daisekihan

Yeah, they are only going to up the attack, I think. Luckily, I think you could go over every fan stream with Ross and the only political opinions you would find is slightly left-of-center pragmatism mixed with cynicism about the US government at least. This attack was made through the legal channels of the EU, but I don’t think they will only take that approach. The petition will only put the movement before the legislative body, meaning it needs MPs willing to support it; the industry will probably try to sap the political will that will pressure them to actually do something. And careless retweets of toxic supporters will make that more difficult. So I hope that even if Ross has no control over that account, he might consider giving the account runner a little friendly advice about exercising caution if he is on good terms with them.

I haven’t looked that closely into the history of Gamergate, and that may be true. Still, even if the impetus came from chuds, there were some people at the beginning who thought there was some merit to it at first. I think the guy who who first made the KotakuinAction subreddit tried to shut it down because he saw it was nothing but bigots. Anyway, I think you may have an overly optimistic view of this process. This isn’t something people who support SKG can just turn over to EU legislators and hope for the best. The industry certainly isn’t going to approach it that way—their resistance is only going to get stronger the closer change gets to happening. Grassroots pressure if anything needs to get bigger to match that. I can absolutely imagine the industry using this as a point of attack, especially in the EU, which is more progressive in general. So any official SKG outlet like a Twitter account needs to be very careful about keeping its nose clean; or at least Ross and the other leaders should do a cost-benefit analysis to inform how they should respond to unsavory supporters.

Hey Ross, I didn’t think this rose to the level of of an email, but I’ve noticed a trend that you might want to get ahead of. Recently at a Ubisoft shareholder meeting, the CEO was first asked about “woke” games and then the SKG campaign by the same person. I’m not going to get into the content of the answer, but I have seen a lot of people supporting SKG who could broadly be thought of as representing the alt-right/Manosphere kind of gamer. Another example I saw was the SKG Twitter retweeting a message of support From Bounding into Comics, which was strongly connected to an alt-right harassment campaign against comic creators and is very right leaning according to every bias checker. I am not trying to make a political argument here but I this sort of association could be problematic for the campaign. Obviously it is important to have as broad a base of support for SKG as possible and I don’t think the campaign should try to push away people who I find unsavory, but it would be very easy for the industry to try to frame SKG as another Gamergate if they can make these links. They haven’t done so yet but I can imagine them taking any step they can think of to discredit SKG the closer it gets to achieving its goals. The original idea of Gamergate wasn’t even bad—gaming journalists are too close to their sources—but the possibility of pushing back against those bad practices was lost when the goals got mixed up with politics. Obviously, you can control something like the shareholder meeting, but it might at least be a good idea if the person running the SKG Twitter tried to be a bit more careful with retweets.

Even in the unlikely event that does happen, it won't be for months if not years. It would be a good idea to put at least this video on as many sites as possible to catch the attention of as many people who bought The Crew as possible. Not to mention, that would only ban TikTok in the United States, which is not even a major focus of Ross's campaign.

It looks like it's already been uploaded there at least once. But I don't think the account is particularly popular. Still, it's something. https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTLS47aFr/

Ross, you might recoil at this idea but, have you considered making a TikTok account to spread the message? You would be surprised how many people do most of their video viewing on TikTok. I was going to suggest posting on Instagram… But someone seems to have already done that https://www.instagram.com/reel/C5UKAqJBys9/?igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

Damn, I must have missed it. I just hope that if this is successful, Ubisoft and companies like it don't decide to double down and keep killing games in the U.S. and elsewhere just to assert that they have the prerogative to do as they please with their intellectual property even if it makes no financial sense.

Ross, I was wondering, even if federal law won't do anything, have you looked into state law? New York and California have economies as large some of the European countries you are targeting, and they have pretty progressive laws.

Ross might try contacting Yahtzee / Second Wind to signal boost this issue. I got the impression that he and Ross had a rapport from when they resolved an issue where Yahtzee borrowed a phrase from Freeman's Mind without realizing it and apologized once Ross called it out.

Ida Auken, a Danish MP, was the one who made the the quote and she was a member of a Socialist party but switched to a Social Liberal party in 2014 and was a member when she said that. At least, all the information I can find seems to indicate her meaning was more along the lines of central ownership, though admittedly the fact that the WEF would publish such an opinion might be a matter of them trying to soften people up to losing property rights. The Baltic states and their weird mix of socialism and capitalism tend to muddy the matters.

Looks like Ross is aware of the EFF. I would personally consider making contact with them my top priority, even if it means becoming something of a nuisance. This is their bread and butter.

Ross, your points are as always well taken. Also, many years ago you and I got in a little tiff here where I derided The Crew and the genre of driving game it represented as having little value and an extremely limited appeal. Over the years I've realized I was just wrong, and I just had a too limited sense of empathy or too little experience to understand your perspective. One thing...I think the person who made that quote about owning nothing was coming from a socialistic model of centralized ownership rather than just corporate ownership, though it definitely gives a bad look. Have you gotten in contact with the EFF? They seems like they would be the go-to guys for this.

Okay, I thought there was more involved in it. Excuse my ignorance!

But like, what if no one is even willing to run such a server in the first place? I mean, we're not talking about erasing the full game, but just the multiplayer aspects of a game you can still play. The company can't run the servers forever, so the proposed other option is to turn multiplayer servers over to the fans. But someone will have to run and pay for those servers. That's just not going to happen every time even if the company does allow it. I'm not saying I agree but if this scenario happened, "but maybe in a couple years when a new game in that series is announced people will go back to the older ones", the companies would argue, "If such a demand appeared we would reopen the servers."

I'll put aside the CIA thing. But about multiplayer features, aren't there inevitably going to be some games that are simply not popular enough for fans to bother setting up a server, even if the company released the code for free? Even popular games can eventually have empty lobbies even if the server is technically running after enough time.

Ross, MintPress, publisher of the article on the CIA that you quote here, is not a credible news organization. They have been caught spreading lies that even other far left news outlets disavowed (https://www.antiwar.com/blog/2013/09/20/retraction-and-apology-to-our-readers-for-mint-press-article-on-syria-gas-attack/) If you are really opposed to misinformation, I think you should be more diligent about your sources. Furthermore, even this article, as flawed as it is, only said that the CIA *was* embedded in major media outlets during the Cold War.

I think Anno 2070 is kind of a bad example, Ross. You talk about burning Bram Stoker's Dracula, but they aren't purging the whole game, just the online elements. Is Anno 2070 even popular enough that someone would run a fan server for a city building game, even if they offered up the code like you've suggested in the past? As to why this is getting noticed and the other ones aren't--the ones you mentioned were only shutting down the online servers in 2021. We were hearing that people wouldn't be able to download the DLC for various popular Assassin's Creed games anymore even if they had already paid for them, and that pissed people off. People are fairly willing to except the fact that online services won't last forever (whether that's right or not is a completely different matter), but if they paid for a certain amount of downloadable data they are going to be affronted if they lose access to that data. I'm sure that the same thing has happened before, but Assassin's Creed II and Far Cry 3 were very popular.

I hope you're right, but it feels like Ross's approach to HL2 is more about critiquing the world and the story instead of trying to interpret it in an entertaining way. Part of the charm of FM was that Gordon seemed to be enjoying himself, but that side of him is almost completely gone now. The Freeman who thought of a rocket launcher was the perfect gift for the was who has everything is gone now. Using the gravity gun would be far too much fun for the current version of Freeman, so I could understand why Ross would write it out.

So Freeman thinks the Gravity Gun is out of power and is never going to use it again. Well, there's one more thing I was looking forward to in this series that Rose wrote out. I wouldn't be surprised if he modded the final level to just be a normal shooting one at this rate. Well, at least Freeman is making some jokes and only half of the lines are just Ross taking the piss out of the level design through Freeman instead of pretty much all of it like the last few episodes.

Ross, the whole point behind The Purge movies is that the psycho killers aren't really even psychos, they're hired by the fascist regime that staged a coup before the series began to kill off the underclass to stem overpopulation. Hence the title.

I just need to take a break from Ross's content, I think. Maybe the problem is with me not him.

The format just does not work for this game. And Ross thinks he is "holding Half Life 2's feet to the fire" by making him oblivious to every character not mentioned in the original game, as if Freeman came into existence on the tram to Black Mesa, when all he is going is reminding the viewer that they aren't really seeing into Freeman's mind but watching a game playthrough. Everyone looking forward to Ravenholm is in for a rude awakening. Ross has decided to make the Gravity Gun unusable (I can only imagine how he plans on getting through the Citadel where Freeman has no other weapon) and half of the enjoyment we all remember from that level is the Gravity Gun. Ross seems to be more interested in criticizing Half Life 2 than making an entertaining story, so if he sticks to form he is just going to dismiss Father Grigori as a lunatic and spend 90% of the time screaming.

I definitely hope I'm wrong. I hope Ross was just burned out by the canals and Freeman will actually do what he does best, thriving in chaos.

If Ross hasn't lost interest, that's great. But the fact remains that Half Life 2 is an NPC heavy game and if Freeman's only reaction to them is screaming about how unrealistically they're behaving and constantly reminding the viewer by proxy that the NPC's can't really hear Freeman, it's going to become unwatchable. It doesn't matter if it's "in character" it is. Freeman's Mind isn't supposed to be an Oliver Stone movie, it's supposed to be comedy. As for Ravenholm, if Ross continues the way he is now, not only will he not have chemistry with Father Grigori, he's going to do little other than complain about how annoying he is or how he's not behaving like a human.

I guess I'm going back on what I said earlier by continuing this, but it is not my belief that Ross should stop making them because I dislike them. I think Ross should stop making the series because he seems to dislike making it. On his streams, the most enthusiasm he can come up with for FM2 is that it's better than working a day job. If Ross really is still passionate about the project and a lack of care has nothing to do with the recent episodes, he should by all means keep trying to make them. But I highly doubt that to be the case.