Accursed Farms
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2024
31:24 · 401K views · Apr 2, 2024
Ross Scott of Accursed Farms lays out a campaign to stop publishers from permanently shutting down games, using The Crew as the test case. He covers government initiatives and the legal options, and the stopkillinggames.com site.
HN points to it as the original statement of the Stop Killing Games campaign.
5 comments from Hacker News
This is a campaign to stop game publishers from turning off and rendering their games-as-a-service which people might have paid for completely inaccessible. The goal is to contact as many consumer agencies worldwide until we have some solid legislation that forces game companies to patch or release their backend, so that paying users can keep playing the game indefinitely after the publishers decide to pull the plug. Games-as-a-service are an increasingly common practice that puts an expiration date to games that are sold at full price, and many users are totally unaware that after a few years the game they have paid for is basically worthless. There is no technological reason this is the case, but pure greed by publishers. Many of today's GaaS are single-player games that have no business at all being online-only. A studio might choose this publishing strategy to extract as much money from consumers, to milk the playerbase with a monthly subscription and killing games when a sequel is announced. There is no law today stopping companies from doing so. We can play games from the 1970s, we can play multiplayer games from the 1990s but many others not even a decade old now are lost forevermore. This is unacceptable. --- Companion video by the author, Ross Scott: "The largest campaign ever to stop publishers destroying games" - this video --- EDIT: it is quite disheartening to see software engineers in this forum defending the practice and saying it is impossible to patch an online-
The [recent CA legislation]( [LINK] ) brought back the topic of Stop Killing Games which is an ongoing campaign to pass laws similar to the CA ban and much more. If you want a very short exposition of what Stop Killing Games is, here's a ~1 minute video: [LINK] Ross Scott is best known for his youtube series "Freeman's Mind" where he plays Half-Life and narrates what Gordon Freeman must be thinking, with a lot of deeply philosophical considerations. It's a staple of YouTube. He's also been running a series called "Dead Game News" and that's how Stop Killing Games was born. The other organizer, Damian, is a real-deal neckbeard dev and has pretty much done it all from BASIC on 8-bit micros to theorem provers and from video games to cryptography audits. Here's the original intro to Stop Killing Games by Ross: this video And here's a subsequent FAQ: [LINK] [Related discussion]( [LINK] ) P.S. had to edit the title a tiny bit as it was a few chars over limit.
For extra context, you can watch Ross Scott's videos about his campaign to stop games being killed. Original video with all the different avenues he's trying: this video The one specifically about this initiative: [LINK] He's done smaller update videos on how it's been progressing on his channel if you want additional info.
SKG organizer here. Something like this CA legislation was our "worst case scenario, everything else failed, at least we could do this much, we've compromised on everything" goal. That is to say, now opponents can't push us to compromise to that level and our worst case scenario in case we pass anything at all is looking better. We're really happy this is happening because it changes the Overton window for us and makes our case stronger and easier to argue for, as you say. A lot of change has been happening in the past few months and even weeks with regards to the market and legislative situation around the problematic of SKG and while you can't ever fully attribute something, we hope that it's thanks to our actions. Ubisoft promising end of life offline modes for The Crew 2 and the third game in the series called Motorfest. Capcom bringing back Windows 7 era games that were lost to G4WL. The "Ubisoft scandal" mentioned in the headline - specifically the unforced shutdown and resulting removal of functioning state from The Crew - is something that SKG have no doubt popularized. Now that we're at 350 000 signatures of a goal of 1 000 000 in our direct democracy initiative, companies and lawmakers are starting to take things seriously. And this is with a $0 budget. We're still in need of more signatures over the next 10 months to reach the goal, so if you're an EU citizen, go click the link Sniffnoy posted above and sign. Worth doing even if you're not a gamer, just to claw bac
Maybe it was the one called "The largest campaign ever to stop publishers destroying games". Check timestamp 24:55 (&t=1495s) this video