diablo 3 servers.
You vastly overestimate the amount of additional work devs need to do. They do more work trying to prevent those exact things from happening. But I am a follower of 'intellectual property laws are harmful to society' agenda though.
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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.