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The Stop Killing Games Campaign (ft. Ross Scott) | Windbreaker Podcast
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On this week’s episode of Windbreaker, Yahtzee, Frost, and Jack chat with Ross Scott about games preservation and his Stop Killing Games campaign. For more info on how to get involved check out the website at https://www.stopkillinggames.com/
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Transcript
Introduction and Sponsor
00:00:00
Speaker
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00:00:28
Speaker
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00:00:48
Speaker
Hello
Hosts and Guest Introduction
00:00:49
Speaker
everyone, welcome back to the Windbreaker podcast. I'm Yahtzee Grotial, I'm joined by Frost as usual. Oh. Also by, slightly less usually, Jack.
00:01:01
Speaker
And downright never happened before at all. We're joined by Ross Scott from the Cursed Farms. How you doing, Ross? Oh, thanks. Been busy. Yeah, we've heard about it because we have literally brought you on to talk about how busy you've been lately.
The "Stop Killing Games" Campaign
00:01:16
Speaker
So why don't we start by me just letting you pitch to the floor the Stop Killing Games campaign where it is and what people can do to help.
00:01:25
Speaker
Sure. OK, this is a movement I've launched to stop or challenge the legality of publishers completely destroying a game that you paid for. So you buy a game that has an online-only requirement, then usually a few years later they just shut it down and you're left with absolutely nothing and no way to fix it or anything. That has not been tested under the law in many countries globally. That's exactly what I'm doing.
00:01:54
Speaker
Kind of doing it in two ways. One is there's a game that's been kind of an ideal candidate to test this called The Crew. Those are driving game released by Ubisoft. So if anyone owns that, you can help. And the other way is in several countries, the UK, Australia, hopefully soon Canada, and later on the European Union itself.
00:02:18
Speaker
We have direct government petitions where if they get enough signatures, people have to respond. I mean, people in government have to respond to this issue to clarify, well, hey, is this legal? You know, is there a question worth asking? So I have a website set up to this, stopkillinggames.com. All right. And anyone can go to that. And there's just like simple instructions for wherever you live, what you can do to help, right?
00:02:49
Speaker
Yeah, unfortunately, Americans are much more limited. Somebody compared this to feeling like they were for an occupied territory for what they could do on this. However, if you own the game, the crew, it's just a coincidence that this game can act on it. But it's much better in Europe, Australia, there's so much to Canada.
00:03:14
Speaker
in the UK, maybe Brazil later on. That's still up in the air for Brazil. Any latest updates from the campaign? Oh man, there's a bunch. Well yeah, the UK petition is open. Also the Australian one has the tightest deadline, May 20th.
00:03:36
Speaker
Although it kind of backfired, there was a miscommunication, and now the issue is for not just video games, but all software, which is probably too big an issue and will get way more resistance. However, it seems like we can narrow it down back in time.
Global Petitions for Game Preservation
00:03:51
Speaker
If the petition is successful, we can narrow it down back in time before it gets into Parliament, back to video games.
00:04:00
Speaker
Other news, two members of European Parliament have taken an interest in this. One is Patrick Breyer, he's unfortunately on his way out, but another one, oh man, I've got to butcher his name, Nicholas Ninas, or Nainas,
00:04:19
Speaker
He's taken it up, and I actually don't even want to say what he's doing to tip off the industry, but I'm encouraged, and it'll help get answers. However this goes, whether it's successful or not, we're going to get clear answers from probably at least half a dozen major countries on this as to, is this legal? That's great, yeah.
00:04:42
Speaker
Yeah. I know this is like a drum you've been banging for quite a few years now, isn't it? I want to say, was it your Darkspore game dungeon, or was it before that? Battle Forge was probably the first one I did. But yeah, I did want a Darkspore also. Yeah. Sure. And for viewers who don't know, Ross, you have been a longtime content creator, YouTuber from, what did we decide on, over 10 years ago? You started Freeman's Minds?
00:05:12
Speaker
Yeah, 2007. 16 years ago. So you started a series called Freeman's Mind in which you gave Freeman from Half-Life kind of an internal dialogue while going through the game. My current favorite series of mine is your game dungeon in which you delve into
00:05:30
Speaker
old and forgotten abandoned a lot of times games and kind of talk us the audience through the process of not only how the game works but how you get the game to play which is always fascinating by the way and so for me it's like obviously you have a love of old games of abandoned games why the crew
00:05:52
Speaker
is the question. Oh, well, I mean, I don't just talk about old and abandoned ones, but I can't, I talk about any that I think might make a good video to watch. And I can often be odd, weird ones off the beaten path, but sometimes I haven't watched a game dungeon since the beginning. And one thing that I've always loved about it is that you clearly don't pick your subject matter based on what the algorithm would favor at any given moment.
00:06:18
Speaker
yeah no i don't it's just so many games i like to think i know a lot of games but there's so many i'd never heard of before until i saw your video about it because clearly you only pick the stuff that you have a personal investment in let's say
00:06:33
Speaker
Not always some just sort of pop up and they give me all sorts of thoughts on it. And yeah, unfortunately, you just made me forget what your Jack's question was. Oh, well, specifically, you know, as someone like yourself who plays so many, you know, older games, possibly games with these, why the crew? Yeah. Okay, well, the crew, it's just kind of a
00:06:56
Speaker
or like why I'm choosing it for this campaign or, okay, well, that's easier.
Case Study: Ubisoft's The Crew
00:07:01
Speaker
It's because it checks off a lot of boxes, but we've been able to act on this. The biggest box it checks off is that this was released by Ubisoft and Ubisoft is located in France and France and the European Union in general have way more consumer protection laws than places like the United States or I guess to a lesser extent, the UK or maybe Canada.
00:07:24
Speaker
So, if I was going to pick one venue where to have this battle, it would be in France. So, that's a lucky coincidence. The other is, it was a big enough game to get a lot of people able to file complaints on this, because I think, I don't know what the numbers are, but it had at least 12 million players, probably more. I heard somebody say 16, but I haven't seen that verified.
00:07:47
Speaker
So, that's not the biggest game ever, but that's enough that you can still find people who have receipts of it, or just some proof of ownership, like a screenshot of that in their account. Because I'm only going to reach a small minority of people, but if that small minority is enough to kind of flood consumer protection agencies saying, hey, is this legal? Are they allowed to do this? Then I can kind of hit that critical mass. Yeah.
00:08:14
Speaker
And it also helps that this is kind of a generic car game as opposed to something like Manhunt or something where it could easily get kind of derailed and smeared left and rights. And the other reason is
00:08:30
Speaker
this is what i would call a clean kill no one on earth can run this game at the moment you know so whereas i heard of a game i heard with uh... like with destiny two they sold dlc but then they that doesn't work anymore or else they remove most of it good luck explaining that to a government official like what dlc is or or just the multiplayer shutting down to a game you know
00:08:59
Speaker
That makes this all a lot messier. So having this just be, you know, 100% of people who bought it cannot play it. Government officials can understand that, you know, so that helps a lot. You've taken a great hard line on this. Stop killing games. We can all understand that. Yeah, because in many ways, I think a lot of people just didn't realize they could do anything about it up until now, you know, this is something we've just sort of learned to live with.
00:09:26
Speaker
Well, I never learned that. It always bothered me. But for the United States, they might be right, unfortunately. However, if we do have a major victory, like in France or Germany or Australia,
00:09:44
Speaker
Americans would get the benefits downstream from that because that would probably change the industry in that in order to sell games in the future in that region, they would need to have some sort of end-of-life plan when they shut it down.
00:09:58
Speaker
And if they've already done the work creating that, they may as well make it global. The analogy I make to that is in 2014, the Australian Consumer Commission sued Valve over not being able to have refunds on your game, because you used to not be able to get refunds on Steam. And Valve lost, and now that's global policy for Steam. So I imagine it would be a very similar dynamic.
00:10:24
Speaker
Yeah, it's simpler for that sort of thing to enact a policy everywhere than just in one country. And I don't think there's anyone who would try to argue that it wouldn't be a good idea to be able to have refunds on Steam, because I think if nothing else, you could at least pin them down and get them to answer the question on camera. Like, is this the intention? Are you intentionally trying to screw people over here?
00:10:52
Speaker
Well, the answer is obviously yes, but the question is, is that legal? That's the part that's a big gray area. Absolutely. Were you waiting for all of these boxes to be checked and the crew happened to check all these boxes? Were you actively searching it out or did it fall in your lap a little bit?
00:11:12
Speaker
It kind of fell in my lap. I was getting pessimistic. I mean, I was still going to do something, but nowhere near on this scale because the options wouldn't have been there. And in fact, I was considering this. I kind of dropped the ball. I realized in retrospect, I maybe could have done this for Overwatch, but it might have been a blessing in disguise that I didn't because they're not located in France. And I think
00:11:37
Speaker
their European outlet is in Switzerland, which is outside the EU, even though it shares some economic laws of that. So now it's all getting muddy again. I mean, but that had 50, I've never even played Overwatch,
Consumer Rights and Game Shutdowns
00:11:51
Speaker
but that had 50 million copies sold. So that would have been great in that respect. I would have done this for any game that was
00:11:59
Speaker
that check the boxes. It's just that Ubisoft set themselves up as a target, so it's like, oh right, take the shot, take the shot, you know.
00:12:09
Speaker
I almost feel like they got complacent, you know, for the longest time this sort of thing was always in the background of stuff like games constantly coming out, old games that hardly anyone played were constantly dying because they couldn't maintain the live servers. A lot of games that they stopped supporting, people still played because they had like set up their own servers and they'd modded the game to run them.
00:12:31
Speaker
Um, but, uh, now they really have like, uh, it's gotten to the point where something needed to be done. Like they would gradually like edging as they always do towards more and more bullshit. And, uh, something had to give, I suppose. And it's, it's been years because you've been running dead game news for like quite a while. You even made a video, I think like five years ago, saying games as a service is essentially just a scam in its own right. Did you think it'd get this far?
00:13:00
Speaker
No, but I hadn't really envisioned how so much of this is in a fog, you know, to know what's going on with it. And I had a thought and I lost it, so keep going. Leading off from that, I suppose, let's say that we do, like they just say, is this legal? And they go, yeah, it's legal to do this.
00:13:26
Speaker
Do you think, do you see it getting worse? Like Tarkov very recently has been sort of fudging with the word DLC, how it's screwed out. It's older players who accepted a sort of founder status are not going to get new free DLC because the new stuff isn't DLC. Do you expect more fudging of words? How crooked do you think it gets? And at what point do you think you're just like, you know what? I'm going to take up woodworking, you know? Something I can keep and hold.
00:13:54
Speaker
I think if, okay, I'm biased, but I think if I hadn't stepped in on this, it was going to get worse and worse because I wasn't seeing any, like, substantial pushback on this.
00:14:06
Speaker
And I feel lucky I was able to find the angles that I was. And again, even if they say, yes, this is all legal, well, the odds are dicier, but that's what the petitions are for. It's like, okay, if this is legal, how about we make this illegal then? You know, with tons of signatures on this.
00:14:28
Speaker
And I remember what I was going to say. Yeah, I think Ubisoft got reckless because they're treating the entire world the way the industry treats the United States. And they forgot that. They're like, oh wait, there are laws in other countries, maybe. But yeah, for Tarkov, I'm not even sure of all the details.
00:14:49
Speaker
I've heard some about that. It was hilarious. There was an article on PC Gamer where they framed it as saying that they've caved and they'll let the players play the game that they paid for. And I was thinking, yeah, that really shows where the industry's mind is on this. Like, OK, fine. We'll compromise and let you play the game you paid money for. I mean, I guess technically,
00:15:17
Speaker
They were saying, I'm a good family man. I've never beaten my wife or my kids. I was like, no, that's below the baseline. You get the best dad in the world mug for that. There you go. I mean, technically, yeah, if they had just taken your money and not given you a game, then like, yeah, I guess that would not be a compromise. That would be more on the publisher side.
00:15:55
Speaker
Love it.
00:15:57
Speaker
They heard you. Look what's happening now. If you pay enough money, you can still get all the achievements for beating the game, but you don't actually have to play it. That's all I want. Oh, no, no. Just like, oh, just for the Steam achievement, that's all I want there. That's what I don't get. I mean, what are people in games for, if not just to play the games rather than just get the name on the high school table? I suppose, I guess the, sorry, you were saying?
00:16:27
Speaker
I'm not even trying to approach the quality side of things. I'll never win that. Or at least millions of other people can talk about that. I'm just trying to get the standard. Don't destroy the game in all forms that people pay money for.
00:16:50
Speaker
Yeah. So, just to clarify, what would be your ideal world in terms of what game publishers would have to do going forwards? Because you don't want to force them to have to run the games forever, right?
00:17:04
Speaker
100%. I think that's unreasonable. I think they should be allowed to end support whenever they want, besides minimum legal standards. No, the ideal scenario would be, OK, the dream scenario would be they not only patch it so that you can run it either with private hosting or an offline mode, if that's appropriate for the game.
00:17:33
Speaker
But to also think, OK, we're done with this game. We're not going to touch it again. We made all our money. Fine. Here's source code or documentation. Do whatever you want. We're done with this game. Now, I'm not trying for that far. I'm trying to get something, you know, the either.
00:17:52
Speaker
Again, ideally be patching it like actually the example I keep bringing up is Gran Turismo Sport was another all always online game that was
00:18:04
Speaker
driving game that you needed the connection for, I think, up to seven years. But then they patched everything. Now they've washed their hands of it, but you can play the game. So that should be the industry standard. And then if they wanted to go above and beyond that, yeah, release code or tools or stuff to let the community do whatever they want.
00:18:24
Speaker
Well, Ross, if we've learned anything, you need to ask for way more and then compromise, just like they compromise by letting you play the game. We have done that. In our petitions, we're not asking for
Legal Arguments for Game Longevity
00:18:35
Speaker
repair instructions or help. However, we're willing to compromise on that. We're asking no.
00:18:41
Speaker
you sold the game, it needs to be in a playable state. And we kept that language kind of broad because, okay, fine, maybe every last feature doesn't work like an auction house or some matchmaking or private messaging between some extra stuff that's kind of on top of the game. So by keeping broad language of a playable state, that hopefully covers things. Absolutely.
00:19:08
Speaker
You know, ideal scenario for me would be if there'd be something you have to sign and say, we're abandoning the game and then the source code is just put in like an online library forever. You know, like the National Library does books.
00:19:25
Speaker
there can be problem to play devil's advocate there can be issues with that with especially if you have a newer game that uses like the exact same engine if all source goes out there then there's going to be a hundred exploits coming for that new game but at the same time you know
00:19:42
Speaker
The farther off in the future this is that you know this requirement is coming, the more the industry can adapt to. This is not an unsolvable problem. And again, to be clear, the source code thing, we're not demanding that. We're just playable in some form.
00:20:01
Speaker
I think part of the problem is that the video games technology isn't as standardized as some forms of expression. I mean, games have always died. In the olden days, it used to be just because consoles didn't have backwards compatibility, or that we just couldn't run ancient DOS games on the newest versions of Windows.
00:20:20
Speaker
Well, see, those games never really died. It's just they became a lot harder to run and wouldn't work on the newest thing. I mean, if you still have that old DOS or Windows 95 computer and it kept them mothballed, it should still work for all my multiplayer stuff back then. So, I mean, that's kind of a different issue with preservation, the more confidence and kind of the community to solve, you know.
00:20:46
Speaker
Oh, sure. But like that, there's a huge difference in art preservation when so much technology is involved. Like we know how to restore a painting. Oh, yeah, we got that locked down. But when operating system, game engines, game engines that are tied to the frame rate of your operating system, which of course will be very slow forever, when a piece of art has so many moving parts to it,
00:21:13
Speaker
preservation is ridiculously difficult. Yeah, we've gotten lucky there has been as much emulation or documentation as there is.
00:21:27
Speaker
Yeah, I remember seeing an article a while back where they compared the modern state of software as a whole. They were saying that it's almost like this isn't really a parallel to the industrial revolution where we could mass produce stuff. It's more like cottage industries where everybody had their own style of making shoes or a basket. There weren't these universal standards across things. That's probably still the case in a lot of ways.
00:21:55
Speaker
The problem is to solve what you're talking about, you would have to solve copyright, and boy, I do not want to try that battle. I mean, I think I've heard, especially when you have the likes of Disney trying to push it as far as possible, I think the standard for copyright in the United States is the lifetime of the author plus 70 years before it enters public domain.
00:22:20
Speaker
I don't want that fight. Yeah. Don't mess with the mouse, as they say. Absolutely. Even the entire state of Florida is losing against Disney. So we don't stand a chance. So it's not so much preservation games as a whole topic as just forcing publishers to not actively kill the games, like going out of their way to prevent people from emulating or patching the game to be able to still run it.
00:22:50
Speaker
That they paid money for. Yeah, yeah. And I think if nothing else, if we could just get them to say that, yes, we want to do this, we could all go, OK, just so we're clear, we live in an evil cyberpunk future. Great. We've figured that out. Let's all stick like weird visors on our faces and turn into the bog.
00:23:10
Speaker
Well, they get the governments to say that. I mean, of course, the publishers are saying that right now. You don't own this. Because we put this clause in here, even though almost no other good acts live this way, and it's not defined by law.
00:23:27
Speaker
They're selling you, they're typically selling you the game as a good, but then it relies on an external service to function, and you're giving no terms as to how long that service lasts. So it's less than renting even, because if you rent something, you know when you have to return it or when it expires, you know? You're not even getting that.
00:23:49
Speaker
Imagine that world, though. Like, what was that, mobile game? Live, Love, or whatever? Where they said, hey, the game's releasing, and then it's going to be down within the year, or whatever it was. They announced their own end date. They announced the release date and that it was shutting down in the same tweet, famously.
00:24:07
Speaker
Which I'm like, you know what? I just want that sort of transparency. I'm not of the mind Not to not speak the Debbie Downer I'm not of the mind that we can change everything but at the very least Some changes are necessary and to me that would be like the transparency where you can just look at the cover of a game as you said They're putting these sort of like live service games that can come down with alongside the single-player games there is almost like no way to differentiate between any of these and
00:24:33
Speaker
Well, yeah, it's almost like we need two different channels. The games, as people like you and I understand them, they're like the single-player story narrative based, the work of art, the culturally important thing from which we can still learn, and just the alternative interpretation of a game being just a thing you do with your hands when you're bored. A live service, grindy, emotion-numbing thing.
00:25:03
Speaker
I think a lot of people who have the idea that that's what games are feel like any live service isn't as good as another.
00:25:12
Speaker
Yeah, but I mean, I look at it from the perspective where these things, games are very subjective what people are enjoying from them. So, you know, some people, somebody is going to see a game and think that's trash. Another person is going to be amazed by the world that they create. And like, oh, this music's great. And they're, even if they're not really engaging with the game on the level that maybe it was even designed for. So just to destroy everything, it just, like, I can't turn that off in my brain how it bothers me.
00:25:42
Speaker
So let's not judge other people's art. It's all art, whether you enjoy it or not, is up for debate. Absolutely. Well, as you're fond of saying, Jack, video games might or may not be art, but they certainly contain art. And it's the destruction of the work of individual artists like the part of these huge development teams, like the musicians, the
00:26:04
Speaker
texture artists, the character artists. I mean, I mean, that all sort of adds an extra complication if we want to talk about releasing source code after a while. intellectual property who owns what is it just like get redistributed back like your like your realized you forgot your wallet and have to put everything back in the grocery store.
00:26:26
Speaker
Just leave it there. I'll get in the car. I'll never come back. But you guys do it. Yeah, the raccoons will get it. It'll all get sorted out somehow. Yeah, no, that's why. I think it's great that he's not going for copyright and said it's just more so like during the Steam refund era, it was Total Biscuit that was more so citing mercantilism. This is how marketing used to work. There is nothing that exists in the way video games do now where it's like, hey, you are purchasing this thing that
00:26:54
Speaker
could last you forever or it could be gone next week and you have no way of accessing it at all. I like that old-school style but prefer that instead of the like don't you understand this is art like I think it's more so like don't you understand I paid for this thing and now it's gone.
00:27:12
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, for me personally, I'm doing this because it's the same to me as if somebody was setting fire to a painting or destroying every copy of an album or something like that. But that's not the primary route on pursuing this legally. It's the consumer angle, which like, hey, this also probably violates laws too. So let's go with the stuff that's going to be most effective. That's the means to the end. And yeah, you were talking about the
00:27:39
Speaker
Well, old mercantilism, I was thinking you probably have to go back to feudal times to have some equivalent to this, where like the serfs lived on the land, but the Lord owns the land. He owns everything on there and you're just existing at his pleasure, you know.
00:27:56
Speaker
to live there. Or if they wanted to send guards into your house and just take things, they could. I mean, it's just that they usually chose not to because they don't want the peasants revolting. But I was thinking, that's about the level of rights we're talking about here, because it just goes against just basic commerce on any definition, I think. It's trying to invent something new.
00:28:20
Speaker
I read somewhere that medieval serfs actually work less than most people do in like eight to five jobs these days. Cause you know, you work on a farm, you plant everything, you feed the animals, you got the afternoon free, put your feet up, hang out with the fellow serfs in the pub. That's just farmers. Yeah. Well, no, I've heard that. Well, yeah, you'd have to work real hard during harvest, but then the rest of the year. Yeah. I think I heard something like,
00:28:48
Speaker
The UK or England had something like a third of the days were essentially holidays or festivals or something back in the feudal times. And for France, it might even be close to half, or maybe I'm getting the numbers wrong, but it was very high. Oh, sure.
00:29:05
Speaker
I think at the end of the day, what's happening in a lot of industries is companies and corporations are getting further and further away from the simple product transaction. And that's what we used to have is, oh, I buy a thing, I get to use the thing, right?
00:29:24
Speaker
And as they get into monthly subscriptions, as they get into games as a service, they're seeing a broader definition of what a product is until the product is no longer part of their income. So they don't worry about it at all.
00:29:42
Speaker
I don't know, they just find newer ways to sort of sell you the same carrot over and over again, right? Yeah, it's always been Nintendo's pattern, hasn't it? They just resell their old stuff for every new console. Yeah, but they keep the old stuff too, you know?
00:29:57
Speaker
That's the thing. It's like, you know, with something like The Crew, with something like Games as a Service, they're no longer selling you the product of a fun game to play. They are selling you the experience of weeks and months and years of giving them a little bit of money in order to do the thing that you actually want to do, which is just play the dang game.
00:30:17
Speaker
Yeah, like Star Wars Battlefront II, I'm actually amazed that they didn't take down the old one because it serves as a comparison point for the new one. And it's like, this is trash, like hardly any better. So that's why, I mean, whenever they take down these sort of games, I almost half anticipate like, hey, a big announcement shutdown for this one game. Why? Because we're about to make a live service version of it. We don't want you to have the old one. Was Battlefront II EA?
00:30:42
Speaker
Yes. I found- The first one was Lucas... Arts. No, no, the publisher. Um... Yes.
00:30:50
Speaker
Well, I think there's a company culture difference among different companies. I think electronic arts, they just don't care. They don't care when the game goes down. They don't care if people bring it back up. You're talking about your spreads, they didn't take it out? They don't care. That's in the past. Everything about their behavior seems consistent to me on that. Whereas others might have what you're talking about where, hey, we have a new game in the franchise, let's kill the old one. I think that's a more
00:31:17
Speaker
recent development. I think most of this has come from just negligence where, well, we didn't design, we didn't put any thought towards what happens when we shut down. There's no penalty for doing it. So, okay, fine. We'll just shut it down. We're done. And I think that's the case with most of them. However, more recently, there might be that mentality of, well, hey, if you're playing the old game, you're not buying the new one. So, you know,
00:31:39
Speaker
Well, this is why this sort of thing needs to be, like, carved out in legislature. Because the corporation is flat-out designed to just do the thing that makes it the most money, with human decision-making subtracted from that. And, uh, that's what happened.
00:31:54
Speaker
It's not even clear to me that it would make it more money necessarily because the old game could serve as advertising if it's a franchise, you know, having old Star Wars. Here, have you seen the new Star Wars that we're putting all our marketing stuff on, you know? And plus the people who are playing old games, it's gotta be a minority of players at any given time for any game versus the big new exciting game that's marketing
00:32:23
Speaker
that has marketing everywhere and has YouTube channels talking about it. I imagine that's where the majority of players are going. See, I think that depends because Overwatch 2, Overwatch 1 being so recent, the gap between them being so minor and our tech isn't really like... The graphical improvements are diminishing, the technical improvements are diminishing, so it is.
00:32:46
Speaker
your own competitor, right? I don't think Overwatch 1 and 2 can exist because now you're like, you've essentially just split your own player base. It is, it's almost like they're thinking ahead of this sense of like, we do want to monopolize our own, our own, our own player base instead of having them split amongst all these other games. So let's start now getting into the habit of it that way four or five years down the line, we've already set precedent in that sort of like, you guys don't like this? Well, you didn't say anything four years ago when we did it. Why are you now crying about it?
00:33:17
Speaker
That's a very good counterpoint. That's why I'm very like jump on it immediately as soon as you see the behavior because otherwise you'll go to court and the judge will go you were fine for seven years and now you're crying? Why?
00:33:31
Speaker
Oh, yeah. I would have done this 10 years ago if I thought I could. Actually, I have gotten this sense just from feedback and everything that the window is sort of slowly closing to be able to act on this. So I'm very glad we've been able to hit as hard as we can.
00:33:54
Speaker
Like, oh, there was stuff, you didn't say anything then. I'm not even sure what the first game shutdown that was sold as a one-time purchase was. It might have been Battle Forge, actually, because there were MMOs before that that died off, but those are usually, you know, subscription.
00:34:12
Speaker
based where that's that's a lot harder to argue legally because okay you paid the game for 30 days or year the year's up okay now we're shutting it down and we if you had extra we're refunding that amount of money it's like well that's that's a normal service that's harder to argue from the legal perspective but once yeah it might have been battle forged though i'm not sure there could have been one prior to that the
00:34:38
Speaker
And so, unfortunately, you have to wait until the game's dead to really act on it. And then it varies. Yeah, you gotta wait for the issue. I feel like it's just kind of the water's slowly been boiling. We went from a consumer standpoint, only so few games offered your older versions, like Minecraft. If you don't like any of the updates, you can just pick any of the older ones. Terraria. You can just roll it back to one of the older ones.
00:35:03
Speaker
But so far we've sort of accepted this culture of like, whatever patch comes through, that's just what I have now. Like I'm okay with it because no one's really complained about that. And to the point where now it's like, okay, you now do not have the old one. And it's incredibly different from what it used to be. I think we kind of.
00:35:19
Speaker
Let it happen because for the most part it was advantageous. Like No Man's Sky. Is anyone really gonna argue for their original copy of No Man's Sky? I don't think so. Or like Simon Punk. No one's gonna argue like, hey man, they took away my old version. No one cares. And now it's like, it takes away my junk.
00:35:35
Speaker
That's where it got fudgy in recent years, isn't it? I mean, as you say, no one wants the original version of No Man's Sky, but where's the line? Where's the line between just updating the game, adding new content, like what Eric Peron does with Stardew Valley on a regular basis, and changing the game so it's not like the product you had? I mean, would Blizzard have gotten away with Overwatch 2 if they'd not called it Overwatch 2, if they'd just patched Overwatch 1 into Overwatch 2?
00:36:06
Speaker
You're probably thinking ahead of the curve there. I don't know. That's probably next. I think that's why they made Overwatch 2. It's like, damn, this should have been live service instead of subscription-based. Or not even subscription one-time purchase. Once we've gotten them to stop killing games, I think the next thing on my priority list is we need to have a date where we just say we stop updating this game.
00:36:34
Speaker
where we stop adding stuff to it, we stop changing it, it's just what it is forever, and we can move on to the next bloody thing. But you're gonna get, you know, people upset, like with Dead Cells, they had promised DLC for like another four years, and then they were like, you know what, this is the last one, right? So now it's, it's just a constant, you kind of do have to constantly sort of meet them at their words instead of waiting for the bad thing to happen, right? It feels like a very,
00:36:59
Speaker
Toxic relationship where it's like, ah, you gotta be willing to speak up at every angle before I was like, well, the game's dead. How did we end up here?
00:37:08
Speaker
I say though, uh, before we get into super chats though, I do, you've had a lot of great, um, support. Have you had any pushback I saw in your, uh, your update video or it was the stream. That's what I was, that's what I was meaning to ask. I mean, I don't think anyone like in the corporation is obviously against you, but I was wondering how much pushback and excusing there is from, you know, the user base. Oh, not just that. No, he's got stories of like maybe a little corporate espionage going on.
00:37:36
Speaker
Oh yeah, I forgot about that. There has been some...
00:37:43
Speaker
Not a lot, though. I imagine it's like a single digit percentage of people that are against this. The people who are against this tend to be in a few camps. One is because I'm trying to go through government means, they're against it. It's like, no, you shouldn't use the government for this. They'll make it all worse. And I've tried to explain, from my perspective, this doesn't get any worse than the trajectory we're on. It's like, OK, a game you like gets destroyed, and you can never play it again, that you paid for.
00:38:12
Speaker
How does gaming get worse than that? I mean, I'm sure people can think of something, but it's a challenge. Another camp is, I think people just don't understand that this is possible. They've been so used to the, this is how it works for multiplayer, that they're
00:38:33
Speaker
or online games that they don't realize it can work different ways.
Preservation Possibilities Post-Support
00:38:38
Speaker
Like I think the Unreal Tournament games got delisted last year. And most of those, you can still play online, even though the server's been shut down with other people. And even things like MMOs, when server emulators enter the wild, I think there are cases where you
00:38:41
Speaker
not
00:38:58
Speaker
I think for an illicit World of Warcraft emulator, it can host thousands of people, from what I understand, just from home systems. So this is definitely possible. Or even if it was a big MMO that required specialized hardware, OK, well, maybe you can scale it down. OK, we can't host 10,000 people, but we can host 50 or something. And that could be a world of difference for the people who still want to play it. Absolutely.
00:39:29
Speaker
I'm trying to think of, I know there were a few other camps, but those are the big ones. One that, but yeah, for the espionage thing, this is kind of unconfirmed, but
00:39:41
Speaker
Some people in a sort of fan-made discord for my regular videos reported somebody had come in there and they were acting kind of suspiciously and they were able to find their contact details from the discord, I think, and look them up on their LinkedIn profile. And that person worked for a PR firm that had represented Ubisoft in the past. So the idea, and apparently they were looking around the Reddit too, the unofficial
00:40:09
Speaker
You know, Chris Farms read it, doing the same thing. So that makes me think that, hey, maybe we're having an impact then if we're having kind of... I think the leading theory is they were trying to find something, you know, that they could smear me on or smear the movement on to say like, oh, look at all these horrible people and come up with quotes or something. But the joke's on them since I barely used record even before this campaign, I guess.
00:40:40
Speaker
But as for other industry pushback, oh yeah, there was a...
00:40:45
Speaker
as what I would call kind of a smear article in like a French and German paper, though I think the paper itself was, or I say paper, it was probably just a media outlet. I don't think they were trying to smear it so much as get views. I got the vibe that the person interviewing like, yeah, this should piss people off if we get quotes from this lawyer saying this. That was the vibe where there was a lawyer saying,
00:41:15
Speaker
This is a German outlet, I think it was GameStar.de. The lawyer that they interviewed was saying, no, this is ridiculous what we're asking for, you know, because this is like if you had a membership at a gym and, you know, when the gym closes or your membership ends, you don't expect to be able to take the equipment home with you.
00:41:39
Speaker
And so one, it's not even clear if this is considered a service under law, but even if it is, well, the gym membership is going to tell you when it expires. Or three, let's say it was a lifetime membership, but the gym membership goes down. Okay, well, if every game company that did this went bankrupt, when that happened,
00:41:58
Speaker
I would be kind of less aggressive about this. So yes, if Ubisoft had gone bankrupt because they shut down a game, then okay, I get it. Nobody wins here. This is just kind of a, you know, an accident that nobody wanted, you know? Absolutely.
00:42:17
Speaker
All right, well, let's get to the super chats. Plenty to get through if you've got any questions about the campaign or any questions to ask about anything in general. Now's the time to ask them with your wallets. Starting with Dr. Theo, who gives $5 and says, admit it, you guys have also thought about what Silent Hill would cook up if you walked in there. I mean, door.
00:42:42
Speaker
I never killed my wife. I think it would pretty, pretty fucking weak sauce. But, uh, Oh, is that based on your psyche? Yeah. Yeah. Jesus Christ. I don't know what I'd find in there. I guess it might confront me with my dog that died. I think it would just be me. Just bear knock a box on me. You punching yourself in the face. It's not all at all. It's just me. David seek is five Canadian dollars.
00:43:11
Speaker
and says, what Ubisoft did to the crew loosely reminds me of how Amazon deleted Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984 books from Kindle customers. Ironic choices.
00:43:22
Speaker
Yeah, I remember that. There have been like a few examples so far of, you know, like digitally purchased movies, digitally purchased books that have been removed from people's devices even though they paid for them. And so I think people are beginning to understand kind of the age of non-ownership that we live in, which I think is helping the cause.
00:43:49
Speaker
like oh yeah tell me if i'm a little tin foil hat and tie here but i feel like gamers are sort of guinea pigs when it comes to consumer ownership in that sense of like what are they okay with me getting rid of because if for the crew right he goes down
00:44:04
Speaker
And it's like, who cares? No one's playing that game anymore. Every time someone sort of defends the practice of just sort of diminishing your ownership, I feel that emboldens other companies that may not be in gaming, like subscription services. Yeah, we eat them all the time. But now there's subscription services for like cars, right? Like it's just gonna keep on pushing through.
00:44:24
Speaker
I've had that thought that maybe this is a testing ground for other industries. Because again, people say, well, that's just games. Those are just for kids, whatever. And in fact, I have a theory that if we just get blocked on every single level in almost a comical fashion, then it makes me think that, OK, we've stumbled into something that some higher forces do not want disrupted because they need to see what people will tolerate and what they won't.
00:44:55
Speaker
Video games are on the cutting edge of everything. They're on the cutting edge of tech, of artistic expression, and of evil cyberpunk futures. Oh, I didn't like that last one. What was that last one I suppose? Well, at least rollerblading might come back. Yes! Oh, I rollerbladed so much when I was a teenager.
00:45:16
Speaker
B.S. Marsh gives $5 and says, Frost, I really loved your new cold take as I worked in the restaurant industry for decades. So here's a small token of my appreciation. Oh, a tip you say. Thank you. Yeah, no, I 100% agree with the way. To me, it's always been like a hat at what end to what end? How far are we pushing it? That's why I jumped on the tipping conversation with Mike Ibarra, because
00:45:41
Speaker
It just seems to never end. I don't know if that's a cynical mindset. I just from my OSHA background, I go, the more you let slide, the harder it is to undo the slide. And this is that position. Who was it who took this position that maybe we could think of tipping video games that we like so that they can make a little bit of extra money? Mike Ibarra, the former president of Blizzard. Yeah, that guy.
00:46:06
Speaker
He said that? They're still looking for wherever they can nickel and dime. He was just testing the waters, I think.
00:46:14
Speaker
I think they heard take two made a statement where they'd like to be able to charge people by the hour for games if they could. I was thinking, wow, we're going back to arcade standards then almost. No, I was like, I'm going to make like a cranker that Jack has, but you get to put quarters in. I'm going to put quarters in the steam deck, whatever it is. I'm going to find a way. I have that little handheld, the play date where that has the crank on it, like the indie handheld.
00:46:42
Speaker
But yeah, like advertise it as an exercise machine where you need to crank it every couple of hours and people will pay big money for it. Shashank7170 gives 40 rupees and says, hey Ross, love your game dungeons.
00:47:01
Speaker
Thanks. I plan to get back to him as soon as I can. This is a detour, not a shift. We appreciate you taking the time away from funny videos to something, you know, remarkably important. To something I wish I didn't have to do. Thank you for stumbling into this on behalf of everyone. Yeah, that way we can just point at you instead of having to be you. Mm-hmm. If I speak it mostly though, yeah, I'm a big fan of game dungeons myself.
00:47:31
Speaker
I'm a very big player of games while listening to video essays on the other monitor, and Game Dungeon is like a staple for those sessions. I have a great one I was working on that kind of sidetracked by this. I'm looking at it. See, if you guys want your Game Dungeon back, and apparently a juicy one, sign this petition so we can get the man back to his gaming. There you go. Yeah, like it.
00:47:56
Speaker
Dale Mallows gives $5 and says, can you guys pause for a sec? I got a poop. Tragic. Sorry. We missed him. Yeah, well, that'll leave, send that a while back, so presumably he's sat himself by now. Beneath 1111 gives 20 Swedish krona and says, for Dale Mallows, no. God knows what that means. Goes out of my head. Sure, it's a reference to something.
00:48:23
Speaker
term of frosty 79, your side lesson says, how do you feel about games that are pseudo shutdown ie games that relied on game spy or other outside service? What should devs do in these cases? Well,
00:48:37
Speaker
I guess two points. One, I don't, yeah, a few points. I don't like that either. I'm just going for the most black and white violation. And hopefully things, we can get some benefits downstream from that. Where maybe I don't, maybe we just get protection to have the game from being destroyed, but they don't understand, but the court still don't understand. They're between like a multiplayer mode, if it's like a mixed mode, like what you're talking about, where the single player still works, but then the multiplayer is bricked.
00:49:07
Speaker
Maybe that leads to somebody else being emboldened by these new rights to kind of press charges on that and then that gets hurt or we get things more clearly defined. And, oh geez, I lost my other thoughts. Maybe that's the next question I'll think of it later. Fox D gives $5 and says, our live service stroke online only games just disposable consumables and not durable works of art. And what does that say about the medium? If so,
00:49:36
Speaker
I don't think I can say like, as we say, all the music and art and stuff that goes into a game is just a disposable thing.
Games: Consumables or Art?
00:49:49
Speaker
I mean, someone put work into it, there was a point where it didn't exist. And now that it does, I don't think that's something we just throw away easily. But you know,
00:49:58
Speaker
You mentioned a live performance. A live performance takes actual people to operate, whereas the only withholding factor is just having access to that server software typically. So the service can go indefinitely if people could have access to that. So that's kind of a
00:50:16
Speaker
artificial service, in my opinion. Maybe it's more akin to closing down a public space. We used to have a park that these plays would be performed in, but the park got shut down by an evil corporation who wanted to build something. I'm just thinking of an 80s movie, and then the scrappy teens need to save the park.
00:50:36
Speaker
Gotta dance for our park. Yeah, it's breaking. This is the plot of breaking. Yeah, you'd want to go to the corporations and say, do you want to be the evil corporation in breaking? Because that's what you're being. I'm OK with that. I don't mind if they're going to be evil. I just want to know. I just want to know where we stand.
00:50:59
Speaker
Like I think comparing live services to something like a live performance, they are relatively similar, but I think the thing we keep saying over and over again is it's all about the expectation. Right, yeah.
00:51:15
Speaker
You know if i go if i go to see if i go to see a movie if i want to own a movie i expect to be able to watch that movie anytime if i go to see a live performance i know that i get to watch this for an hour and a half and then it just sits in my mind.
00:51:31
Speaker
And so part of, part of, hopefully, you know, what this does is helps give gamers a better expectation of what they're paying for, which could change how long we can play games, could change the prices, or it might not change anything. But I think it's a good stepping stone.
00:51:49
Speaker
Yeah. And with flat performances, you're usually not investing tens of millions of dollars and years of effort for just like one showing. And then that's it. You know, it's the proportions can be off for AAA companies. Sure. Sure. Sure. Yeah. Rob Mace, member for five months in the Green Gang, says, I paid money for CSGO and now it's gone. Brownie face. Oh.
00:52:16
Speaker
That's right, CSGO 2. I don't know what the official name is for it. A lot of people weren't too happy with the state it entered in. I don't know if it's better now. I've been off of this thing for a while. Was it not just an engine upgrade? I could be wrong, but I think I heard that you can run the old version of CSGO
00:52:40
Speaker
separately and then find other people who want to connect to it. So if that's wrong, I resent everything I'm saying. But there's a difference between they made much less popular and it's much more of a pain in the ass to run it versus just dead. Like it is gone 100%. So I'm not trying to fight for the ones that make it a pain in the ass. That's half my gaming already.
00:53:07
Speaker
Wesley Thomas gives 10 Canadian dollars, says it really stings when you buy a game and it gets taken away. Dead Space Mobile, I still miss you. PS, will there be a Stellar Blade review? Last second censorship, still in the same ballpark, IMO. Stellar Blade is the game that's on my to-do list to start playing this very afternoon. Wesley Thomas. Last second censorship. See, this is an interesting one because what's happened, aside from, let's get away from all the raunchy stuff, is
00:53:35
Speaker
the characters localize differently depending on the nations because different nations have different ideas of like what can and can't be shown and so they gave a little bit more clothing in some of them and people are taking that as censorship alteration and this goes back to like how where's the line of alteration you know where it's like it's still my vision it's not what I paid for etc etc this is this is a very wibbly wobbly realm
00:53:58
Speaker
I mean it's comparable to when they released Carmageddon in Europe. Some countries were allowed to have like the humans that just bled red blood. Some countries had to swap them out for green blooded zombies. In Germany they just had to swap the zombies out for robots. Robots.
00:54:17
Speaker
Or World of Warcraft, I think, in China. They can't have the skeletons and the ghosts or things like that. Yes, all the skulls had to be removed for localization in China. People are bringing it up as a censorship debate as part of the whole, you know.
00:54:38
Speaker
government-controlled debate, but when you're talking about lots of different countries, it's too muddy to dip a toe into, if you ask me. Sure. I think it's just very Western-centric, isn't it? That's why I think, like, this whole thing has sort of been normalized because it's America in general that's sort of like, eh, it is what it is, whereas it's Europe, it's Australia that goes, no, that's not how goods work. They never have. Same thing with, like, tipping. Tipping sounds normal in America, but everywhere else, they're like, who the hell is using gratuity?
00:55:12
Speaker
Storm Templar gives side dollars and says big fan of all three of you for a decade plus. Is there any allies we might get in the industry? CDPR has preservation and no DRM as selling point of GOG. Yes, good question Ross. What sort of support has come in from the development and stroke publishing side of the industry, if any?
00:55:32
Speaker
Well, I mean, I've heard of a few smaller developers have reached out to me in support of it. Probably the biggest one I know I saw people tell me about on Twitter was running with scissors. The people made the postal games there. They're all for this.
00:55:48
Speaker
Let's see, the, hey, I'll take, postal's interesting. It's definitely a game, they've definitely made games of note. Yes, they've found out a niche for themselves that say that. Yeah, I do have a contact with GOG and they're interested in maybe making a statement on this and maybe getting in touch with one of the members of parliament that
00:56:18
Speaker
European Parliament being able to talk about this, maybe they can kind of create publicity for both sides or something like that. For the most part, I don't know of a lot, but it could be I just don't know. My head's just been kind of...
00:56:35
Speaker
try to grind through as much of this as I can, so. Absolutely. May not be aware of everything. Do you think, I mean, the timing was a little too close to say it was because of you, but Xbox themselves has become more and more vocal about offering games preservation as features for future consoles and whatnot. Do you think, if not you directly, this sort of stuff will sort of be
00:56:58
Speaker
I guess selling points, if not any legislation going through, but a selling point of like, hey, I won't destroy your games, Sony. I'm too cynical to say yes, but I'd love to be proven wrong. And even with the Xbox thing, I think what they're really doing is backwards compatibility kind of.
00:57:18
Speaker
bringing it forward. So it's preservation in a sense. It's just not the the worst of the worst that I'm dealing with on this sort of thing. So that that's helpful, but it's not the same kind of existential level that they're sure to go. I think it's very easy to just stay. You're going to preserve games. I mean, who knows if that's going to be the case, like in 10 years when no one's talking about your game anymore and it can quietly drop out of sight.
00:57:46
Speaker
Dale Mallows gives $5 and says, in reply to Fox D, I don't believe a game made by committee can or should be considered art. At best, it's kitsch. At worst, it's junk food. There's a little bit of an argument going on there. I think that goes back to the subjective view that I meant. Whatever pays more is right in this argument, is all I'm saying.
00:58:11
Speaker
I don't think the fact that it's committee design should preclude anything as art. I think art is in the perception of the user. As you say, everyone takes their own, extracts their own experience from it. If you think something is art, then maybe it is art, but then that's a very old debate.
00:58:27
Speaker
Look, old Renaissance paintings that people value, those are commissioned by the church, a lot of them, you know? It's, you know, the artist does, just because they don't have control over every aspect of it, doesn't mean that there is an artistic value. And just by coincidence, I am a fan of the crew game. And it's the second largest driving game ever made. And in my opinion, it represents a ground level view of the United States better than any other game I've ever seen.
00:58:55
Speaker
So that's something for that, you know, even if the circumstances are much more commercial and they're just trying to push product and that sort of thing. Absolutely. I think, like, design by committee is like, is an easy and, in my opinion, lazy criticism because it devalues any sort of collaboration. Like, oh, wait, more than five people worked on something? No, design by committee. That's not art. I mean, there are plenty of games that feel like they were designed by committee and that's what I object to. Agreed. Agreed.
00:59:26
Speaker
Incidentally, you said it's the second biggest car game. Would I be right in assuming the Crew 2 is the biggest one? No, because, well, I mean, it's a little subjective. The Crew 2 has the same map, except they removed parts. So instead of an amusement park, it's just a field. They raised some small towns.
00:59:52
Speaker
There's a space shuttle launch area. They just got rid of that. Now, they added some boat races, but then that's not technically driving. So if we're talking about the biggest driving game, I think the crew is still number two, and then fuel is the biggest one. But that's kind of a different animal, what that is. And I have them bigger than Euro truck simulator, that's my question. Yeah. Europe's tiny.
01:00:22
Speaker
You know, you say that. Compared to a while to walk across it. Yeah, take a while to walk across it still. Euro truck simulator is going to have a much higher quality ratio per square mile than something like fuel, but yeah. I want a driving game that takes place in Google Maps. Just go to my house.
01:00:41
Speaker
They've got that, it's called Google Street View. Oh, that's true. Yeah, but this doesn't have the tactile nature of the car. Also, it's outdated. You could just pretend. Yeah, I do. Whitticism gives $10 and says, I did some research on games during law school and video game law is very underdeveloped in a way that benefits publishers. Almost all suits are settled because why risk a court making some bad law?
01:01:09
Speaker
Well, if you're in the United States, it's probably worse than that because I was lucky enough to get some pro bono, high-level research help on this for the U.S. And the court case that kind of screwed us all is ProCD versus Seidenberg.
01:01:26
Speaker
where basically the ruling was, okay, software is complicated, so we're just going to defer to the end-user license agreement for almost everything. And there is some gray area under that, but the ability to continue running a game that you pay for is not part of that. That's pretty...
01:01:46
Speaker
much defer by the license agreement. So, I'm not optimistic at all for getting direct progress in the United States on this. That's why so much of this is international.
01:01:58
Speaker
It was interesting to think that the underdevelopment of video game lore is benefiting publishers now, because of course in the past it always benefited the player. I mean, this was the whole abandonware thing that was never tested in the court. Should people still be allowed to pirate games if no one's selling them and no one's supporting them? And, like, technically no, but it was never tested in the court.
01:02:22
Speaker
Well, if we're talking legally, then no. There's no legal term for abandonware. It's all illegal, technically. Now, of course, the reality is abandonware sites, the way they usually operate is they put the game up.
01:02:38
Speaker
And then if nobody complains, they leave it up. If they get a cease and desist, they take that game down. And so they can kind of exist between the cracks like that, you know? Sure. Yeah, as long as nobody cares, you're golden.
01:02:54
Speaker
I'm seeing someone, a user comment, a similar thought that I've seen messing around the internet now, which is if someone tried to invent a library nowadays, it probably wouldn't happen. Because of copyright issues and all of this legal mess, we are very fortunate that we have libraries as historical precedent.
01:03:18
Speaker
I never thought of that. There's some dystopia for you. I don't think you could have sort of come across a better example than France, who would fight Amazon for the libraries and whatnot. And they use common law, which is very much because the way America and Britain work is sort of like
01:03:36
Speaker
do what you want until somebody gets killed. And then I'm gonna say you can't do that. And then I'm gonna try to keep track of all this kind of stuff happening. Whereas France is more so, this is how I want things to work. And if it doesn't hit one of these, you're doing something illegal and I'm gonna look into it. So that's where you got your best bet of just like, wait a minute, this is how goods work at all.
01:03:56
Speaker
Yeah. I said in my video, if we can't win on this, we're never going to win. At least that's what I think. Normally, we hate outdated laws, but in this way, how Draconic it is kind of works to your favor. Good. Well, on that subject, Hjorth87 gives 20 Danish kroner and says, it's not illegal, is the lowest bar. I want ethics.
01:04:19
Speaker
I'm aiming slightly higher than that, and I just want the games to not be destroyed. This isn't going to stop every other grubby game practice in the industry. Just, okay, if we can at least not literally destroy the games, a friend of mine compared this to, it's like, okay, we're trying to stop muggings. We're not trying to stop the con games, you know?
01:04:42
Speaker
if you lose your money to the shell game on the street okay well then that's still on you but the we're trying to stop somebody just taking what you don't change money with with ethics you change it with more money that's why i say you know pat phil spencer on the back every time he talks about games preservation sure just fight them against each other
01:05:07
Speaker
Lampe gives £20 and says, how are you balancing what you're asking for with others who just feel entitled to have access? So often people just don't want to pay for a product and claim they want preservation as a way to justify piracy.
01:05:22
Speaker
Well, I think most developers don't really worry about piracy once they're no longer selling the game and no longer supporting it and never have intentions to touch it again. Yeah, oh yeah, I should make that clear. Everything we're doing would not change anything the companies are doing while the game is being supported.
01:05:41
Speaker
So if they want an online-only game and that's unpiratable, sure. Everything's focused on when support ends. And hey, some of them can go really long time. I mean, there's still MMOs from the 90s that are running today. I think EverQuest is still supported.
01:06:00
Speaker
So we're basically saying do whatever you want as a company, except once you're done with it, the people who have paid you, they need to be able to run it in some fashion. So if that's not a good enough balance, I mean, geez, what are you asking for, you know? Free stuff, that's what. Piracy has turned into this whole moral thing. Just say you like stealing things. It's fine. You don't have to justify it. I take this because I want stuff.
01:06:30
Speaker
Well, I should point out the crew has never been pirated. In fact, a lot of these games have never been pirated because of the way it's structured that's incredibly difficult. You'd have to reverse engineer a survey emulator, which I'm fine with. It's just that's not an excuse to destroy the game forever, that you want piracy protection, you know?
Right to Repair and Game Preservation
01:06:52
Speaker
No, it's very similar to what I know a lot of farmers, a lot of people who own electronics are dealing with, which is the right to repair movement that's also happening, where it's like, oh, if I buy a tractor and a part breaks, I want to be able to fix that part and not have to pay a subscription service to John Deere or whatever in order to fix it. I bought the tractor. I'm not renting the tractor.
01:07:15
Speaker
And so to me it's very similar things with the crew where it says, no, I bought a thing. Let me use the thing I bought. Yeah, absolutely. Doran Grossman Naples gives $5 and says, I want the pre-MS Minecraft model. Once you buy the game, you can play any version from pre-alpha to now, single player or private server, any OS. That's a dream, isn't it?
01:07:42
Speaker
Actually, I've heard of a, if you're talking about a real compromise, the best version I've heard of is you buy software or a game and you get that version, you own that. But then maybe updates down the line, you have to pay, or you get updates for a year or something. But then if, so if you buy the 2.5 version, you get to keep that. But then a few years later, 5.0 is out and it's cool and has all this extra stuff. Okay, well then you pay a little bit for that.
01:08:11
Speaker
That's not as consumer friendly, but that seems to me a good compromise for developers who want to keep working on stuff, but can't do it for free, you know? That's how Adobe editing software worked for ages, is you know, you would buy the one version and that would last you five years until they came out with the cool new version. And then much like everything else, they switched over to a subscription service.
01:08:39
Speaker
Yeah, I still use Photoshop 6.0. Not because I'm like taking a high model stand-again subscription, I'm just comfortable with where everything is in Photoshop 6.0. Fair. Alex Armstrong gives side dollars and says, I like detective games and point-and-click adventures, but I lack the intuitiveness, I think intuition is the word you're after there, Alex Armstrong, to solve them without guides. Should I keep trying or give up and watch Let's Plays?
01:09:07
Speaker
Well, for me, Alex, solving puzzles is why you play detective games in Boy and Click Adventures. I like solving puzzles. I like feeling clever. That's why I like Obra Dins so much. And that's why I was so disappointed that you can only really play that game once. And once you've figured all the puzzles out, there's no more of that satisfaction of going, aha.
01:09:26
Speaker
I'd say there's a big range. I mean, there are puzzles no one on Earth is going to figure out in some adventure games. And then there's others that can kind of... So maybe look up the easiest ones and kind of work your way up from there. And figure out where your cutoff is, you know? There you go. Nick Noll gives $5 and says, do you buy the argument that a company can't afford to make a game server code public after sunsetting because it's proprietary and is still in use?
01:09:56
Speaker
There can be cases like that where the, let's say there's like middleware licenses associated with running that server where they only had the license for a certain amount of time for their company. So to release that publicly would just be a huge contract violation and yeah, the cost would be unfathomable.
01:10:20
Speaker
To my understanding these laws are not going to be retroactive So we're basically talking about so yeah, that might be an excuse for some games today However, that's not an excuse for saying oh, so therefore we can never make a game that has an end-of-life plan That's the thing to distinguish that if they knew this is going to be a requirement in two years
01:10:41
Speaker
They could adapt to that. Plus, if that was a known requirement in many markets, there would probably be a gold rush of middleware to meet those standards immediately. Say, yeah, here, you can click these three buttons and here's your end of life build for when you want to shut it down later. Because that would be a market ready to be filled. Sure.
01:11:04
Speaker
Bones of AU gives £5 and says, "...accredits to Marvel's Avengers for at least ditching the cash shop and just give everybody the MTX costumes rather than permalocking gear post support." Yeah, I guess it's still playable. I was reading a headline the other day that it's still got more simultaneous players than what Suicide Squad has now. That's not too hard.
01:11:35
Speaker
Whiplash SL gives $10 and says, I spoke with a filmmaker at the university I attend about art preservation in the digital era, and they had a very stark question about that. What deserves to be preserved versus what gets left behind? Well, in my opinion, that's up to the people who care about this stuff. Yeah, to be clear, I'm not trying to have every game preserved. I'm trying to
01:12:00
Speaker
What I'm trying to do is if somebody wants to preserve a game, they can. That's what I'm after. Because if a game's garbage and literally nobody cares about this, fine. We lose it. That's tough.
01:12:14
Speaker
Right. I mean, at the end of the day, we can't preserve everything forever. You know, things will slip through the cracks and get lost through time. That's just how time works. But agreed. The ability to save things is all we're looking for. Especially if it pays for it. Especially if it's hard to pay for it, absolutely. The answer to that question is pretty straightforward. What deserves to be preserved? Anything that at least one person with the wherewithal to preserve it wishes to preserve.
01:12:46
Speaker
Put that on a shirt. There you go. Uh, Fox D gives five dollars and says, I wonder about some opera in the 19th century that nobody's heard in two centuries because it wasn't Deflader Mouse or Carmen and it got forgotten. Well, it was ever thus, Fox D. I mean, like you've forgotten, you didn't record the conversation you had with your mum two weeks ago. Is that a great loss to human culture? Maybe. Well, she spit some fat beats, you know, we'll never know.
01:13:15
Speaker
I mean, I'm so used to I'm so used to being able to listen back to conversations because I do all these podcasts and streams and stuff. Sometimes after I've had like a call like for work with the guys and then afterwards I'm thinking, oh, I need something to listen to. I'll listen back to that conversation I just had. And then I realize I can't because it was a work call and not a stream.
01:13:34
Speaker
It sounds like the path to madness for me, but I saw an article somebody sent me recently, it's estimated 75% of films in the silent era no longer exist because they would just kind of burn down the film for the silver or extract other stuff and that's it. So yeah, that's already happened. This was a huge problem with like early BBC stuff as well, because their policy was just to
01:14:00
Speaker
destroy stuff to clear the space and there's like reams of classic Doctor Who episodes that's like the fan base are all like would all like pay through the nose for and they literally just have to ask people did anyone happen to record this with their VCRs at the time it came out because we'd love to hear from you.
01:14:18
Speaker
Doesn't that predate VCRs? Yeah, that's the problem. No, and of course, like also everything that we continue to make things on is disposable. You know, film degrades over time, even hard drives collapse over the years. And so it's, you know, entropy comes for us all in the end. Do what I do, get into writing books.
01:14:46
Speaker
Then at least you got a box of comp copies you could at least show someone if the entire internet goes down tomorrow. Don't you have to send copies of that to the British Library? Oh, I haven't. Maybe somebody did. Maybe the publisher did. Yeah, because they asked for like a copy of everything ever written.
01:15:05
Speaker
One. Not every library, one of them. They don't display all the books they have, but yeah, technically they're supposed to have a copy. We're like games for being art, if you will, are also part like toys and machinery. So preserving it and playing it, keeping it purchasable, keeping it functioning are just like three different things here. Well, I think the internet has demonstrated, as we say, that if at least one person cares, then
01:15:37
Speaker
then they could preserve it if they want. And that's kind of what the internet is. Everyone who cares about something preserves it somewhere. You say that when some intern is going to trip over the servers.
01:15:49
Speaker
There it is, all the internet predate in 2010. Uh, where were we? JGALstar1 gives $5 and says, speaking of preservation, Yahtzee, I'm rewatching your old dev diary series and the game download links are broken. Do you still have them to re-host? Yeah, early on the game download links were linked to the site, but later on all the game downloads were added to my itch.io page. So if you go to yzcroshaw.itch.io, all the games are up there.
01:16:19
Speaker
God bless itch.io. Love that. FoxD gives $5 and says, I'm not OK with sunset stroke last update dates on games when EU4 and Euro Truck Simulator 2 are still getting updates after over a decade and adding value. I mean, you would say that, but like the Factorio devs who were working on their game for quite a while have finally said this is the last one. The thing we're doing after this is going to be a whole like essentially another game that we're going to be throwing into there. So.
01:16:49
Speaker
Also, people like Eric Barone, who would just update games with new stuff on a whim without asking for extra money, kind of, you know, setting a hard act to follow over everyone else. He's got like millions. What do you need more money for? More time is what you need.
01:17:06
Speaker
Well, I can understand devs wanting to move on to something new for them. Well, that's how I see it. I mean, I make games, but having to maintain it for the rest of my life feels like one of the circles of hell. I want to move on to the next idea I'm excited about, like most creatives. Dolly.
01:17:27
Speaker
Lampe gives 10 pounds and says, how is this for games different? What happens in cloud provided software? Cloud services have the same problem of something you bought not being accessible. Ultimately, games are software. Well, the biggest thing is the licensing where they're like, here's when you lose access. You know, it's just too cloudy for lack of a better phrase. You just don't know when you're going to lose the access. It needs to be if you're going to do the thing, be clear about when you're going to do the thing. That's like the minimum that we can go for.
01:17:56
Speaker
And theoretically, obviously this would be like real pie in the sky thinking is something like legislation on giving people access to games, to software could have a rippling effect into other versions of software. I mean, obviously that is not what you are going for.
01:18:16
Speaker
No, it's okay. You're not the first person to have that thought, but I'm trying not to raise the alarm.
Cloud Services and Game Ownership
01:18:23
Speaker
That's not my goal, personally. For the record, that's not my goal. That's too big, but you're right. That could happen. No, no. And I don't think that is a viable... That's like 20, 30 years down the line. But you're right. It's all software.
01:18:41
Speaker
Chris Fratz gives $5 and says there's two ways you can get UT2K4 back online. Either enter a command in the console to redirect the master server list or edit an INI. I think you can just specify the IP address. You want like if you had joined game and maybe it's for authentication thing.
01:19:04
Speaker
Uh, Kit Kangaroo gives 5 euros and says veterans of YT Gaming uniting to fight the good fight. Loved to see it. I do hope for Freeman's Mind 2 to finish before 2030. Such a great series.
01:19:17
Speaker
Yeah, I'm doing too many things, but this is a temporary, this is a detour. I think we can all agree you're doing something significantly more important than the funny YouTube videos. We all love the funny YouTube videos, but we're all okay with you taking a little detour here. Just like man's a side questing his whole life now he's got to do the main quest. I don't want to be the Dovahkiin.
01:19:45
Speaker
Sorry, I got a flashback to the end of Evil Dead 2 for a second there. And all the crowd going, hail, hail! And Ash just going, no! SDH gives $19.99 and says, seeing Ross and Yachts on the same screen is so surreal to me, here's some money. Feels pretty surreal for me. Because as I say, I've been watching Ross's stuff since probably right from the beginning of Freeman's mind.
01:20:12
Speaker
We've seen a lot of zero punctuation. Yeah. We've, we've corresponded once before in the past after I nicked one of your jokes accidentally. Yeah. And that was never a big deal. Yeah. I was, I was just kind of a pride when I made that statement, you know, it was just like, yeah, thanks. Yeah. This is the first time we've spoken face to face as it were. I'm enjoying it.
01:20:39
Speaker
Lampe gives five pounds and says, to clarify my cloud point, cloud services that charge a one-time access fee for lifetime access. Okay. All right then. Thanks for clarifying. Chris Fratz comes back with five dollars and says, I'm 23 years old. Now he's playing Unreal Tournament 2K 4 on Saturday and having a great time getting some frags. It should not have been delisted. Well, what's the problem then, Chris Fratz? You got your game.
01:21:09
Speaker
you were playing yeah you're having fun good for you uh lucas n gives 20 r dollars and says one possible bad end to this would be that companies would be further encouraged to only make free-to-play games so you have no sense of ownership what do you think of it don't really doing that but no that's that's something we're looking into okay here's
01:21:33
Speaker
I'll mention this in my video. The free-to-play games, you know, they run on microtransactions for the funding. Those are one-time purchases.
Goods vs. Services in Gaming
01:21:42
Speaker
So, if the law considers those goods, well, then in order to access your one-time purchase, you need the game running in some form once they're done with it. It's the same logic. So, yeah.
01:21:57
Speaker
There might not even be that much of a distinction. The only big distinction is for the subscription games, like World of Warcraft. World of Warcraft will be way harder to do because you pay your 30 days, they're your 30 days. That's a service. It's not unclear. However, I think that's literally five games now. Maybe there's another I don't know of. There's World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XI and XIV, EVE Online,
01:22:26
Speaker
There was another newer space game I forgot the name of. I don't know of any other games that have survived that still run on subscription only. So I can live with those losses.
Developers: Money vs. Creativity
01:22:41
Speaker
Also LucasM, you're sort of operating on the assumption that companies only ever want to do the thing that makes money. I want to believe that there are people in developers
01:22:51
Speaker
maybe buried beneath layers and layers of committees that actually wanted to creatively express themselves still. Oh. Yeah, but they don't, they often are the ones in charge is the problem. Yeah. I bet if developers could vote on whether to end the light, I bet there would be probably be 90% less. Yeah. What is this? Marty's gone. He's a hopeful one now. I assume developers want their games to be played. I know I do.
01:23:20
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, this is all I publish aside, the stuff we're complaining about. Yeah. Uh, Eric Wyckhart. Oh, hello, Eric. He's doing his thing where even though he's just editing the podcast, he plays a super chat so he can get a word in edgeways. Uh, he was 50 arses and says, didn't the CEO recently say people should be able to tip games they bought and now an insider joke? What is next? Tipping my own workplace? Well, here's a question.
01:23:45
Speaker
Well, here's a question, Eric. Um, what is health insurance in America? If not tipping your own workplace, you guys tip. It's like having a tip automatically extracted from your paycheck every month. So you can go to the doctor. Oh, that's so sad, but true. I might as well. I'm paying it already. You know,
01:24:09
Speaker
Uh, FoxD gives five dollars and says, take two wants to charge me by the hour. Please, nobody tell them how many hours I put into civilization five. I can't afford it. What game were they talking about specifically or were they just throwing that up in the air? Like John Ricotello is saying, I want to charge for bullets. That was specific in mind. It was a, that's the thing. They just throw out these like, what if practices and hope someone else tries it because I don't have the balls for it myself.
01:24:37
Speaker
Well, they want to see what they can get away with. I suppose like every now and again, they'll throw out an idea and everyone says, that's awful. Don't do that. And someone does it. And then if one says, that's awful, like we said, it would be. But then they just keep doing it. And eventually we all run out of energy. And that's just how things are now. If people are willing to actually pay the money, then it's going to stick around because that's all that matters.
01:25:06
Speaker
That's true. That's true. There have definitely been times where I have like, oh, I've bought some stuff in Rocket League because it's like, oh, I played enough Rocket League. I'm OK giving them a little bit more money because I've played it for X amount of hours. So I'm OK spending a little more money. Same with games like Team Fortress 2 or Overwatch where I have.
01:25:29
Speaker
you know, hundreds of hours into the game where it's like I can tell myself I I've earned spending some money on boxes or skins or whatever. So I bet a large faction of consumers will say, well, I guess I'm OK playing by the hour as long as every hour is fun. Well, this hour isn't very fun, but maybe I'll play I'll pay a little bit because the next hour might be fun. That was a funny one someone brought up where it's like if I was it.
01:26:00
Speaker
I forgot what it was. It was about getting money back, essentially. It was like, if you can take this game at any point, then I should be allowed a refund at any point. And even I was on the Reddit. I don't know if it was real. Somebody said that they showed they got a refund for their crew. The first crew game after like 10 some years. Did you hear about that?
Consumer Protection and Refunds
01:26:21
Speaker
I think I did the, yeah, I think it was for PlayStation 4 that they did, some did that. But no, I was gonna say that's not the focus of my campaign because there's not gonna be enough people getting refunds for this to have like a shockwave effect in the industry. But you can try, especially if you're in Europe or Australia, you can try to have, if you just want your game, not even the crew, but anything, any game that does this or a DLC,
01:26:51
Speaker
Contact your consumer protection agency and say, hey, I want my money back. You might get it. I'm not pursuing that as part of the campaign because that doesn't lead a direct path to stopping this practice. But I'm not against you trying. You might be able to get your money back. Do online only gaming for free if you want.
01:27:12
Speaker
I tried to get mine back from Blizzard for Overwatch 1 and they didn't essentially, they didn't really say no so much as they're like, our system isn't made to handle this request.
01:27:22
Speaker
So we're going to have to say no. Well, that's one way to roadblock here, isn't it? Yeah. They're like, you played too many hours so long ago. Computer said no. Computer said no. Sorry. Well, don't do this directly to the companies. Do it to the consumer protection agency in their country. Well, you got to get their nose first. Oh, yeah. You're right. You're right. That's usually a first step.
01:27:52
Speaker
SteamtasticVegabond gives 2.79 CAD and says console with a coin slot you have to pay to empty.
01:27:59
Speaker
So, that would all just be your money though, wouldn't it, Steemtastic Vagabond? You're putting your own money to get your own money back. I don't think you've thought this through, Steemtastic Vagabond. But some people would kill for that. Absolutely, man. I used to have a coin-operated bubblegum machine in my front room. And you loved it. I had the key for it. I'd just take a coin out and put it back in to have my bubblegum.
01:28:26
Speaker
I mean, I was paying for the bubblegum as well, but it was fun to pretend I was being a bit naughty. Yeah. It's just a fun thing to have. I've shortchanged myself. Rose Delta gives side dollars and says, fun remark. An old coworker who's from China was shocked we pay for Final Fantasy XIV by the month and not per hour played.
01:28:53
Speaker
That's right, they've got, um, cafes, don't they? Hmm. Oh, sure, sure. Uh, Steemtastic Vagabond comes... Yeah, certainly does seem to be. Steemtastic Vagabond comes back with 279 Canadian and says, localized censorship is still censorship.
01:29:14
Speaker
Well, we won't we won't breach this topic. Obviously, we're here. We're here to talk about something else. You know, we're not here to define what censorship is. And if a if a creative person agrees to make a change, is it censorship? You know, if someone else has an idea. Yeah, that's that's interesting, isn't that right? If I say you're wrong, will you pay more money to say that I'm wrong? Because I don't mind the back and forth.
01:29:40
Speaker
I mean, I've, I've worked with editors on my work and they say, Hey, can we just, uh, can we just remove this reference here? Cause some people might be offended. I'm like, yeah, whatever. Not must not be huge skin off my back. Is it right? Would they get up my ass if they knew about that? Right. So it's like, you know, the, we're, we're not here to solve or define what censorship is. We're here to talk about something else next.
Regional Regulations and Game Releases
01:30:07
Speaker
Well, sticking with that subject because Aerith fits along with a hundred arses and says, to the above don't know, a worldwide release requires to compromise with all regions regulations or do changes per region, but this seems ignored and devs get blamed. Metopia is a kids game, but it's 18 plus on Russia. What? Is that because you can have same sex relationships in that game? Because that's usually the case. Oh, sure.
01:30:35
Speaker
If you can have same-sex relationships in something like The Sims, then it has to be like adults only in Russia. I mean, it's like Bellatro, got knocked off of some stores in South Korea, and I forget where else because it has poker themes. It's got gambling themes, not gambling itself, just the themes. Sure. So there is no blanket censorship, I'd say. Blistered Soul goes $1.99 and says, dev diary collection game on Steam to preserve it.
01:31:03
Speaker
Yeah, you hypocrite, where is it? It's already all there on itch.io. Free to download. Help yourself. I mean, do you want me to just pack it all into one zip? Don't forget to tip. I mean, I could do that.
Preserving the Art of Gaming
01:31:21
Speaker
Tomix1199 gives $10 and says, are you fighting for all games that are currently alive or is this more of all future games to be developed should be left in a playable state after end of support? Whatever we can get.
01:31:32
Speaker
But it's most likely going to be the future ones, primarily. I don't get to decide that. That's going to be courts and the look at that. And ideally, it would be nice for everything to be. I can see it being kind of a shockwave. I think it would be fair to give some lead in time for a lot of publishers and developers, but that won't be my decision.
01:32:01
Speaker
A Dark-ish member for one month in ad-free podcasts. And then Fast gives £9.99 to say, can't catch stream right now, but can catch podcast later. Just want to say thanks for all the great content. Also, Frost, I know you caught a lot of flack lately, but keep your chin up. Cold take is amazing. Flack? Who's been flack? I've been getting flack. Oh, was this the helldivers 2 thing? Oh, that's not flack. That's just gaming, you know.
01:32:38
Speaker
Well, I think there's a lot of answers to that and a lot of people will have different answers. For me, I'm interested in interactive narrative and game design and the new gameplay ideas that people come up with to express emotional storytelling and narrative. Those are the things that are most interesting to me.
01:32:47
Speaker
You don't like this game I don't like, huh? Cheers. Cheers. There you go.
01:33:00
Speaker
Start menus for me. You like start menus? If you can just keep a library of all the start menus in all games, I'd be happy. Yeah, that's pretty good. That's probably an archive somewhere. Ever seen Forsaken's? That's an oppressive start menu. Yeah, that's a good one.
01:33:18
Speaker
Like all of the above really for me, but one thing in particular for me is I love game worlds, especially when they put lots of effort into them. That's why even these games that, you know, if it feels like it's designed by committee and the writing's not so good, the gameplay is okay, but wow, this world has a lot of detail. This is neat. And like seeing it. So my standards fluctuate a lot depending on the game of what to expect, you know?
01:33:43
Speaker
Absolutely. You've done your part to get soundtracks released by the original musicians, haven't you? Well, it's more like the abandonware thing. I just decided to go for it and hope there wouldn't be trouble with it. In these cases where, to the best of my knowledge, I was the only person in possession of some of these, so I'm thinking,
01:34:06
Speaker
I'm just gonna release this and just you know probably nobody cares or the composer is happy to have it heard you know so yeah mute I love all kinds of soundtracks even if I just don't care for that game in any other way you know so
01:34:22
Speaker
That's like, that's the that's the difficulty when we talk about like, you know, my preservation or games as art or whatever is because they're they are so complex. Like, like, oh, I just want to save the map of this world because I think it's a cool ass map. Everything else about this art sucks. That's like saying, like, I love the frame of this painting. I do not care for the painting.
Creating Realistic Game Experiences
01:34:49
Speaker
John Brooks gives 10 pounds and says, Ross, been great having you here, hope to get you back for an update in future, or even if they have you on a podcast just because. Sure, I'd love to talk about something that's not this. I'm sure you're getting sick of that. Yeah, we're dipping a toe in regular guests, maybe. We've got some friends of their channel that might be lining up, but we'll see how we go.
01:35:17
Speaker
Strum Theory goes to 199 and says, how long does Freeman's mind take to make? There you go. It varies. It's like if I'm really.
01:35:27
Speaker
There's a lot of weird stuff you do sometimes. How long does it take to write a good chapter of a book? That's one way to look at it. There's a big variance there, but obviously if you're under more pressure, it can speed that time up.
01:35:46
Speaker
There's a question I had, because there was an episode in Freeman's Mind 2 where you're on the water hazard level and you got the bit where you have to jump over the ramp in the hovercraft, and in the video you do this whole thing where Freeman takes planks off of a thing and nails them to the end of the ramp to extend it, which I want to say you can't do in the game. Did you just have like a whole modded version of the game or something?
01:36:15
Speaker
No, but I had help from somebody to mod just that part. It's in the credits. I forget exactly who it was on that one, but... Yeah, there were a few things where sometimes the gaming nature of Half-Life 2 would kind of bug me in that I'm trying to treat this like it's a real...
01:36:33
Speaker
Like, this is all real for Freeman. So when I see just real obvious things that I want to fix, I'm thinking, if I was in this situation, I would do this. That's why in the original one, I always had him doing pull-ups when you could bypass a big portion if you could just do a pull-up. So I kind of did a little trick by doing like turning on no clip on and off and just trying to maneuver in that way.
01:37:01
Speaker
First of all, pull ups are hard. Pull ups are really difficult to do. I was writing about this. I was writing about realistic platformers in the old Prince of Persia sense. And I just did a little aside on there saying, have you ever tried that instantly? Have you ever tried pulling yourself up with just your arms onto a ledge without using your legs as well? Because I have tried. It is really hard.
01:37:27
Speaker
Well, I'm not trying to brag, but I can do that. I can do everything that Freeman goes through except for the insane falls and getting shot at. All the other jumps and climbing I'm capable of. Congratulations. That reminded me. There's a movie, Mom and Dad Save the World, that's the best highlight I've seen of somebody struggling to do a pull-up.
Licensing Issues and Game Access
01:37:52
Speaker
in any movie ever where these aliens are chasing him and if he could just pull himself up the ladder, he could do it. And you can see him just struggling with it. It's a great scene. Finally, someone else who's seen that movie, that's not just me. So good. Saral Racer gives six euros and says, with how licenses work for cars and music in racing games, do you think you could get pushback from those companies?
01:38:19
Speaker
It's possible, but I am not aware of any game that's had licensed music or carved brands where the people who bought the game are no longer allowed to play it. It's usually that that's a cutoff for being able to sell more copies of it by the publisher.
01:38:39
Speaker
So if you have an old version of something like Crazy Taxi or now Project Cars or something, you can still play those. I don't know what's in their contracts, but literally every other game I'm aware of that has that, that's just a cutoff for when they can sell it, not when players who bought it can continue playing it.
01:39:03
Speaker
That happens even now. You had like Stranger Things was providing licensing to like SMITE and all these other crossover collaborations. And after the licensing expires, they get rid of the ability to buy it, but anyone who's bought it can still use it. You know, so let's just how that works. There you go. Keeping the stuff you paid for. That's all you want.
Call to Action for Game Preservation
01:39:22
Speaker
It seems so simple when we say it out loud. What a novel concept. Ah, give us $1.99 and says, Frost, glad you're feeling better. Well, thank you.
01:39:33
Speaker
Yes, you were laid up with wisdom tooth problems for the weekend. Yeah, too wise. Too big. FT gives $5 and says, using a super chat, remind everyone to go to the Stop Killing Games site and do your part. Also, don't forget to sign the UK and AU petitions. That's right. What's that website again? StopKillingGames.com. StopKillingGames.com. That sounds like a fantastic website to go to right now.
01:40:03
Speaker
I mean, I'm a British citizen. It's kind of spartan, actually. I didn't really want a lot of distractions. It's just to follow people to the right place. Oh, thank you, Eric. Eric is putting a little screenshot of it up in the center of us all right now so you even know what it looks like.
01:40:20
Speaker
There you go. If you want to, you could even click through. It's very simple step by step. Click your country and it's like, here's the whole process for you. Very, very easy. If you're in America, it will just say, sorry. Well, if you own the crew, you can help if you're an American, but I just had to go where the openings were, you know? Absolutely.
01:40:45
Speaker
Snake in the garden gives five euros and says working in cloud security It's all working towards meeting minimum standards for law first then customer preference second ethics not even prioritized IRL Yeah, I assume as much snake in the garden Hmm lampy gives 20 pounds it says hypo Yachts makes a game as a solo dev no publisher has a server component required to run to express an idea Four years later. He doesn't want to support it anymore Should he be forced to go back and make it work or be sued?
01:41:16
Speaker
Well, I don't think you'll look like getting sued, but you can just dump your files and move on. Yeah, I mean, there's nothing stopping you from doing that. Just stick it all on GitHub or something. Well, and like you've said before, Ross, this is something that will theoretically, if anything happens, every game made before this will be grandfathered in, but now it will say that games going forward needs to have some sort of sunset plan, right?
Future Playability and New Games
01:41:46
Speaker
It's not even clear to me if, like this, I would take that, but it's not even clear to me if they would be grandfathered in. It's more like if you're still selling this game after this date when this law goes into effect, then you're on the hook for those newer copies. But if the only way this happened would be to grandfather in existing ones, fine. Like we're still saving all the games of the future then. Yeah, yeah. Whatever gets us to the finish line.
01:42:17
Speaker
A superb owner gives five dollars and says here's some dollars for the pods excellent new Jack DLC Although I do miss the classic Marty feature being included How can players patch that back in you can wait till next week a superb owner when Marty will be back
01:42:32
Speaker
We've basically just swapped them out for Jack because Jack knows who Ross Scott is better than that he does. I know who Ross Scott is and also I'm an archivist in the movie industry. I spend a lot of my time digitizing VHS and maintaining archives and copies in that manner. So I have a small amount of expertise that is tangential to the conversation. Yeah.
01:42:59
Speaker
Dr. Theo gives $2 and says, why not support community servers after death? Well, exactly, Dr. Theo. Why not?
01:43:08
Speaker
One did. I don't know if you guys saw the article on that one. It was City of Heroes. The game died essentially, but the community did their best to support their own server to the point where they got an official licensing from the company going, okay, if you meet our standards, we'll let you keep it alive. We're not going to add anything more. We're not going to charge microtransactions. You can't charge money for them, but you can keep it going if you want.
01:43:33
Speaker
Hell yeah. I think I even heard of a kit. Wasn't there a version being run secretly the whole time? It was secretly the whole time because they're like, we have to make sure everything's ready and perfect before we ask. And it's like, that's a great plan. It's like, yeah, you deal with it. Yeah. That's, it's a great plan to just go to school and say, Hey, you don't have to do shit.
01:43:57
Speaker
Well, you've got it all sorted. And honestly, yeah, I don't even like, I wouldn't be surprised if they just start letting you rent out licenses for servers. Sure. Sure. But if you void any of it, like franchising, like McDonald's, like, yeah, just meet my standards. You can host it. How about it? Yeah, I like it.
01:44:17
Speaker
Uh, Chris Pratz? Oh, nope, missed one. Uh, Longshanks gives five pounds and says Fallout New Vegas runs like ass on Windows 10 and above, even with mods.
Publisher Responsibilities for Old Games
01:44:26
Speaker
Could a publisher be responsible for keeping a game compatible on future OS? I don't think so, because it says, like, minimum requirements, maximum requirements. Is there, like, a overkill requirements? Like, anything beyond this is not my problem.
01:44:41
Speaker
Well, like I said, this is why we should have a date where we just flat out say we're not going to update it past this date. Yeah, for the record, nothing we're doing would involve that. But when we talk about support, we're talking about that exact day that the game doesn't work. So whatever the OS they supported was then, that's all it would apply to. So things in the future, hopefully the community can kind of work out.
01:45:07
Speaker
Right. Like with City Heroes, like in a perfect world, yeah, they would make things open enough for the community to figure it out. But no, a developer, a publisher is not responsible to make a game forever playable. Like once we go to hollow computers and transparent monitors, Fallout New Vegas shouldn't have to play on that. Or Bethesda shouldn't have to make it play on that.
01:45:32
Speaker
Or what you said, if they list in the requirements, you know, okay, only runs on this OS. Fine. Now that's...
Debate on Remasters and Ports
01:45:40
Speaker
Informed purchasing decisions is what we are asking for. If you take away nothing else, that's the main point. Chris Fratz gives $2 and says, would you consider ports stroke remasters as preservation? Yeah, how do you feel about something like the Resident Evil 4 remake and the original Resident Evil 4 no longer being available?
01:46:02
Speaker
I don't know how I feel about that sort of thing. Well, in Resident Evil 4, you can still play the original Resident Evil 4 and find a copy of it. I still have my copy in my GameCube, I can play it. As long as the original wasn't destroyed in all forms forever, then fine, whatever.
01:46:26
Speaker
Again, I'm really trying to keep the scope narrow. EJ gives $5 and says, what if a board game you had to call an 800 number to get instructions for your next turn and they shut that phone number down?
01:46:42
Speaker
Well, I'm only focused on video games, but even in that case, I would say I probably wouldn't be trying to do all this or something like that because, like I said, even in the petitions, I put playable state. Is the game playable? Then good enough. I mean, what that might mean could vary. It could be you do lose features along the way, but that's just completely different place than where we are now with this sort of thing.
01:47:10
Speaker
Nine Seed gives $4.99 and says, been a fan of Second Wind and Ross Scott for a while now. Very happy this crossover finally happened. Rock on you guys. Thank you, Nine Seed. Tsunami Dusha gives $20 and doesn't say anything, but thanks for the $20 Tsunami Dusha. And then Unnuclear gives $5 and says, if you never bought the crew, check if you've ever got it in a humble bundle or another similar service.
01:47:37
Speaker
Yeah, I heard for Xbox, I don't even know how it works now. GWG, something gold. You might have gotten a free copy from that. Games with gold? Games with gold, maybe that's it. Maybe, oof, I'd have to go check that. Yeah, so you might be able to file a complaint. You're an odor. Yeah, I mean, I might have gotten a copy somewhere down the line. It's hard to recall all the shit that's on my Steam list.
01:48:06
Speaker
I got, I did buy the crew two. I don't think I ever played the crew one. I played the crew two. I reviewed it and didn't like it that much of a recall. So another petition comes along for the crew two. I'll get right on board with that. I'm out by then. Either it's solved or we failed, you know.
01:48:29
Speaker
And then Chris Fratz comes back with $5 and says, clarification, I consider a port-stroke remaster version of a game that's updated but still using the original code. A port just keeping the old graphics. Well, are you saying we should mandate people do that, Chris Fratz? Because at the moment, that's just, like, if they feel like porting or remastering stuff. No, I think it's more so just, do you feel that's preservation?
01:48:53
Speaker
I care. Yes. I mean, if it walks like preservation and quacks like preservation. Could be a platypus. I think that's close enough. For me personally, close enough. But for remakes, if they're really changing things, I could see where that's not. But that's such a nuanced issue. I'm not even going to worry about it. That's fair.
01:49:18
Speaker
Like, I found the re-releases of the first three Tomb Raider games fairly recently was... I found I was more interested in that than the full-on remake of Tomb Raider 1 that came out a while back. And a nursery, I wanna say.
01:49:34
Speaker
It's so tricky. And of course, just with general gameplay updates and whatnot, you know, what is preservation? I know. I mean, I think it's more fun to play the original and see how much we've learned since then. Right? Oh, good god. Did we really put up with these controls in the original Tomb Raider game? Nodding my head every time something bigoted comes through. My god, how racist we were. Wow. Everyone must have been stupid back then.
01:50:03
Speaker
Right? Or even things like in the Dark Souls remaster, you know, like adding the bonfire near the skeleton blacksmith, right?
Changing Games and Original Intent
01:50:11
Speaker
Where it's just like, how changing is that to the original intent of Dark Souls? I know, I mean, after a certain point, it's fucking George Lucas with his special editions of the original trilogy. Exactly. Listen, he gave you more. What could you ask for? For me, it was more like Jakey and Rowling.
01:50:33
Speaker
who was just like, oh yeah, no, I totally intended for these characters to be like... Exactly. It was like, I didn't pick up on that. And, uh, Andy C gives 50 MX dollars and says nothing to add to the conversation. Just wanted to say it's nice to see Jack on camera. Thank you Ross for this campaign. I'm signing it now.
01:50:57
Speaker
Oh, great. Good for you. And that's the last super jab and there's some more pop in at the last moment, which they very often do. But for now, let's wrap things up. Uh, I was Yahtzee Croshaw. I was joined by Frost.
01:51:13
Speaker
Bye, Jack. And thank you very much to our special guest, Ross Scott. Yay! From Accursed Farms and the Stop Killing Games petition. If you want games to not die, he's the person to talk to. StopKillingGames.com. See what you can do.
01:51:35
Speaker
All right, well, that's it for today's podcast. Just to plug the rest of our week's stuff. I've got my usual fully ramblymatic video this week coming out on Wednesday. It'll be on the subject. It's a double bill this week. It's on Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom and Phantom Fury. A nice retro-styled indie game. Double bill.
01:51:56
Speaker
I'll have my Yachty Try stream on Wednesday as well. Frost, what do you got? I just had a video going up talking about the tipping culture that Mike Ybarra would like to see in video games and I go, that's nice honey, let's not do that though. I think it's important very much as Ross Scott has done here to offer a little friction on the slippery slope every now and again so we don't slide too far down. Absolutely. That's it for me.
01:52:23
Speaker
Jack, you got anything? I don't have anything. I think Friday I'm streaming some Elden Ring preparing for the DLC and then working on getting all those adventurers and I remasters out.
Conclusion and Final Thoughts
01:52:33
Speaker
The originals will not be preserved. We're making them better. Special editions, there you go. And Ross, once again, thanks for coming. If you got anything you wanted to plug besides stop killing games, now's the time. No, I'm like laser focused.
01:52:52
Speaker
Great. Well, I'll just say follow the Accursed Farms YouTube channel for all sorts of great content. Normal videos will return as soon as I'm able. Yes, don't put pressure on the poor boy. Look at him. He's been worn thin. All right. The last couple of superjads came in. Pure Pyro gives two euros. Says request for more Foundry VTT videos with Jack and Omar.
01:53:18
Speaker
If you guys want them, I'll tell you how I do everything in Foundry VTT for my Dungeons and Dragons games. It's very fun. And one last super chat from Unnuclear, who gives $2 and says, is this the last super chat? Yes, hopefully, because we're going to wrap things up right now before any more come in, like the cheeky little twats you are. All right. Thanks for watching. Bye, everyone. See you next time. Bye.
01:54:01
Speaker
you