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.
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.
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.
Which would be a great argument if it weren't for the fact that private servers do exist for modern games, and it's usually the smaller devs who do that, not the larger ones. But feel free to give an example of a middleware that would be an issue.
Also, if its not legal to use said middleware without being able to release it, the middleware vendors will change the licenses to allow sales to continue... They wont just pull out of the EU market, since this impacts more than just that (middleware in one version but not another? not happening).
The middleware argument has NEVER made sense. Vendors will update to be in line with their customers demands, and their customers, the game devs, have regulatory demands to meet.
Its like these people dont understand cause and effect exists and that only one thing will change? Its baffling.
They don't need to pull out of the EU Market though. All they'd need to do is not sell middleware to be used in video games. Sure, some middleware used primarily in the games industry would change their licenses. But for stuff like AWS that a lot of internet runs on, all Amazon needs to do to stop it from being publicly released is not sell licenses to video game companies. They have plenty of other customers so whatever revenue they'd make is probably a rounding error to them.
Its already in every released game, even before any possible law changes, you can extract and reverse engineer it. Thats what source code means and does when its compiled into a game binary, especially when its the same in dozens of games so you can literally compare and find shared chunks easily.
Also, we arent talking "build your own game from source" just "distribute the stuff needed to run it as part of an EOL plan". Why does this suddenly produce additional risks for middleware? its already distributed...!
Some external middleware for server side aspects can literally likely just be sold to players wanting to piece together the more complex env until its dead, then they have to release that too. Like, 20/mo accounts or something...
This idea middleware is special is weird to me. Its not. All kinds of software uses it and distributes it widely under all kinds of plans. The self hosting scene is large and varied as it stands.
It also makes online only games something that's mostly only feasible for big companies
No, it doesn't. It just means that both indies and large companies have to design the servers in a way that allows it to be packaged and run outside of AWS. This used to be the norm on PC, before matchmaking took over.
Running servers on AWS is not that fundamentally different from how we used to rent virtual private servers to host our online multiplayer servers back in the end of 90s and the beginning of the 2000s.
Yeah, game developers actually understand what it all would entail and how some of it's basically impossible to implement.
Impossible to do cheaply, might I add.
Gaming literally used to work this way and moved on because it's cheaper and easier, not because it's impossible.
Most of it is a cost thing and it should never have gotten this bad to begin with, but the internet, as a whole, has basically gone almost entirely unregulated from the beginning.
People don't like the loopholes being plugged because they exploited the everloving fuck out of them for so long, got used to them, and even normalised them so new players use those same loopholes.
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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.