I thought I already discussed the issue with the killswitch hypothetical with you
I called this person's behavior human-garbage for evoking right in their first response to me the image of domestic violence against women, while they pretend to address any of my points but also not really. It's manipulative garbage-human behavior, sorry to tell you that.
You guys like to throw a bunch of below waist attacks at me can't take any fair hits that I throw back at you.

Believe it or not: I would really like to discuss the issues around SKG but you guys constantly refuse to address any of my previous points that I have to constantly link in my posts in order draw attention to them. Not my fault when you guys have to constantly get off-rails by simply refusing to understand how thought-experiments work and trying cheap tactics by being emotionally manipulative or even pretending to be a mod in here in order desperately trying to restore your pathetic hug bubble atmosphere, where no one challenges any of your dumb arguments...

As I understand it from the videos, the initiative, at this stage, is not about articulating the minutea of specific laws (the how). That will follow later.

It is about articulating an intent (the why) and to make it broad enough to gather different segments of the gaming population under one tent (ie, build up a big enough base to actually get something done).

And the intent is rather clear: Stop publisher and developers from making their games inaccessible after they started selling them.

I disagree. I think Valve is a great example and no, Steam is not just a shop.

Steam is a near-monopolistic platform for PC gaming driving a lot of the agenda, especially among small to medium sized developers.

Currently, the success of a game, especially if it is only on PC, is highly contingent on how well it does on the Steam platform. I'm sure the pressure to integrate into Steam services, in order to be more appealing to the majority of PC gamers on that platform, is very high for developers.

I wouldn't buy anything on Steam as the agenda that the Steam platform is driving is just not ideologically compatible with what I want. But I still visit the Steam website to look at the aggregate user review scores for a game before I buy it here. I think the speaks volumes about the pull that Steam has right now.

Sometimes, industry forces have such a large amount of momentum that you need the law to intervene if you want the commons to actually have a voice.

To give another example: I don't particularly like Facebook (I try to avoid posting pictures of my baby on Facebook, because I don't want to give them intellectual property rights to those pictures... that is the amount of distrust I have for the platform right now). But I'm still on Facebook, because I have a significant number of ex-colleages, various acquaintances and extended family on the platform and I would be hard-pressed to keep contact with those people if I left.

But the day laws would force Facebook to interop with other social services such that I could connect and talk with people on Facebook from another platform, I would leave Facebook in a heartbeat.

The Stop Killing Games initiative is about giving the commons a voice in a gaming landscape that is dominated with industry interests.

I know the marked weight of steam, and still - it is just a shop.

Sure, if STORES follow special rules from a certain country, just for make it easy, they follow the same patterns they need to implement all over the world as long as it is possible.
But comparing it to Amazon, Steam is the store, while the publishers are the single traders. And even on Amazon traders can decide to NOT sell into certain places.

The thing is, the whole initiative is aiming for the publishers and devs. They use Steam as a marked place, but any decision wouldn't bother steam in any way.
If any country would decide in favor of this initiative, it would be something CDPR has to watch for it, but it wouldn't bother GoG.

You are from Canada, so you don't know the deal we had in Germany.
But the publishers and devs have done a lot of things in the past, to NOT let German restrictions influence their products. It would have been easy to use that changes world wide. It would have been cheaper.

Still, publishers and devs decided for one of 2 options, if something was clashing with the German regulations.
1. Simply ignore that marked. And Germany is the largest marked for games in Europe and most likely in the Top 5 world wide. They willingly earned less money to not follow the regulations.
2. Build a special version of the game just for the German marked. We had special version of various Command and Conquer games (from foot troops are robots to missing missions and units), a ton of shooters (Ragdoll, certain symbols, blood that got removed, animations removed, all characters turned into robots, and so on). Every game about WW2 was more or less in need of a special German version.
And Australiens have comparable things, but for less games.
It costs money to produce that one. It costs money to maintain those versions.
They threw more money on the game to follow the restriction of a certain marked ONLY on that marked.

And we got more current examples. Did you know that some small states in Europe more or less banned Lootboxes?
Years ago.
Are lootboxes gone now?
They rather withdraw from countries where they are not allowed to have lootboxes or they disable them there.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/loot-box-state-of-play-2024-another-trip-around-the-world-of-regulation
And btw, I didn't heard about Steam banning games with Lootboxes now. Might be because Valve is using Lootboxes to a large extend and I'm not so sure if valve is in favor of preserving Team Fortress 2 or current Counterstrike for forever...


They will do so the same for every single country thing.

And everything this initiative is talking about is how to force the Developers / Publishers / right holders of games with laws.
Not the stores.

EU wide could make a difference.
A single country?
As long as the choice is to "loose" a bit money because of one country or to bring something that makes you loose big money to the world.
We just have to search the last 30 years for similar examples. And we will find plenty.

Steam is not just a store, it is an entire platform experience and many millions of gamers are locked in it for a large part of their game collection that they cannot extract from said platform.

It starts with the Steam client which is the overwelmingly preferred straightforward way to access your games on the platform which the overwelming majority of Steam users use.

It continues with the myriad of Steam-oriented services (cloud saves, achievements, multiplayer integration and workshop for player-generated content) your games integrate into and some games will flat out refuse to run properly if it cannot access those services.

And it finishes with a Steam console which a significant part of the playerbase will purchase and expect their game to run on (largely interopable with the PC, but still requires separate consideration for screen size, inputs and others).

It is also a hub of player-generated game information with guides, reviews and more.

Yes, game devs have the option to treat it purely as a store and not integrate into their various services, but given its massive market weight and player expectations to use many of those services, the pressure is pretty big to integrate.

It is aimed at the gaming industry. Developers and publishers will definitely have the first line of responsibility at being compliant. But they in turn will put pressure on the ecosystem to adapt to avoid lockin on remote servers (including Steam's).

Either Steam will have to directly provide tooling for integrations into their services to still operate in some way even if their services are absent or else widespread third party tools will emerge on top of vendor-specific tools to provide that functionality and should vendors try to legally fight this, then they will find themselves in the initiative's crosshair.

Possibly, for devs/publishers who REALLY want to have as much drm as they can get away with, but many are not quite that opinionated and will find it cheaper to release a single version world-wide that complies with the EU directive.

Plus, if the EU adopts it, other places may feel more comfortable to follow suit, especially now that the US don't have the diplomatic pull they used to have with other Western countries (let's face it, a lot of those pro-industry, anti-customer practices are lobbied by the US... it was like that for the digital millenium copyright act and the fight against right to repair).

For example, now that Canada is getting closer to the EU with defense and other interests, they might decide to also adopt some of the EU pro-consumer practices like this initiative if it passes in the EU.

They tried that in 2015 with the Steam Machine, it flopped horribly and it got discontinued in 2018.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Machine_(computer)

You may argue that the Steam Deck fits the bill, but then again that is a handheld device, so it fills a different niche.

edit - can't be arsed to mess with the forum link formating

The initiative seems to have exploded on social media for some reason (no idea why). It has broken 708k and is pretty rapidly climbing.

I personally have not signed, but will be interesting to watch until the end of July, when it ends.

In an unlikely situation EU even takes this seriously. Most big companies will fight tooth and nail to prevent it the biggest being Nintendo. No one will bother with all the legal loop holes. Also false steam is a store to sell games that's the end of it. You can't apply anything to a hub that just sells games. Steam deck and console were options but needed to purchase or play anything off of steam.

This is how weak the SKG argument is, they don't understand the legal battle to change anything and why it likely won't go anywhere.
Simple Ross made a vid stating the movement is pretty much doomed, then proceded to place a target on Pirate software. So most without really knowing what the movement is even doing it signing out of spite. If this goes to court they'll all be in for a rude awakening. Then again most said as much to Ross with the general response being "Let the goverment figure it out". Just wait for a different drama to start up and people will forget about SKG.

The TL;DR: Drama channels (and other grifters) got in on it after Ross posted a video that single-handedly blamed a single internet personalty/Blizzard Nepobaby.

Oh, internet drama *grabs popcorn*

Funny how know your meme has probably the best writeup of the current situation
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/pirate-software-stop-killing-games-drama

EDIT:
+11k votes in the past 2 hours. Not sure why this of all things was the trigger to mobilize, but at this rate, seems like the "admit defeat" video was the ultimate uno reverse card.

Nah, its was a means to generate free publicity, in the end I doubt half of the new signatures even know what is even involved. Heck I doubt if they are legit since only EU citizens are allowed to sign and I imagine some used vpn to appear to be in the EU. In the end if they don't reach the amount in the next week new drama will draw everyones attention. Meanwhile pirate software will be bullied of the platform because of Ross.

I don't know. Now that I'm actually looking into it, apparently Pewdiepie has come out in support of SKG. Could very easily explain the spike in signatures. I know barely any YT personalities, but the biggest one is a pretty big deal. Will it be enough? 280K is still a pretty big chunk in a month. Then again, +3K in the last hour.

If you watched the vid a good chunk is just to blaming pirate software. People want to believe in a movement but ROsss proves he doesn't understand how.

Blaming? Pirate software apparently was one of the biggest opponents of the initiative with a large audience. So should Ross not be able to discuss/refute/react to the claims? Try to justify and get his point across?

Not once did Ross say that PS was the sole reason it failed, or suggested anybody go after him etc. Just brought him up as the most vocal opposition and used the opposing view points to argue his own. If that is putting a target on somebody, then everybody might as well just stop talking with each other.

Also, in other news, jacksepticeye, who a quick search reveals to be a 31M sub channel on YT, also came out in support of SKG:
https://x.com/accursedfarms/status/1940083365798990302

This has exploded quite spectacularly. Fun times ahead to be sure.

He was the only person he ever spoke too regarding it(at the time), he's spoke with other's since yet is more focused on him which everyone is just doing via mob mentality.

He dedicated a solid chunck of the 50 minute vid covering it. Most are focused on that and not what the movement is trying to do.

Notice how people are now only helping, again do any of them even understand that Ross doesn't have a plan he said he would more or less quit if EU(most likely) rejects it.