- 2 days ago
Ross Scott jest, jak sam wspomina - "supersojusznikiem" inicjatywy Stop Killing Games. I dziś odpowie na najbardziej palące Was pytania!
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00:00All right, so let me start with saying hi, Ross, and I'm so happy to see you here.
00:05Thank you for taking the time for this interview. We're so happy to host you here.
00:09So for me, let me just introduce you to our audience.
00:13For the people that don't know you, but I imagine most of them know you,
00:16since they know you from the Stop Killing Games initiative,
00:20Ross Scott is to me the original biggest supporter of Stop Killing Games.
00:24His channel is called Accurce Farms, where previously his main focus was basically retro games.
00:31I guess that's the biggest focus.
00:33Just various games, sometimes old, sometimes new. Much more casual thing than this.
00:39Yeah, I got it. So, and then you jumped into dead game news, let's say.
00:44Videos where you talked about issues related to publishers taking beloved games and killing them.
00:50So I guess that's your main focus now, right?
00:53Temporarily. I just want to try my best to end this practice,
00:58then go back to just the goofier videos I was doing.
01:02I wanted to say that one of the best videos I really loved was the Deus Ex documentary that you made,
01:07because it was so awesome. I love it.
01:09And I've watched it multiple times, so thank you for that.
01:12Please check out his channel, Accurce Farms.
01:14As I mentioned, you will find the link below, and welcome, Ross, to TVGry.
01:18And let's start with something really easy.
01:21How do you find living in Poland? Because I've heard you live in Poland.
01:24What do you think about our country?
01:25I think it's all right. My first thought when I came here was almost like in a science fiction movie,
01:33where they go back in time and change something, that society is a little, it's similar, but a little different.
01:40And it was like that with a lot of things, small things, but generally fine.
01:45I mean, do you know any words or sentences in Polish that help you in everyday life, or do you just try to do this?
01:52I know lots of words, jedzenie, you know, kucarica, kurczak, pomidor, cebula, czarki, you know, so I can mostly read a menu.
02:03That's awesome. That's awesome.
02:05All right, so let's jump into more, let's say, important questions.
02:09How did the initiative start for you?
02:12Were you from the beginning in the initiative, or someone that was the mastermind behind it invited you in?
02:19How did it start for you?
02:20It was, it's kind of a cumulative thing from many previous things I was doing.
02:29I guess the start of, literally the start of the initiative was from several volunteers that I had been working with on other things already,
02:38that they helped put together and I communicated with them on.
02:42But prior to that we were doing consumer protection action related to this, and prior to that I was making a lot of videos over a period of years trying to alert more people about this to try to get something done on it.
02:58Got it, okay.
02:59And then when you were into that and you saw that pirate software and some other people jumped into it and tried to diminish it and stop it, and it actually stopped for a while.
03:14And then it jumped all over the internet.
03:17What were your thoughts?
03:18What are your feelings with all of this situation?
03:21Because I imagine you went through a lot with that.
03:24Yeah, it's the sort of, I've never done anything like a campaign like this before, so this has all been me trying to take my best guess at what to do.
03:34I mean, I would have thought, okay, one person not liking it, misrepresenting it, wasn't that big a deal because I didn't think it was, but it ended up having a very big impact.
03:45And I tried to find other ways to compensate for that by reaching out to, you know, members of parliament and possible other promotion options for it, but that fell through.
03:57But I made a video on it a few weeks ago because I thought we weren't going to make it, so I wanted to at least wake people up as just one last attempt to try to make this work.
04:07And it ended up being far more successful than I thought it would be for different reasons than I thought it would be, so I'm glad it's working.
04:15I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm just trying to end the practice and get out, really.
04:21Got it.
04:21Okay.
04:22And are you in touch with any devs or politicians or just anyone that is related to this idea?
04:28I mean, are there any people that are, let's say, important in that topic, in that general, let's say, of Stop Killing Games and are they happy that you do it or are there some people like politicians, for example, that actually hate your work, for example, because you're killing what they're doing behind the scenes, for example?
04:48Well, if there are, they haven't, for politicians, if there are, they haven't told me yet, uh, I imagine as this gets closer to the EU commission, then we'll probably, probably see some comments like that, but I mean, from politicians, uh, no, we've gotten a few politicians offering support of this, um, for developers, it's, I'd say the majority I've come in contact with are for it, but there, there are some that are against it.
05:18Typically, the bigger the developer, the more I hear nothing at all, so, but a lot of indie developers will be supportive of it, but it varies, it's, I, I think it certainly has a chance the way it's going.
05:33So, I guess, uh, my guess is that the bigger the company, the bigger is the risk and the more they are scared that, uh, it's going to hurt them in some way or another, right?
05:44Well, I, I think it's a little more complicated than that, I mean, if you're talking about developers, I think the bigger the company, the more likely it is that they have an NDA that they've signed, or they can't talk about this, otherwise they might lose their job.
05:58Either supporting it or being against it, because they might be seen as a representative of the company and they want to keep things pretty controlled there as part of their contract.
06:07For publishers, yeah, I think they're going, I think they would resist pretty much any suggested change at all, unless it obviously made them lots of money.
06:17That's the thing, I don't think this change that we're proposing has to cost much at all, especially if it's planned for from the, from the start, but it, just even small things, companies have a history, large companies can have a history of resisting.
06:33Yeah, you mentioned the cost, one of the questions, because most of the questions I have for you today are from our community and one of them that keeps repeating on and on is the, is the cost of the games.
06:43As you live in Poland, you've probably heard about the issue of Polish pricing of the games, for example, on Steam.
06:51So some people are afraid that when the Stop Killing Games initiatives come through onto the parliament, the prices of the games are going to be higher and higher.
07:04What do you think about that? I've heard that you talked about it on the FAQ already, but for the people that don't know the answer to that.
07:11Yeah, there's kind of two sides of this one is if we're just talking about the actual costs to a company to do this.
07:18If it's planned for for new games, it can be very low because it becomes more about not lots of additional costs, but more about making the game one way as opposed to another way.
07:31The in between phase could cost a little more because especially if companies, when they make a new game, they just copy like 80% of the code that they use in the last game onto the new one.
07:41And then they might have to change a couple of things so that that could cost a little bit.
07:46I heard one developer estimate it would look like even even even a high high estimate in terms of real world costs that would add like 50 Grosia essentially to the price of the game by having the end of life plan if it's planned for.
08:03However, that said publishers are already trying to increase the cost of games like I think Nintendo like with the switch games the new ones they're talking about like I'm not I'm actually not sure what it costs in Poland right now.
08:18I don't have a switch but the they were talking about $80 US so that would probably be let's say over 300 ZWD.
08:25Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
08:27So that's without us impacting anything, you know, and there's speculation that the new Grand Theft Auto might cost 100 American dollars, which would be let's say that would probably be at least 350 maybe even 400 ZWD or something like that.
08:43Yeah, that's 500 that's that's 480 or something like that. That's the estimation. It's almost 500 ZWD.
08:50So this is already happening without us impacting anything. So what could happen is let's say this goes through and they say oh, well, now we have to comply with this. So now we're raising the price 50 ZWD or 100 ZWD.
09:04It would just be an excuse. It wouldn't. And this would it's kind of like during the pandemic prices on a lot of goods went up because of inflation, but then some companies also increase their prices a whole bunch in the middle of that to kind of disguise what you know, the price increases because they had an excuse.
09:27So there is a possibility it could increase it a little bit, but it would be kind of a dishonest increase in my opinion. If it's a lot more than 50 Grotia, I think you can't really blame it on what we're doing.
09:42Got it. And do you think that this legislation and the changes that will be done here will impact the indie developers in any way or another, like positively or negatively?
09:53That's where it could vary a lot. But especially in like in the short term, especially in the long term, I think it would almost wouldn't matter.
10:01But in the short term, if a company was planning to release their game just after a law went into effect, but they would have years notice, I think on this, then that could be problematic for them.
10:17Also, if they haven't looked into alternatives or how to make an end of life build, that could be an issue too.
10:25However, it's worth stating, I believe most indie game developers will be completely unaffected.
10:30Because if they end support for their game, but the game can still run, they're already compliant and this wouldn't impact anything.
10:38And that's most games in order this primarily affects games that require an online connection in order to run it to the publisher, not even online connection, but one to the publisher.
10:51And that's already a lot more work and responsibility than just making a smaller indie game.
11:00Like if it's a game that can support private servers, then you don't have to connect to them, it's already compliant, you know, or if it's a single player game, and it doesn't require you to connect, it's already compliant.
11:12So there could be some changes. However, one thing to consider is even the fastest case scenario, it's probably still a few years out before it would come into impact.
11:24I think there would be the equivalent of a gold rush for vendors making middleware targeted at indie developers saying, Oh, if you want to sell your games in the EU, well, here's our product that makes it easy to compile an end of life build.
11:39And we're going to try and sell this to you immediately before, so they can get their market share to make this as easy as possible.
11:48So that it's so that any developers don't even have to may not have to think about it that much to just it's just another software component that they're adding in.
11:57Because there will be a new market demand for that in terms of workload, some people have compared it to GDPR requirements.
12:04And that could be fair, because that did require them not to just send out all data and a way to turn it off if you requested it, that sort of thing.
12:13Do you think the solution to this problem is also to just jumping into physical copies instead of digital? Because that's the question that was repeated as well.
12:22And the issue from our side is that I've actually got a response from our lawyers today, because we've just asked them, in what way do we own the games when we buy them?
12:36And the lawyer responded to us saying that we don't own any games, we're just actually getting the license for the game, even if you're buying that on the DVD.
12:49But maybe if we change the law here, that would mean that, for example, if you get the physical copy, that would actually change something.
12:59Do you think that the digital copies are a solution in any way here or it has to be done digitally anyway?
13:06Well, there's a couple of things you brought up there. First, the physical and digital doesn't really matter so much now, because one of the games we sent to the consumer protection agency was called The Crew.
13:18It came on a physical copy, additional to digital. Those physical copies don't work at all now. And there are other games like that, like Destiny 2 or The Division, one of the Need for Speed games.
13:31That they had physical copies, they will not work if you don't have that connection. So whereas something like GOG, they only sell digital copies, but you can download them, back them up, and they're yours for life, essentially.
13:48Now, regarding ownership, that is an important distinction. We're not actually asking for full ownership, because your lawyer is correct that what they said, that you've never really, in terms of the law, you've never really owned the game.
14:04What you owned was like the piece of plastic, or whatever that housed, that contained the data on it. But in real, so under the law, you never owned it. But in real world terms, of course, you've owned plenty of games, because, you know, if you bought a game 20 years ago, and it still works, that looks a lot like owning.
14:24But some things that might not be allowed would be something like reselling a digital copy, because that's something normally associated with ownership. What we're actually asking is, the publisher has to sell you some rights to the game, just to run it in the first place to have access to it.
14:44So we're not even asking for additional rights. But the problem is, many of these license agreements contain terms that, say, they can terminate the game at any time for any reason.
14:56Well, terms like that may already be in conflict with EU law, there's a directive. Yeah, directive 9313 EEC, which protects consumers against unfair terms and consumer contracts.
15:10And the EU Commission says this terms like that are in a lot of these games might be might conflict with that.
15:17Well, if that's the case, then that means there's no real state of time when your game ends, which means they can't just take it away from you.
15:25So in order to make good on the license that they already sold, they would have to give you some way to continue running it after they ended support, which would mean an end of life build.
15:37So we're not actually asking for full ownership or saying is they can't just effectively destroy the game that they sold you.
15:48It gets nuanced, you know?
15:50Yeah, I got it. It's quite complicated. But also, that's why I think it's really important for the politicians to really jump into the topic, get some good expertise in that from the people that know their stuff.
16:02And that's the issue for now, because actually behind the scenes, we're trying to talk to some politicians and I can see that for them games are just, you know, stuff for kids and they don't really understand the legislation behind that behind that.
16:16So we're trying to change that. OK, so the biggest question I have for you today is what are the next steps?
16:22Because we see that the initiative gained some speed, we're trying to reach more and more signatures under that.
16:30But when it goes into the EU and it's going to be discussed there, what do you think are the next steps for this initiative, for the group?
16:42And are you going to be in it or are you trying to stay on the side and just watch the show?
16:47This is a question that might actually be better for someone who's a political insider for what the next steps are, because I can only know so much on it.
16:57The well, yeah, from now until the end of July, on my end, I'm just trying to get more exposure on this so we can get signatures, because even though it's past one million, we don't know how many of those are valid.
17:09So we're trying to have a safety margin on that.
17:13After July, the well, I guess one of the biggest things if people still wanted to help would be to contact a member of parliament like in Poland and say, like, you know, if you can reach them, say,
17:26please support this initiative, it's very pro-consumer rights here.
17:33Even though it's just video games, what's actually happening is an important issue that, you know, you don't want this practice spreading to other goods and services, what's going on in the games industry.
17:44Sorry to stop you there, but just one question, just one question to follow that up.
17:48What do you think are the next consumer goods that can be affected with this legislation?
17:54Because that's really interesting, because on the side of the initiative, for example, they mentioned some kind of consumer goods for medical supplies or something like that, or like agricultural equipment, stuff like that.
18:07Those are examples of products you really wouldn't want this practice spreading to.
18:13The thing is, I'm not even completely sure how much this is spreading to other areas.
18:18Like, I know there was an example of like, for some car manufacturer of like, if you wanted the cars heated, you had to pay a subscription fee for that.
18:28Or, well, one I know with printers, where, you know, the printer may still work, but because it doesn't have a signal from the seller, then the software stops working or something like that.
18:42That's something where it spills more over into like the right to repair movement, which there have been signs of this, but I'm not even sure how many it affects.
18:51But well, actually, I know of one for on Amazon, people would buy, you know, electronic books, and then that would get removed from their collection later, even though they paid for them.
19:04Or I think with Sony, you could buy movies on like the PlayStation Network, watch them, and then they just took them down and you couldn't keep them.
19:13So we're seeing it spread a little bit to other areas, but in games, it's just, you know, everywhere.
19:19Yeah, I guess with Amazon and Netflix, you can buy some movies and then it can be taken down from the platform, even though you bought it.
19:28So that's one example as well.
19:30And the thing is, that's actually okay, if you can back it up, like if you bought the movie and you download it, and then you could just keep it on a USB drive or something.
19:40If they took it down later, well, then that's reasonable because you were able to buy and keep it for yourself.
19:47But if they require you to connect to it, and then you can't run it, and they never told you how long it was going to be up.
19:53This is this is why we have consumer laws practices like this.
19:58But for the what's next, after that, as I understand it, it becomes a lot more about political outreach with making connections with members of parliament, which I am not experienced in at all.
20:12And that's going to be much more the the official organizers job who do have more who are building more political context.
20:20Now, once this goes to the EU Commission, I hope to get invited as an observer, which so I could kind of listen in on how it goes down.
20:28And maybe I could convene with the official organizers, but I wouldn't have an official role.
20:33I'm only a resident. I'm not a citizen. I need to learn much more Polish to become a citizen.
20:39Yeah, you should. I mean, it's really hard, but you know, after some time it gets easier.
20:44Well, I'm aiming for just verbs and nouns. So, you know, I can. So I'm trying to speak like a caveman.
20:50That's the level. So I can just point to things that, you know, if I can reach that level, I'll be happy.
21:01So it's something Polish people love. If you just know any word in Polish, that's that's amazing.
21:07So I want to speak like Tarzan is my goal. So, you know.
21:12All right. So just one more question in that topic.
21:16I imagine that I will have, I will save those questions for Krzysiek Krzysztof, which is the next guest.
21:22Yeah, he's an official organizer.
21:24So we're going to have him on our podcast. So there's going to be many more questions for him.
21:31But do you think, because many people in our comments imagine that when it passes, when it goes to the EU,
21:38there's going to be a lot of lawyers from the side of corporations.
21:42Do you think that the corporations are actually going to go through with the changes, even if the EU law passes,
21:48and they're not going to bypass that in any way as they do sometimes?
21:53Or do you think they're going to just try and implement the changes?
21:58That's a hard question. There's only one or two ways I could even think that they could bypass it,
22:04which I don't want to give them any clues.
22:06But it really depends on the resistance, because like I mentioned, this does not have to be an expensive change.
22:13Like, I think the GDPR compliance is a very good analogy to how much extra work this is for them.
22:22And the thing is, once there are tools in place, like let's say one year or three years after it's been implemented,
22:29it might not be any additional cost at all. It's just that they don't want to deal with any of this if they don't have to.
22:35Because if we were doing if we were trying to end loot boxes or ban microtransactions, that would be billions of euros to the industry.
22:44They would fight that every single way they could.
22:47I think they probably will fight this just because there's kind of a they don't want to have any regulation whatsoever.
22:55So they might not actually be that afraid of this, but they might be afraid if we can get this done.
23:01Well, what's next for their business practices that might not be so friendly to the customer? That sort of thing.
23:08I think that's probably where most of the fear comes from.
23:10We really just need the end of life plan to cost less than any penalties for not complying with it.
23:17So that's because then it becomes what's most profitable.
23:22And if it becomes more profitable to just shut down your game and let people continue playing it, then I think over time that's what companies would start doing.
23:31OK, and just one last question, because we don't have much time for you, I guess, have a lot of important stuff to do.
23:39And one last thing that I wanted to ask you about, even though you haven't worked at Blizzard for seven years, but we all know that there is a misrepresentation from some creators like Pirate Software.
23:52But let's let's jump into the positive side of things.
23:57And could you tell me if you see that there is a one part of the community or some creator that really helped you to get the point across and promote it?
24:06Like, for example, I know that PewDiePie or Moist Critical were really vital on that on that.
24:13So do you have any favorites in that topic?
24:16Oh, geez. No, I think in first influence, the ones you mentioned probably did the most for Moist Critical, just from sheer numbers.
24:23But yeah, there are a lot of smaller ones, but I guess one that stood out is Lewis Rossman, who is very involved in Right to Repair.
24:33So all the things that are not video games, which this kind of and he understood it very early on, despite not being much of a gamer.
24:43He understood the industry side. He understood our side. And I felt like his assessment was very reasonable early on.
24:51OK, OK, got it. Yeah. So there is a great comment from one of our people that commented on under our video.
25:00And I just wanted to read that in the end because it really summarizes the whole situation.
25:06Give an inch and you'll never get it back. That's how big corporations work.
25:10They keep pushing the boundaries bit by bit until one day we wake up and realize we don't actually own anything.
25:17It's important to speak about this because it's not just about games. It's about our fundamental rights as consumers to truly own the things we pay for.
25:25So that's it. And thank you so much, Ross, for being here and for doing the initiative from your side.
25:31I know that you're not really the, let's say, mastermind behind creating it all, but you were really vital in the whole process.
25:38I'm a big ally. Yeah. Yeah, that's that's really true. So thank you for that.
25:42And to the people listening to us, listening to this, to our talk, please keep signing the petition and please reach out.
25:50We'll get others to sign it. You can only sign it once.
25:55So, of course, if you already signed, don't do it again.
25:58You can get friends, family members, that sort of thing.
26:01Exactly. Exactly. And also, if you have any contacts to the politicians, please reach out to them.
26:08Polish politicians that need to hear about this. Do you want to add anything in the end?
26:14I guess not just that. I think we really have a chance on this. And like you said, you know, even if it's not full ownership, you know, for some people get afraid like, oh, what could happen if this goes through?
26:27It's like the way I look at it as a gamer, what is worse than games you care about being destroyed?
26:34It's not going to get worse than the trajectory we're on. So there's not that much to lose, really.
26:40Yeah, that's true. All right. Thank you very much again. And thank you for being here and for doing that. And I guess see you on the Internet.
26:48Yeah. Yeah. All right. Thanks. Thank you. Bye.
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