0:00 Hello guys and gals. Me, Mudahar, and you caught me in the middle of the night playing some SoCom 2 on the old 0:07 PlayStation. Now, you know what is a You would think that a 20 plus year old game 0:12 probably has nobody playing online. And you're actually almost right about it. There's actually a community of like 20, 0:17 30 people that come together probably every night to play the super old PS2 game. And uh I decided to modify my 0:25 PlayStation 2, change some settings around, and connect to the server and have a good fun night. And you know 0:31 what, ladies and gentlemen, it's it's possible because this game isn't dead. I can't say that for every single game 0:37 that we've played, but if you know me, game preservation is really important. 0:43 And obviously, campaigns like Stop Killing Games are something I want to promote. Now, this is like the third 0:48 video very recently that I've talked about this. And if you're wondering why I'm super passionate, it's because I 0:54 actually think Stop Killing Games can change the way gaming is preserved in 0:59 the future. But I do want to make this video as sort of a video that shows you examples of games being preserved. I 1:06 actually want to deconstruct a lot of Pirate Software's words and basically show why Stop Killing Games actually 1:12 matters and why we shouldn't give up on this initiative just because some people want to be contrarians. Now, if you go 1:19 to stopkillinggames.com, you will notice that it has, as of right now, about 695,000 signatures, meaning 1:27 that this initiative is climbing incredibly fast. By the time we're finished this video, we might even get 1:32 closer to 70%. Who knows, I'll actually look back at this by the time we're signing off. Now, for anybody that, you 1:38 know, needs a quick rundown of what's been going on, obviously Ross from Aursed Farms made a video about a week 1:45 ago where he talked about Stop Killing Games and how they were on the last leg of the initiative. In fact, right now, 1:50 it is the last month for this initiative, meaning that we literally just have a month to get those 1:56 signatures. Now, it doesn't matter if you get the 9999,999 signatures, you need the full million. 2:03 So, a big question is obviously for anybody in my audience that's from the EU or the United Kingdom, there will be 2:09 links in the description below that you can go to which allow you to sign up and get those signatures. And again, only do 2:16 this if you're from those areas. Please do not falsely fill out signatures if you don't actually belong in those 2:22 areas. There is nothing more detrimental to this campaign than doing something like that. So ladies and gentlemen, just 2:29 remember if you got friends and family, even if they don't play video games, this initiative actually goes far beyond 2:35 video games and has the implications of doing way more. Now the reason why this initiative matters for all of us is that 2:42 Europe represents around 15% of the world's GDP, meaning it's not an irrelevant economy. If something happens 2:49 in Europe where game companies are effectively forced to give us end of life plans, they will have to 2:55 effectively downstream this to the entire world. So whether you live in the United States, whether you live in Canada, whether you live in India, 3:01 whether you live anywhere in the world, you will be benefited from European 3:07 actions and regulations. Just understand that again, if game companies, you know, 3:12 unless they're being deliberately malicious, when a game ends, you can play that game at its end of life. And 3:18 even if it's locked to the European Union, nothing stops you from downloading the end of life build from 3:24 Europe and using it anywhere else in the world. So, we all benefit. Unfortunately 3:29 though, only the EU can sign. So, again, Ross from Recursed Farms made a video about a week ago where he talked about 3:35 Stop Killing Games. They're on the end of this journey, and a big part of his video was talking about Pirate Software 3:40 and his unfortunate negative attitude regarding this actual thing. Now, no one 3:45 should sign an initiative or be part of something just because the blind majority say so. If this initiative has 3:51 problems, it's good to point them out. My only problem with it is I feel like Pirate Software has done a lot of the 3:57 negative contrarianism without actually giving cogent points on why he's been 4:02 negative about it. And I'm not somebody that's a game developer, but I am somebody that is a programmer. I know my 4:08 way around code. And honestly, the more I revisit a lot of Pirate Software's words, the more I wonder why are you so 4:15 against something that is entirely possible. So, I wanted to make this video a set of examples and I want to 4:21 show you a lot of projects that are centered around game preservation. So, I want to start off by saying that yes, 4:27 there are multiple types of games, right? And one of the things that obviously we don't need to really talk 4:32 about are single player things. So, for instance, playing games like Shinmeiggami Tensei 3, Nocturn, for 4:37 instance, a game that is purely a single player experience, as are many offline single player experiences. Doesn't even 4:43 have to be something from the PS2 era. You could literally be talking about a game right now. PlayStation 5 Dead Straining 2 games are again, you know, 4:51 offline only. Games that are single player, fully on disk titles, you know, full experiences are obviously exempt 4:57 from this discussion. Those games will never die as long as we have emulators and even original hardware that exists. 5:04 Primarily, the games that are being targeted here are games that are online only with a singleplayer attachment to 5:10 them. So games like The Crew, which mostly could be played offline because that's a majority of its content, but 5:17 arbitrarily require connection to Ubisoft servers, and once that connection is gone, as is the game, it 5:23 as is the access for the game that you paid for, which gets removed from your library. Now, a lot of companies are 5:30 completely okay with stuffing actual clauses in their user agreements which 5:35 state that they can take your game away at any point, which we saw with games or, you know, companies like Blizzard. 5:41 Now, this is not okay. And again, I don't think that this would be a super huge issue. And where Thor would be 5:47 right in this entire, you know, initiative being wrong is if game companies had to actually even advertise 5:54 that you weren't even buying a video game. you were just renting it all along. I seriously always go back to 6:00 this example because imagine if you went on Steam and you wanted to buy a game like Hell Divers 2, which is a live 6:06 service game. Uh imagine if instead of the buy option, you just saw the words you're renting Hell Divers 2 and at any 6:12 moment it could be taken away. Could you imagine an impact of sales at that point if game companies were required to tell 6:18 you that the game you were purchasing was just a rental? That's not what game companies do. Game companies will tell 6:25 you that you're outright buying a game. And even if that game is an MMO or a single player game with an online only 6:31 attachment, or it has a mixture of multiplayer, single player, game companies can just take that away from 6:36 you without any actual protection for the game, you know, player. So, we as gamers lose the history and memories of 6:43 the games that we enjoy and love, and there's just nothing we can do about it. Game companies are totally okay with 6:49 selling us, you know, games that basically are just licenses, but I don't 6:54 think the broader community really understands that what they have is just a license. If people knew that all they 7:00 were buying were rentals, then I'm sure they probably wouldn't be buying a lot of games that they do. Imagine if every 7:06 Blu-ray or DVD you purchased just said it's all a rental. At any moment, this 7:12 movie can be revoked from you. Imagine if a piece of music that you bought could be revoked at any moment from your 7:18 possession. That's the same thing happening with video games and it's not okay. Now, to show you some of the 7:24 actual cool projects that exist, the footage you're seeing is Guns. Now, this is from a server called Freestyle Guns, 7:30 which has around 100 people playing. Now, Guns in my last video I talked about used to be this big like MMO back 7:36 in the day or like this big, you know, online shooter back in the days of JJI. Now, since it's been officially debunked 7:42 and it has a, you know, a resurgence coming up, like they're about to re-release this game, you can play it 7:47 right now through a private server, which which is where I got this footage from. But let's say you want to play 7:53 older games like Socom 2 that actually had their online services completely shut down back in 2012. Well, through a 7:59 community called PS Rewired, you can actually go through an official piece of 8:05 hardware. So whether you have a real PS2 or through an emulator, you can modify some network settings around and play 8:11 these games as they once were. So this footage of Socom 2 was literally recorded a few days ago underneath 8:19 actual PlayStation 2 emulation. And this works between real hardware and emulation. Now even beyond just SOCOM 2, 8:27 another game that I wanted to try out was Metal Gear Online 2. Now, I used to play this back in 2008, and obviously 8:34 Konami has long since shut down the multiplayer services. In fact, you can't even get Metal Gear Online with newer 8:42 copies of MGS4. So, provided you have a old day one build, you can rip the online files out of it and use 8:48 specialized software to actually play online. So, for instance, I was able to download this from Save MG2. I can make 8:56 an account where there's about 50 people on average playing the game at any given moment, which doesn't seem like a lot, 9:02 but it's a small but budding community. And over here, all you can do is download a customized RPCS3 emulator or 9:09 if you have a jailbroken and maybe even an official PS3, you can play this game 9:14 as it, you know, originally released. And it's quite a lot of fun. Even though the skill gap is pretty huge, like 9:20 generally the people playing this game are those people that are just gottier experts. But if you give it a chance, 9:26 you can experience a bit of gaming history. But arguably when I was filming this video, one of the coolest things 9:31 that I saw was something called Insignia Xbox Live. Now, for anybody that missed out on OG Xbox Live before the Xbox 360, 9:40 this led me through a process where I legitimately like set up a Xbox Live 9:45 account. Now, Insignia is a private server solution where it terms to emulate actual Xbox Live. So, this 9:52 footage was recorded in XMU, which was an actual emulator, and I downloaded it, got my official Xbox dashboard set up. I 10:00 went through the entire sign up process, and then just for shits and giggles, I loaded up Fantasy Star Online 1 and 2, a 10:08 game well over 20 years old. And to my shock, there are still people actually 10:14 playing this game at the dead of night or any hours. Immediately when I jumped in, I noticed some players. We had a 10:20 friendly interaction. We said hi to each other and within a matter of minutes we were able to play this game together. A 10:26 game this old that servers are long dead. The community has banded together 10:31 to bring back old projects. Now, not every single project works 100% and most 10:36 of these really don't have every single feature working. But there are projects like The Matrix Online, which again is a 10:44 incomplete project, but it allows gamers to play certain MMO builds of a game 10:49 called The Matrix Online from I think it was Sony Interactive Entertainment. And even though you can't really do much in 10:56 it, it's a great way to bring up a game from back in the day and sort of see a 11:01 piece of history in gaming culture. And again, these are all projects the community has banded together to create 11:08 and keep games preserved. And if the community is doing this through reverse engineering efforts, you know, it would 11:14 only be beneficial if companies had to have an endof life plan. So people who are interested in these games or these 11:20 games hold memories to you, you'll never actually lose them to the fabric of time simply because that's what big 11:26 corporations want you. They want you to immediately buy the next product and they want to keep this world of planned 11:32 obsolescence alive. With projects like RPCN, you too can actually configure 11:38 other PlayStation 3 games like Killzone 2, for instance, and play them in online 11:43 communities as well. It's all of the stuff that really adds into an amazing 11:48 experience. And to cut back on, you know, Jason's [ __ ] here, Pirate Software's nonsense, I played literally 11:56 Xbox Live on the OG Xbox again. Now, one of the points that I didn't 12:01 like from Pirate Software was this one comment on his video regarding Meet Your Maker, a game with tons of userenerated 12:07 content, where he said, "Without a UGC game, where you make dungeons that other people playing, without that large 12:12 player base, that game becomes stale because of a lack of variation, which I guess is true. A lot of games do end up 12:18 dying out." Now, in my previous video, I talked about Little Bigplet and how there exists an archive of old user 12:24 created content that can just serve as a scrapbook of time. I think we all know that eventually every large scale game 12:30 will wayne in its player base and die. That's just how things go. That's business. That's life. That's YouTube 12:36 channels. That's, you know, just just the just the slow march of time hitting, right? That's how things work. So, it's 12:43 not it's not a matter of like you cannot preserve the essence of a game like this with a small group of players. It needs 12:50 thousands or more active players to give the experience. And all those games that I showed you give you the experience. 12:56 and the essence of a game even with player bases less than a 100 average users at any given time. Now granted 13:03 those games don't you know have a bunch of UGC but again these are online experiences that we all grew up with 13:09 that I think are really important and preserving just the ability to play them is there because at some point maybe you 13:16 would like to go back and see where a certain favorite game franchise of yours went and what the gameplay consisted of. 13:22 And if you can't access it, then there's just no way to experience it unless you maybe watch a YouTube video. And even 13:28 that isn't the same feeling. So inside one of these comments on I guess Lewis Rossman's video, he writes, "I'm aware 13:34 of the process of an initiative to be turned into legislature much further down the road after many edits. If 13:40 people want me to back it with then the technical and monetary hurdles of applying the request need to be included 13:45 in the conversation. As written, this initiative would put a massive undue burden on developers both in AAA and 13:52 indie to the extent of killing off live service games. It's entirely too vague 13:58 on what the problem is and currently opens a conversation that causes more problems instead of fixing the ones it 14:04 wants to do. If we want to hit the niche and terrible business practices of incorrectly advertising live service 14:10 games or always online single playeron games, then call that out directly, not 14:15 just video games as stated in the initiative. So, this is where I do tend to disagree. Calling out video games to 14:22 exist well after a company wants to stop supporting them is the initiative. We 14:27 don't want video games to die. It doesn't matter if the video game is a single player experience, single player 14:33 with multiplayer, forced, or a live service MMO experience. It should have 14:39 an endoflife plan. Remember the thing about stop killing games was it was never retroactive. 14:46 Meaning that no matter what had happened after the initiative was passed and the laws were made, anything that exists as 14:52 of right now is pretty much untouched. But it does set a precedent to go into 14:58 the future that if you're a game developer and you want to cater to the EU markets, you should design an 15:03 end-of-life plan. Remember, the EU economy is like 15% of the world's like trade, which is not insignificant after 15:10 the Chinese and the Americans come the entire European Union. And so, of course, if something's going to happen 15:17 in the EU, it's probably going to trickle down to the rest of the world. And that's why this initiative matters 15:22 for all of us. And if we're going to push even further, it's not just video 15:27 games that are the problem. I think the issue is we only focus on video games here. But let's say that you're somebody 15:33 that loves movies or music. Remember, initiatives like this that focus on preservation matter for you, too. Don't 15:41 you want every single movie that exists out there to be preserved or something down the road so we as human beings 15:47 don't lose any form of history? Don't you want music to be preserved? It's a lot different for movies and music 15:53 because you can just screen record an entire season of a TV show or an entire 15:58 movie. You can rip entire music CDs onto hardware. Hell, back in the day for the 16:04 PS2, you could rip entire musical CDs all day every day. Okay, that used to be a thing back then. Nowadays, not so 16:11 [ __ ] much, at least on consoles. And this is important. But when it comes to things like software, it's not just 16:18 video games. A lot of big companies want us to be locked into this live subscription model. So whether you use 16:24 things like Microsoft Windows or Adobe Premiere for instance, which is a great example, Adobe used to be a software you 16:31 could just go to the store and buy a copy of, you know, for a specific, you know, version of that year. Now you 16:37 could keep this version and install it whenever you wanted to. But now you have to be locked into subscriptions from 16:43 Adobe. And there are times where even if you want to cancel that subscription, you may be subject to absurd 16:49 cancellation fees. Things that shouldn't be legal are now legal and normalized. 16:54 And it's really up to us as a consumer group to at least advocate for better solutions. You know, there's good 17:01 regulations like what happened to Apple in the EU. Apple users are basically 17:06 allowed to install whatever application they want to their phones and Apple is so malicious they geolock that to make 17:13 sure that we in America, we in Canada, we anywhere outside the EU don't even get those benefits. But you know, when 17:20 Apple was forced to basically go into their actual phones and get rid of their shitty lightning cable and give us USBC, 17:28 all of a sudden they touted all the benefits you get with this cable. Even though literally Android users had these 17:34 benefits and Apple was the last hold out and they had to be forced by an entire economic zone to [ __ ] cater with a 17:42 better technology. It's actually insane sometimes that you have to regulate companies into doing just some good or 17:49 to protect the actual consumer which is what stop Killing Games was ultimately about. So looking further into like 17:56 Pirate Software's words over here, he talks about more specifically in the second video, what really are these 18:02 scenarios. So he talks about potential scenarios where a studio could be abused if the initiative was implemented as 18:09 written. It adds new paths for abuse and that need to be discussed to help hone 18:14 this initiative into something that would do good without doing harm. I then explained that very few people in the 18:20 game development space can actually discuss this from the other side due to fear of losing their jobs and a studio 18:27 is much safer in Silent Descent than they are discussing the drawbacks of your ideals. The recent attacks on our 18:33 games is obvious evidence of this. My main issue with this initiative is that it is broad in its approach to change 18:40 the industry in the exact language of the initiative, not the FAQ request that all games stay in a functional playable 18:48 state. That is not feasible for all games at a technical level and could potentially restrict developers from 18:54 making online only games like MMOs, MOBAs, and userenerated content games in 19:00 the future. That list is not exhaustive and it doesn't matter if you do or don't like those kind of games. So, this is 19:07 one of those things where on surface level, yeah, it makes sense, right? Like, why would you ever want to stifle 19:13 an MMO from existing or a MOA from existing or any game with UGC? Except 19:18 that's not what the initiative was ever about. and he's still not actually addressing what are the technical like 19:25 hurdles that you're you you're you're you're stopping from this initiative being passed. Right? So, I wanted to 19:32 look at one of Pirate Software's videos, specifically that second video he was talking about and kind of understand what his points were and deconstruct 19:38 them a little bit because I don't think that they're actually all that valid. Thus, the most common requirement of the 19:44 initiative, which is games have to be left in a functional playable state. Now, what happens if that game is a 19:50 online only live service game? Well, if you want that to stay in a functional playable state, that means the devs have 19:56 to release either server binaries or somehow carve off the game to be a single player experience now. Some way 20:02 to keep it functional and playable. Right now, many of you are requesting yes, I should get the server binaries so 20:08 that I can go and make private servers for this. But that doesn't make a lot of sense in the real world. And the reason 20:13 why is because it leaves developers open to abuse. So, let's explore that a little bit. Let's say that you made your 20:18 own video game and you made a live service game. Maybe it's an MMO, maybe it's something else, right? And let's 20:24 say that I want to monetize that game, but you don't allow monetization of the game by any other party. This makes 20:30 sense because most creators don't allow for that. You can't just take someone else's art and profit off of it. Normal, 20:36 right? So, then I go, well, how am I going to force you to do this? Under this initiative, you would have to 20:42 release the server binaries or keep the game in a functional playable state at end of life. So, I hit you with a ton of 20:47 bots. I hit you with a ton of exploits. I attack your community. I destroy your Reddit. I go after your business. I go 20:54 everywhere that I possibly can to make this cost as much as it possibly can for you. And it's not hard to do this. We 21:00 saw the exact same thing happen in TF2 recently. The massive amount of bots that were attacking the game. This is 21:06 not infeasible. This is something that is very easily attainable today. And let's say that this goes on long enough 21:13 that your game dies because you can't afford it anymore and your studio has to shut down. At end of life, you now have 21:20 to release those server binaries to keep the game in a functional playable state. At which point I take those, I create a 21:26 private server and I monetize it. And some people have said, well, simply don't allow monetization of the server. 21:31 Well, who's going to enforce that? If you want a government initiative to enforce that, that means the government has to build a registry of all of those 21:37 games and all of that intellectual property that shouldn't be monetized and then somehow enforce that. Now, there's 21:44 a lot to unpack there, but I want to actually play everything in context. I don't want to be labeled a clip chimper 21:49 in this situation. You know, I don't want to be somebody that doesn't give you the full context of what somebody is saying. And again, if you want to see 21:55 all of his video, it's completely available on his channel. But the actual example that he talked about here sounds 22:00 a lot like corporate espionage, corporate sabotage, sorry, that's the better uh term. And the thing is, it's 22:06 true, right? Like, yes, let's say that a company, and you know, he mentioned Team Fortress 2, which is a game that didn't 22:12 even have official servers until after, you know, Valve had transitioned things to a source multiplayer framework. But a 22:18 lot of people did get those server binaries and they did host games. And while TF2, yes, they had a bot problem, 22:24 and I believe in some cases they still do, there's a lot of stuff the community has done with those server binaries 22:30 provided by Valve to create an amazing fun gaming experience. But what he's 22:35 talking about is obviously, let's say somebody takes, you know, your video game, they take your binaries, they 22:40 basically attack your game, uh, they attack your game with bots, nefarious practices, and as soon as your game is 22:47 dead, right, because these people have attacked it, they'll release the server binaries. Somebody takes your server 22:52 binaries, they revitalize your dead game, and then inject things like monetization. So again, it's a vehicle, 22:58 I guess, according to Jason, that people can legally attack a video game, destroy them, and then be able to rehost them 23:04 and profit off of the art that another person created, which again, I think is a pretty legitimate thing to somewhat 23:11 worry about, right? Like, yes, that could happen. But he's also talked about what is the enforcement mechanism? Would 23:18 they have to have a registry? And what he's describing is something that already exists. Again, these are not 23:23 situations that are, you know, unavoidable. Companies like Riot Games, for instance, shut down an entire League 23:29 of Legends private server because they felt it encroached their intellectual property and copyrights. And again, it's 23:36 debatable if they did that, but they shut it down using the legal channels. Same thing with Blizzard when they shut 23:42 down World of Warcraft private servers because they felt it was violating their terms of services or copyrights. And 23:50 even people like Pirate Software, who's an independent developer, has at times 23:55 used the DMCA, and it's debatable if it's false or not, to weaponize it 24:01 against people that he has not liked, people that he believed were abusing his 24:06 copyright, mostly his like actual likeness. They took some apparently alleged clips from his stream, used them 24:12 in promotional material, and instead of attacking the promotional material directly, it seems his team went 24:17 directly for the actual developers Steam uh, you know, game, even though that Steam build did not have any of the 24:24 offending DMCA material. Again, if you're worried about copyrights and you're worried about, you know, people 24:29 using things for nefarious purposes, the legal channels are available to protect your game even long after it's dead. 24:36 There are games that have private servers that are still not supported. Nothing would even stop some someone 24:41 like Konami from going after that Save MGO project and shutting it down simply 24:47 because they're distributing Konami assets. But let's go further in. Okay, again, I don't think that this should be 24:53 a cause reason for preventing any form of preservation whether things are live 24:58 service or not. But Jason has a few things to say about live service itself. Let's hear this. So, in the most 25:04 extreme, people said live service games shouldn't exist at all, and the initiative will kill them off for good, and that's a good thing. Well, you don't 25:11 get to define what players get to play or not play. You also shouldn't be able to get to define what developers build 25:16 or don't build. You should not have creative control over the developers, and you should not have control over what is in my Steam library or on my 25:22 phone. That doesn't make any goddamn sense. Aside from that, the initiative does not purport to kill live service games. it would just make it incredibly 25:29 difficult to build said games and add a lot of risk to it. Which is why I'm bringing all of this up and why I don't support the initiative in the first 25:35 place. A lot of people don't realize that this will slowly diminish live service games in the market because it's 25:41 not an incentive for us to build them anymore, which means you get less multiplayer live experiences. And this 25:46 is where I'm not going to mince words. I actually don't see the problem in any of that. I get that he likes live service 25:52 experiences, but if regulation exists to prevent video games from all going into this planned obsolescence model because 25:59 here's the thing, it's a very rosy view that video games are livey, you know, they constantly have, you know, stuff 26:04 being injected in and for some stuff that can work. Like, yeah, an MMO probably needs to be connected online 26:10 all the time, but to not have an end of life plan for when that game eventually goes away is an issue. Now, he does 26:16 mention later on in this video, and I don't need to play it, but obviously I think a big problem is how these games 26:22 are built, right? Like, obviously, if you as a developer came out and said, "Hey buddy, listen, you're just renting 26:27 the game. You're not buying it." That would alleviate a lot of purchasing concerns. But I also think it would very 26:33 negatively impact the sales of a video game if people were just told outright, "Yeah, this is a rental. So, if you're 26:39 spending 60 bucks today, well, you might consider getting a game that'll be around, you know, long after." You don't 26:45 want to get something that has a endof life guarantee. Uh but you just don't know when that end of life is. Now the 26:52 thing is with live service stuff is look if game companies are regulated to again have an end of life plan and that means 26:58 that producing a video game that is planned to be obsolete from the beginning is risky then that really 27:03 isn't anybody's problem. Okay? At the end of the day that should be a practice that isn't accepted in the gaming 27:09 sphere. I get that you like live services. I've played a few live services that I enjoy myself, but I'm 27:15 thinking of the long-term implications of game preservation. And he does touch upon it here to fix something. So, the 27:21 next one is that this is about games preservation and that it needs to happen to preserve these types of games for 27:27 future generations and for everyone to always have forever. But I would argue that this isn't actually preserving 27:32 these games. Social games such as, let's say, Apex Legends require a number of 27:38 players to be in the match at the same time so that you can have an experience that is only able to be obtained through 27:44 lots of players interacting, right? It's a multiplayer game. You need a bunch of people. How many of you have felt 27:50 negatively when an MMO dies or when a live service game dies, oh, dead game, 27:55 there's only five people online. Why would I play that? So, why would you want to preserve a game in that state? 28:00 That doesn't make any sense to me. You want to take down these live service games, put them up on a private server, 28:06 and then play it with a couple of people. You're not bringing it back at its height. You're not taking a snapshot of what the game actually is. You're 28:12 making it limp on in a way that doesn't make any sense. That's not preservation. And for those that may stop there and 28:18 go, "But but private servers going to have a lot of players. Look at all the ones for World of Warcraft." Again, we 28:23 talked about that. It opens up a route for abuse of the developers. Now again when it comes to the abuse of 28:29 developers, sure but those developers can always go through the legal channel as you have when there was abuse that 28:35 you perceived and any large company does that and still does it to this day. But the thing about any of this like you 28:41 know you're not capturing games and preserving them as their height or like whatever that to me doesn't really make 28:48 any sense and I don't know why he harps on it. We all know that games eventually drop off. There are games, you know, 28:53 where live services will come to an end. Nobody's talking about replacing these games as they're active. Again, a live 29:00 service experience we know will choose to end its service, and you should be able to play on those servers as long as 29:06 the company's willing to support them. But what happens afterwards if you bought a game and you weren't even 29:12 notified that you were renting the game all along, you should be able to have some way to access features of the game, 29:18 not every single feature, but enough to play the core content of the game after it drops. you know, because you paid for 29:25 the game. Simple as that. That's the argument being made. And yes, granted, 29:30 I've been showing you Metal Gear Online footage this whole time. Do you think this experience is reflective of the 29:36 game at its peak? No. There's what, 50 people currently as I'm recording this game? Yes. That's not representative of 29:43 this entire community, but it allows the gamers who are interested in this to at least play the multiplayer 29:49 functionality, even if it's not what the game was at its peak. There's a lot of 29:54 games that have been lost to time and this allows us to at least preserve some aspect of the game because the only 30:00 other alternative that Jason is providing is to just let the [ __ ] game die. Simple as that. Lose that aspect of gaming history which I simply 30:08 and millions of others do not accept. And it's not just Jason. It's not just gamers. It's other developers. People 30:14 that are also passionate about video games to the point of producing it themselves. This is a serious consumer 30:20 advocacy movement that wants to preserve video games instead of adding in extra barriers to prevent, you know, video 30:27 games from being made. Again, if you're worried that live service models and MMO models are threatened because of this, 30:33 again, I ask you on a technical level, how does this initiative inhibit any video games? He mentions this possible 30:40 abuse that can exist. And there are avenues for companies large and small to address this abuse through a legal 30:46 channel that exists right now. But like if you ask what are the 30:52 technical hurdles? What prevents an MMO from existing if it has an endof life plan or not? You know a lot of those 30:59 games even the Matrix online that I showed you earlier. Hell, forget that. Games like World of Warcraft, games like 31:06 Final Fantasy 15, hell Final Fantasy uh 11 even, right? A lot of MMOs have 31:12 server emulators or even server binaries that are out there in the world floating and it allows people to take that game 31:19 and actually preserve it or at least have a server that's available long after companies stop supporting it. Does 31:26 that mean that a game like World of Warcraft suddenly just doesn't exist or is one of the most popular MMOs, yes, 31:32 World of Warcraft, capable of providing users with an endof life plan? What is an MMO game that you that that literally 31:41 would be ruined if something like Stop Killing Games existed, right? Would it be games like Destiny 2? Would it be 31:47 games like Anthem? Would it be any MMO like GTA Online for instance that would cease to function if all of a sudden 31:55 game developers were, you know, forced to have an endof life plan from the very beginning of its development? That's the 32:01 question that I actually want to ask. Now, do I think that Pirate Software is a completely malicious individual in 32:07 this? You know, the the part of me that has the best of faith to everyone that 32:13 likes to believe in the good of everyone likes to think that no, he's obviously not a malicious person. I don't think 32:18 he's an evil person because I really do think that he is misinformed and he is 32:24 coming at this from a pretty combative standpoint. Like at some point when you're so wrong, you know, you can 32:30 either let your ego completely take over and refuse to change your beliefs even 32:35 in light of all this new information or you know it's a situation where again 32:40 maybe he is really malicious. Maybe this is somebody that has more of a corporate view of the gaming industry and not 32:46 somebody that believes in the actual good of the gaming industry or believes in consumer protection. Because if 32:53 Piratesoft really cared about the gamer, right, the the video game industry, he 32:58 would not be against consumer protections. Because these consumer protections are not designed primarily 33:03 to ruin or make game development harder for the indie or AAA. It just makes it 33:09 so that when these game companies decide to produce video games, they have an endof life plan. Meaning that for the 33:15 people buying their video games, they can at least feel protected and safe in 33:20 their purchases. And I think that's really the most important part of this. Look, I can talk your ear off about game 33:26 preservation all day. I've done it for years on my channel. But the reason why I'm so passionate about this is that I 33:33 feel what Ross has done, the campaign that he started is that if this passes, 33:38 and I hope to God it passes because it starts a dialogue. And that dialogue 33:43 then involves a bunch of policy makers to think about how they want to craft 33:48 and write these laws. Remember this is just an initiative. We can hammer out the fine details once this gets 33:55 introduced. But down the road, if all of this does get introduced and passed, it 34:00 means that all of us gamers around the world benefit because game preservation 34:06 becomes codified and that's the important part of it. So yes, am I a 34:12 little bit angry at Pirate Software for misrepresenting this initiative and still constantly constantly becoming the 34:19 lightning rod for just not, you know, presenting it in a good faith manner? Yes, absolutely. Do I do do I wish this 34:29 this drama had to exist? No. I I wish it didn't. I wish honestly many gamers 34:35 could look at this without the lens of being combative and realize that consumer rights are just a good positive 34:41 thing for everyone involved. But honestly, the thing that I care about now beyond all of this is that this 34:49 initiative passes. So again, to go back to the Stop Killing Games website, in the amount of time we've talked about 34:55 this, we went up around 2,000 signatures, and that is the kind of 35:00 progress we need to be seeing. So don't listen to Pirate Software. Don't listen to anybody that is riding the [ __ ] 35:06 [ __ ] of corporate game development. Look at the people that are talking about consumer protections and the 35:13 preservation of video games going forward. In this video, I showed you a whole bunch of projects that exist to 35:18 keep games alive and active. But there also exist so many video games that are 35:24 dead. There was a game that I used to play back when I was a teenager called Mag. A 256 player, you know, Battlefield 35:32 like game for the PlayStation 3. And for a lot of the games that exist right now, that game has been lost forever to time. 35:40 If stop killing games passed all the way back then and games like Mag were thought with an end of life plan, I 35:47 could probably play a amazing innovative game. A game that hasn't even been replicated to this day at all. in that 35:54 capacity at least, you know, something like Mag. And I'm sure that for some of 36:00 you guys watching that are younger than me, you probably want to go back and play old experiences. You want to at least give it a try, right? You want to 36:07 at least see, you know, how games just evolve. Even if you're not a gamer, you 36:12 probably just want to see how this technology grew over time. Well, without initiatives like Stop Killing Games, if 36:19 you don't play something right there and then, you might never get the experience to play it again. You know, I thought 36:24 Concord was a pile of dog [ __ ] and most people did. That's why I died in less than a week. But 36:32 damn, would I like to go back and maybe experience it again with some friends for one drunk night? Sure. 36:38 Unfortunately, you can't because didn't come with an end of life plan. Anyways, 36:43 talked about it too much. If you like what you saw, please like, comment, and subscribe. But more importantly, please 36:49 go to stopkillinggames.com if you can sign this initiative because every signature matters. We have one 36:56 month left and godamn do I want to see that signature pool well past a million. 37:02 The momentum is here. We might actually get all the way to the end. If you like what you saw, please like, comment, and 37:07 subscribe. I I am