Video Link goes here: https://youtu.be/HIfRLujXtUo Haven't watched, because I'd rather not watch a one hour autopsy that mostly blames a single person.

Welp! So it goes. I've said many things and many pieces that expecting a panacea solution to this issue trying to treat a symptom. Here's my overview:

1) SKG would have to rewrite contract law to work. Athletes, car manufactures, musicians, they aren't signing perpetual contracts. This is meant to prevent absurd exclusivity situations such as Weezer only being able to play at Microsoft events. (People are shallow enough that they wouldn't be interested in an debranded game.)

2) Most of what SKG was about wasn't going to correct the habits of the average person, and much less the typical gatchapon whale. Changing "buy" to "rental agreement" won't solve the issue, just as changing "credit card" to "short term loan card" wouldn't fix that either.

3) If you want to have a game that lasts forever, it should be constructed from the bottom up to be a game from the hands of the Public. Can't have it stolen away if the public owns it, after all. (FlightGear, Speed Demons, Warzone2100, etc.)

4) Even with those out of the way, there are still several rakes to step on between "having access to the servers" and "having a functional game" thanks to black box code patents, proprietary middleware, and so on.

5) Functionally speaking, I'm not certain how the arbitration of SKG was to be carried out in the first place, especially in the case of natural disasters, sudden bankruptcy, and other events that could sever the connection between the source code/server code and their holders.

6) Some of the stipulations and fliers of SKG felt like they were designed to fail under any serious scrutiny, such as the "online services expiration date". Short of reading tea leaves, how exactly is a publisher or developer going to predict the endurance of their game; be it exploding at launch and dumping to a weekly concurrent player count of 0, or somehow lasting 25+ years with services on offer today? (Neopets and Clonclord, for example.)

7) Even if SKG were somehow ratified into a law with all the stipulations as listed instead of being ran through a bureaucratic paper shredder, I'm sure NetEase, NetDragon, SNK, MiHoYo and other companies outside of the Eurozone would give a rat's buttock. Most of those have a GDP bigger than many countries.

8) Expressions by rights holders or developers themselves to refuse have been expressed. Now what? Is SKG supposed to violate the refusal, especially if it's written in grave rights or a will?

I respected the idea, the onus, but not the execution or conceits.

Quelle surprise

Yes, unsurprising. The whole initiative was a total non-starter in the first place, misunderstanding the core underlying issues at hand (game design/DRM) and proposing unrealistic and unworkable band-aid fixes.

If banning DRM at the national legislative level is not possible, then the only solution will be through consumer-led action/education.

I am not sure what you mean here, but you do know that one of the benefits of patent law is that patents are public information? You cannot patent something unless you make it public. This is actually why patetns are part of what drives innovation and the sharing of knowledge.

Granted, you're protected by law so no one else can use whatever is patented (including code) while it’s under the protection period, but it's not a 'blackbox' at all. This is also why there’s a risk in filing a patent too early (and why someone might choose not to patent something at all) - someone else could build upon your patent, improve and change it enough, and create a better product, which they can then patent themselves.

Copyright is another matter. It is not public in the same way, and you can copyright code.

And I watched the video I now will not listen to Rosses content for the most part as he basically is calling people who regularly enjoy games as idiots who don't understand what is laid out before them on the '' SKG '' thing.. and saying those who don't play games or barely do understand it better ..

For those of us who don't have time to watch the video, can you briefly clarify in what sense it has 'missed'?

I kind of wished it would have worked, but I am not surprised it did not. I was against it for being too broad and far reaching, while at the same time struggling to find its own identity. They wanted to do too much,all at once against too many big players, and in the end, the way the laws would be written would end up hurting the smaller indie studios by putting an undue onus on them to patch and/or maintain games that flop, when they don't have the manpower to necessarily do it.

It would have created a bar to entry in the games creation space that is very high and would deprive gamers of a lot of games that companies just can't risk making. Imagine being a solo developer, and you release your hobby project game for fun, only to have someone threaten to sue you because it has a multi-player component that doesn't work after a few years, and no one whlas really playing it anyway. But one guy, who wants to wield the law like a bludgeon is forcing someone who has no free time, to make a patch to allow him to play a game he paid $5 for. Not a likely scenario, but a possible one.

Basically he said ''not enough support '' and ''not enough signatures '' while also apparently the place he was trying to get it taken serious in more or less kinda tossed it out do do they technically have laws and regulations that fall into what ''stop killing games'' is attempting .. Add to that he admitted he didn't understand the lows and such enough to make SKGs work.

Also Ross seems to not get that the reason many people are going on about'' you'd need to essentially rework multiplayer and online games to be a single player experience and balance things to be completable with a single player experience...if SKGs happened is because it would kinda need to be to have them playable after server shutdown as many actually wouldn't get fan run or maintained game servers and connections

Among many other things

Right, the Nemesis System. It expires in 2036 at soonest. This means nobody can make a system WB feels is shaped enough like it without either paying though the nose or under legal duress. Same reason only Namco games had minigames during their long load times while everyone else had you stare at a barely interactive screen.

While you are correct that it isn't a "black box", often the terms of a patent are legally vague enough to provide snares to seemingly innocuous features; tripmines of spurious terminology that can drag development to a halt because of one ugly rock.

I’ll give you the load screen games, those were a clever idea, and that patent was a well-executed technical solution. It was smart workaround for a hardware limitation. But it did not stop any kind of games from being made, or halt the development of any game, it just stoped them making mini games running on the load screen.

As for the Nemesis system, people often misunderstand what the patent actually covers, mostly because they’ve only read headlines or listened to YouTubers (who don’t really know anything about it) talk about it. Yes, Monolith’s system is detailed and innovative. But the patent doesn’t prevent anyone from creating a similar system; it only restricts others from implementing it in the exact same way Monolith did.

Plenty of games could (and some do) feature mechanics like enemy persistence or rivals that evolve based on the player’s actions. For example, Warframe’s Adversary system lets enemies “remember” who killed them and come back stronger - similar to the Nemesis system. That’s totally fine, because it’s implemented differently enough from the patented Nemesis system.

The bigger issue is that something like the Nemesis system requires a very particular type of game design to make sense, typically a single-player open-world or sandbox environment with hierarchical enemy structures and persistent characters. That’s not something most games are doing right now, which is probably why we haven’t seen many attempts to replicate it, patent or not.

Ah ok, I see. Thanks! So, he didn't get enough signatures and now he's presumably raging at the gaming community for not sharing his vision and backing his initiative.

If i recall correctly, it wasn't just a total amount of signatures necessary, but a specific amount from within each EU member state, so if not enough people in Bulgaria or Cyprus or something care, it doesn't matter if every single citizen of France signs.

I might be mistaken here, but i believe that's somewhat of how it works, so chances were kinda slim to begin with.

In the UK it got enough signatures to be heard in parliament, where it took the representatives present about 2 seconds to say "nah, we dont care. We have more important things to worry about".

Being heard does not mean anything will change

It's another reason why it was never going to go anywhere. Those petitions are basically worthless, since all it does is force the issue to 'be discussed'. It's highly unlikely anything will actually happen, unless you could get a sizeable number of politicians to buy in.