Ah yes the guy who refuses to talk to Ross, who has no idea how citizen petitions in the EU work and who has a vested interest in this failing. Surely a voice to listen to regarding this petition.

May I ask why?

Imma break down their points and provide my own counter-arguments:

Client-Server model games can’t be client only because people could cheat

The publisher can provide the executable for the server portion of the client-server game at no cost to them.

The Crew was online only and had been running for 10 years, for it to continue running would cost Ubisoft more money and squeals provide the same experience with continued support

The publisher can provide the executable for the server portion of the client-server game at no cost to them.

Excessive red-tape / Government overreach

I like my government regulating massive corporations who exist in one of the largest industries, the move fast and break things mentality is detrimental to our society.

You bought a licence to the game not the game itself

That’s fucked up and shouldn’t happen. Why you ‘buy’ something, be it a game, movie, software, car, house. You should have the freedom to do whatever you want with it.

The initiative would damage live service games which provide value outside of just the game (online friendships).

Live service games can still do this under the initiative. Publishers might make less live service games but that’s their problem, not the consumers.

In the comments he adds counter-arguments to why publishers shouldn’t provide the server executable. Focusing on how monetisation would work:

If we don’t allow monetization - Who would be the party that enforces non-monetization of that server? If it’s the government I feel like we’re making an insane amount of red tape. If it’s the original company then this doesn’t work if they shut down.

If the company shuts down then it’s no longer an issue because no-one is losing money from the game servers now being monetised.

If we don’t allow monetization - Who is going to pay for the hosting if the servers cannot be monetized? If they cannot be monetized then these servers will also eventually shut down due to cost. We don’t up preserving games like this we just shift their death down the road.

The community, there are entire operating systems that are provided by volunteers for free with no advertisements. Providing the server executable does not shift their death down the road as anyone can run it going forward.

If we do allow monetization - This leads to a really weird attack potential if people can monetize the servers. You make an awesome game that has a small community. I want to monetize that game and run my own servers. I create a shitload of bots and constant exploits to erode the game and your business. Your business closes and you now have to give out server binaries to keep the game in a playable state. I can now profit off your work via private servers. This isn’t unlikely as we’ve seen mass attacks such as with TF2 We actually see echoes of this in the mobile market already as well. The only defense right now is DMCA or other takedown measures. Devs legitimately have very little protections as-is and this would erode that further. This creates an incentive for abuse where the abuser is protected as they are within their legal right to operate said “abandoned” games servers.

An odd straw-man, as for a small studio to develop a free to play, live service game to then have their game targeted by nefarious actors using a denial of service attack will only happed if the game is popular / good, in which case the developers should be making enough money to invest in protections against said actors, e.g. the IPs can be tracked and forwarded to the relevant authorities as orchestrating a denial of service attack is a crime.

That scenario isn’t anything like the TF2 situation, whose bots are ran by frustrated community members in an effort to have Valve continue updating TF2. Private servers can also be ran for TF2 as I write this, and the game is still being ran by Valve.

The only defence isn’t takedown measures, since the developer is running the game, as Thor said in the video, the developer can ban the bots.

I think the guy is smart, and I used to hold his opinion in very high regard. But after he shat his opinion out and just doubled down and refusing to talk with Ross after calling him and his movement “scummy” I lost alot of respect for him. The dude can make 2 whole videos shitting on Ross and the movement but won’t talk to him about it? fuck off. Every time I watch a video of his he just sounds so pretentious to me now. And for someone that shines his “20 years of gamedev” purple heart badge every 15 mins, he acts willfully ignorant to the years of people self hosting reverse engineered WOW servers acting like its impossible for the community to keep these games preserved.

Weird as hell take. His first example is League of Legends. Yes it is client server based, so give people the server binaries. Despite me not liking the game itself, LoL is huge and it would be shame to lose that history whenever it inevitably dies out.

And he mentioned that if this law would go through, no one would build live service games anymore. Oh no what a shame that would be… And it is absolutely wrong. Because guess what, the OGs of live service games, Valve, would need to do nothing at all if this went in to action. You can play TF2, CS2 (and yes even CSGO) and DotA 2 today by just running your own server. It’s not that hard.

Edit: Somehow I brain-farted live service as live action, woops