Keep Killing Games

About six months ago the Accursed Farms YouTube Channel released a video announcing the Stop Killing Games Initiative, and the Pirate Software Youtube Channel released a response and a follow up. The backlash I’ve seen against Pirate Software and his argument, is nothing but vitriol, and shows that so many people in the gaming community simply don’t understand the reality of game development, and often misrepresent the argument entirely.

This post was prompted by a newly posted video featuring Accursed Farms’ Ross on the Tech Over Tea’s YouTube Channel. I think Ross is being disingenuous here about his original video, and the response from Thor (Pirate Software). Additionally, nobody seems to understand why Thor refuses to talk to Ross, but this clip outlines exactly why - for those who don’t watch, he finds Ross’s reasons for why the initiative would pass to be disgusting - and frankly, I do too.

Ross may think he’s the good guy here, but this initiative will have the exact opposite effect to its aim:

The Stop Killing Games Initiative will kill games before launch.

Perspective Is Everything

It’s always so disappointing when people fail to consider other people’s perspective in an argument - in this case, consider the perspective of a game developers and publishers. Let’s take one specific developer as an example: CCP Games, developer of Eve Online, and based in Reykjavík, Iceland. Now, Iceland is not part of the European Union, but it is in the European Economic Area, which allows it to freely trade within the EU. I’m not certain if the initiative would apply to CCP Games specifically, but for the sake of argument, let’s say it does (it’s hardly the only MMO studio in Europe, just the most prominent in my mind).

Each star system within the game’s world has the capacity to host thousands of active players at once, resulting in events like “The Massacre at M2-XFE”, where 5000+ players battled for 14 hours, destroying in-game ships and equipment valued at multiple hundreds of thousands of real world US dollars. It seemed that, in the early 2010s, news of yet another record-breaking battle in Eve was posted every other month.

Eve Online is incredibly unique, in that everything in the game’s universe is created by the players - every mineral mined, processed, manufactured and sold entirely by the rabidly dedicated player base, only to be destroyed in immense conflicts like this, before the whole process starts again. It’s truly a monument to the unique art form of video games.

And applying certain technical requirements to the server software would render a game like this impossible to produce.

The Initiative aims for server software of discontinued games, including those like Eve Online, to be released once it’s shut down. The problem here is, Eve’s server software is intimately tied to the hardware - while some low-traffic star systems can be handled on the same shared box, each high-traffic system has its own dedicated machine, and some particularly difficult systems like the economic hub Jita require custom hardware just to avoid severe time dilation (the in-game term for slowing a system’s processing speed to ensure consistency between players).

Take these complex considerations, and multiply it by over 8000, because that’s how many star systems are in Eve’s universe.

Eve isn’t Eve without a vast universe to explore and fight over - so setting up only one or a handful of fan-made star systems isn’t going to cut it. So, any efforts made by CCP to release the server software would be entirely wasted. This doesn’t even take into consideration how much 3rd party code is incorporated into the servers - while I don’t know the details of how it’s actually built, it’s practically a budgetary requirement that massive software projects license 3rd party code, rather than reimlement basic functionality. Even if the servers were designed from the beginning to eventually be released, the cost trade-off would push the burden on the developers and publishers even further into the realm of impossibility.

When You Can Be Anything, Be Kind

This is only one case of the negative impacts of the initiative that Ross and his supporters seem to be overlooking, but it’s also a prime example why Thor opposes it. He’s been a developer for essentially his whole adult life, and has worked at Blizzard among others, seeing the reality of what goes into a game like this. If anyone has domain knowledge of this issue, it’s him.

And yet, the amount of hate I’ve seen directed at him is horrific, with so many people slandering him, or outright dismissing his argument simply because he worked at Blizzard. This immature behaviour isn’t the kind of thing that moves the medium forward, and it seems to reflect a larger trend across culture, where people are less and less willing to consider others as human beings.

The thing is, Thor doesn’t disagree that there are problems with live service games and game ownership that need to be addressed - what he outlined in his original video, is that the “Stop Killing Games Initiative” is the wrong way to go about it, and is being presented in a disingenuous fashion.

My personal opinion is that Thor is correct - the initiative is misguided at best, and destructive at worst. It is also my personal opinion that people need to wake up and realize that their words carry meaning, and their actions carry weight. It can be so tiring.

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When I’m not blogging at four in the morning, I can usually be found on Bluesky or Discord.