Okay, this one’s going to be fun. So, the Stop Killing Games Initiative is almost over. And the last time we covered it, the European Citizens Initiative, which is the part of it that matters the most, had just opened. As of right now, you’ve got just days to join it. Meaning that this is your last chance to make your voice heard and hopefully prevent the games that you buy from being destroyed. But here’s the thing. Until last week, it really did seem to be rather doomed. They needed hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, over half a million more signatures. But um well right now it’s getting thousands an hour. The reason why is quite funny. So here’s what happened. They needed a hit 1 million signatures but after months of stalling they only had 450k. But then over the horizon a savior came. That savior is pirate software. That’s because his opposition plus a few pinches of World of Warcraft sparked a drama that is now surging signatures to the tune of over 240,000 in just 7 days. So, time to get you up to speed. It all began last year when the darlings at Ubisoft shut down the crew. Now, they didn’t just shut down the online features, they shut down everything because, as it turns out, even the single player required the online component. That basically meant that your copy of the crew was um yeah, no longer a thing that you could really do anything with. So, Ross Scott from Accursed Farms was not a fan of this. So, he started a movement. Now, you may know Ross from things like Freeman’s Mind or Dead Game News. And his plan, right, was to use the law, not change.org, to actually change things here. And it certainly seems that now a year on, he actually may succeed in a way. So basically, right, Ross believes that consumers bought a product with games like The Crew and that that product was then taken away. But from Ubisoft’s perspective, it’s rather different. They argue that they sold a license to a live service, a service that they could simply end whenever they wanted. So, put simply, what this movement aims to do is to address this gray area so that at the very least people would get formal clarity on what they were actually buying. Best case scenario would involve something basically with more teeth. Now, this was all multi-prong. There was a UK campaign that hit problems early on with the government claiming that existing laws already cover the issue. As for the US, well, basically it was never an option because of already settled law. Now, because of this, stuff looked grim. But last summer, another path opened, and that path was the EU citizens initiative. So, this lets EU citizens propose legislative agendas. And this proposal was very simple. Stop destroying video games. And what it would require certainly does sound simple. It’s that any game sold in the future would have to prepare for the eventuality or the possibility of server shutdowns, that they would need to remain in a functional playable state. Now, this could be through, say, single player access, maybe through peer-to-peer connections, opening up private server stuff. You get the point, right? But actually, what’s key right now is that at this point, the implementation details are actually not required. The way this works is that if it is successful, the EU will then have 6 months to respond, and if they say yes, then they will adopt a resolution, and that would guide EU activity, but it would not instantly mean a whole bunch of new super hasty laws. But make no mistake, it would actually matter. And that’s because EU policy has got global impact. I mean, it’s pretty obvious now. Just look at Apple and Google for one example. Now, for this, all that’s needed is a 1 million signatures and b a minimum threshold being passed in at least seven EU countries, which basically just exists. So, um I don’t know. If the French all get together and want something that nobody else wants and only one country passes, then hey, they’re the EU safe. Anyway, you get the point. That is the challenge. Those are the stakes. So, here’s what happened next. Going through the requirements, the regional thresholds do seem to be quite manageable. Right now, the million signatures is quite a lot. I mean, a hell of a lot. And success there would require a multilingual international campaign. One that’s actually centered on EU citizens. Who is leading it? Well, an English-speaking YouTuber with a cult following, which I mean I mean in a positive way, just so I’m being clear. But basically, it’s not a huge number of people. Now, this story obviously did cut through. Loads of people covered it, us included, and the early momentum was really strong until it wasn’t. Now, this is because some things fell through. One being a planned feature in Gog’s email newsletter that was attacked by that company having layoffs. Even Heineken, yes, Heineken, the beer people, wanted to include the campaign in their marketing, but only after the petition ended. But there is another one, and I think uh I think I know it’s the one you want me to talk about. It’s the pirate. Okay, TLDDR. Pirate Software opposed the initiative. This is back when it all kicked off. So, what I’ll do here is boil down what I essentially think is the best case or like the best faith version of his argument, which is essentially that in very many cases, overregulation often actually helps the incumbents. In this case, would help the AAA companies. The reason being that they would be the only companies with the resources to actually overcome the regulations. That is actually a fair enough reasonable argument, but I think in practice it’s fair to say that Pirate Software in his two videos was um not really steelmanning his opposition. There were some errors. Wasn’t really a great situation. But really in this story, there’s a key thing to remember. The initial I’ll say drama, let’s just say hot public disagreement that with pirate happened when let’s just say his internet stocks were in a slightly different and altogether more healthy place. Since then he was involved in a major World of Warcraft drama which I will cover shortly. I don’t like doing drama but in this case it does actually inform how the news would play out. As for the initiative well by the following April signatures were just sitting at 425K. That’s not even halfway. And only 25,000 signatures had been added between April and last week. So, it basically was dead in the water. Momentum from the previous summer had completely fizzled out. But then, with only weeks to go, Scott posted his video and everything changed. The end of Stop Killing Games. It’s a fairly dramatic, somber title for a video and one that is fair. It absolutely did appear to be dead. It was a final plea and an explainer made by a very, very tired-l lookinging man. It was clear to me that the campaign had taken its toll. Scott admitted as much, a one choice quote, “It’s like asking someone with severe dyslexia to write a book report on War and Peace. I am the wrong person for that job.” And I think that does speak to the absolutely mammoth amount of work that doing anything like this would actually require. But it’s not all that Scott said. He took aim at pirate and he explained point by point right how pirates coverage was in his view not at all a fair representation of the overall initiative its goals its specific language and I would say from my read of it I think pirate almost immediately jumped straight to some worstcase outcomes of a maximalist version of the campaign of course we can add to that an interpersonal level to all of this you know the usual emotional reactions hot words but if it was just that if it was only that, well, what happened would not really be what has happened. So, let’s talk about World of Warcraft. As I said, I hate covering drama, but today it is actually relevant because basically it is the kindling. I think what we’re seeing with this initiative would not really have played out if these World of Warcraft related events didn’t play out the way that they did because basically this is why people were ready, willing, and even excited to hop back into the fray and to pump all of this up. So, here’s the TLDDR. Only Fact is a WoW classic hardcore streamer content guild. That’s a lot of words, but basically think of it as a reality TV show where dozens to hundreds of hours of gameplay are at stake because when a character dies, it is dead. Just that that character has got lots of fans in Twitch chat and some sort of big name behind them in the form of the streamer. Pirate along with other streamers were doing a dungeon in this game and that dungeon went poly. people died and of course whenever they died that means they lose their characters that they progressed. Now you might be thinking so what? A World of Warcraft dungeon run went bad and people lost their characters in a hardcore server. Why is that a new story? Well, there absolutely is a reason why. So it was broadly seen that he went very much every man for himself mode trying to save his own character and uh really to the detriment of his teammates a few of whom died. Now, at the time, tensions were high, and those tensions were pointed at Pirate Software, both from viewers and from his fellow party members. And what followed was, I think, to put a very messy thing in simple terms, in an emotional sense, the opposite of saying, “Shit, my bad. I’m sorry. I absolutely could have done more there. My bad.” Basically, owning the L, doing so in public, and doing so in a way that feels authentic. of course that you know feels authentic because it actually is authentic. So if you ask me what actually happened is a common downfall of very smart very rational people. That’s because very smart very rational people can rationalize how they are very very right and others are very very wrong. And from that place it’s very easy to disregard how other people think and to not have a holistic view of a situation. I mean, to put it in very simple terms, people thought he came off really defensive. And what all of this meant was fuel for the fire, an abundance of fuel. And I’ve got to imagine that from Pirates’s point of view, it really must have looked like the entire world was against him. And I mean, in a few ways, it was. It was a total mess. Or, you know, per the dynamics of Twitch, it was an incredible content event. And the reality is that once people are against you, it’s very hard to change minds. Especially when, as I think Pirate was, you’re feeling quite defensive and you’re very much feeling the toll of thousands of angry people being very angry at you in just about every way they can. Meaning that, yeah, some people were, let’s just say, going beyond having just a civil disagreement. Now, after that point, some aftershocks followed. There was a clip of an Ashes of Creation raid pool that sparked a bit of a drama. There were then accusations of pre-watching games in order to look better on stream. There was critique of his Blizzard credentials and a whole lot of different things. Basically, he turned into somewhat of a punching bag. Now, to, I suppose, try and work through some of this, he did a session with Dr. K. I think it was a pretty enlightening one. It certainly is uh I’d say a good listen. It essentially did get into why he reacted the way he did, the way that he actually felt. I’m not going to paraphrase uh here too much beyond just what I’ve already said. That’s my takeaway. So, I’d recommend if you want more texture, more understanding of this story and the social dynamics that made it play out, give Dr. K’s video a watch. But as it pertains to the Stop Killing Games movement, I think you can see how well whenever there was the initial disagreement of Ross, pirate stocks were looking pretty good. But then he was involved in several major dramas. These dramas led to hundreds and hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people maybe finding out about him or having a changed opinion of him. There were a lot of videos talking about, you know, mistakes, examining everything. And that’s why right now, before this video, when I just searched for Pirate Software on YouTube, here’s what I got. We’ve got the Pirate Software Unraveling featuring a game developer, 211K views. A Josh Strife Hayes reaction, 204K views. an ActMan video, 586K views. An upper echelon video, 266K views. Uh, one from Moist Critical, 3.1 million views. And that is just the top few search results. We’re talking about millions of views here. Now, while so many of these were rooted in the dramatic aspect, obviously they were related to Stop Killing Games, and they all painted Stop Killing Games in a positive light. And what that essentially meant is that now you didn’t need to be a game preservation enthusiast to know that stop Killing Games exists. All you needed was a passing interest in one of the larger ongoing dramas. And of course, even if you didn’t have that, social media algorithms do know how to find you if you could be interested in it. All of that means a humongous megaphone. And so far, it absolutely seems it’s done the trick. We’ve gone from almost certain failure at 454K signatures to at the time of writing this video 714K and at the time of recording, which was only a few hours later, 737K signatures. Now, that basically means that they need 263K in about 30 days. And obviously, if this rate holds just a little bit longer, they’ll absolutely make it. Or will they? Because here’s the thing. They do actually need consistent, legitimate signatures. Reason why is fairly simple. fake ones could be stripped out. Overexited Americans having fun with a VPN, um, I don’t know, could probably try to sign up for this. Wouldn’t help the initiative. It would probably get scrubbed. And, uh, well, if you’re in America, you can’t sign an EU petition. So, it’s not a guaranteed thing just yet, but it certainly is looking like it’s going to pass a million. Now, what happens if it succeeds is basically this. The EU Commission will consider further action. That could be legislative action, or it could just be guidance on existing consumer laws. Now, no matter what, the industry would have significant input. But regardless, we would get a formal statement on the matter and its legality, and that’s actually a powerful starting point for future conversations and new laws. But here’s the thing, it gets even better because uh those conversations have already begun, and we’ve already started to make progress. Through all the noise and all the drama, the core problems fairly simple that audiences often think they’re buying a product when they buy a game, but in reality, they’re actually buying licenses. Now, since October, Steam explicitly states that all purchases are licenses, that it’s not ownership, and that was always the case. It’s just that now it’s no longer hidden in their ULA. And Val’s timing was, let’s just say, curious here. That’s because California signed AB2426, stating that any media that you can’t permanently access offline must be labeled as a license, not a product. Now, another site to this is companies seeing PR opportunities, and there’s a beautiful irony. Ubisoft. Yes, the very company that started this whole mess is actually taking action. That’s because they’re testing offline modes for The Crew 2 and Motorfest. And I think it’s fairly clear that the Stop Killing Games movement inspired this. So, you know what? In certain ways, it’s already winning. Now, another thing that could inspire this was an actual lawsuit, specifically a Californian one, about the closure of the crew. But that lawsuit is actually facing some problems right now. And that’s because of a Final Fantasy 11 related precedent that lets companies remove users from games because well as a user all you’ve bought is a license and that can be revoked. That’s a ruling that obviously plays to Ubisoft’s advantage in that lawsuit. But looking at the big picture we actually do see the developers are choosing to address these issues and not because they’re being forced to by the law seemingly because they want to. But there are many reasons for that. It could be PR or it could simply be because they see what way the wind is blowing. Here’s something cool. Take a look at Super Moves World of Parkour. This is an indie game that failed. Legal obligations prevent keeping the online functions active, but existing owners can still play it in single player. There’s another example. Whenever Blizzard Entertainment purchased Spellbreaks developer, they obviously stopped the game. But months later, they released a peer-to-peer version of the game on it.io. That’s awesome. And before all of this, Valon Studios ended Knockout City, but they made sure that private servers still would work. This is basically three indie teams finding a way to preserve their games retroactively. It is good It matters. Now, yes, it is the case that player counts may be in the single digits, but it preserves gaming history. If a bunch of people want to play one of these games together, they actually can. And if Stop Killing Games passes, developers would have to consider things like this, not retroactively, but from day one. And that doesn’t mean you can no longer make an MMO. You can still make Hell Divers, but you’ll need to sell your games correctly. You’ll need to label them as what they actually are. Are they products or are they licenses? And you’d need to provide some sort of exit plan whenever servers shut down. And nobody is saying that retrofitting games for offline play is an easy thing. But I don’t actually think that’s a reason not to try this because in many ways the direction of travel has not been great in gaming. It’s often not been great in consumer law at least until recently. I think making progress in this realm is absolutely a good thing and I think the idea why not try well I think that is the attitude that we need. Of course as for some of the reasons why not you’ve likely heard those from pirate software. I think most people are thinking that on balance, no, it’s actually worth giving this a shot. I think the benefits to consumer awareness, consumer protections, and well, game preservation are pretty damn good reason why we should actually try.