Yeah the main difference seems to be that he open sourced the games after he got very wealthy from them not before. So of course at that point you can easily feel magnanimous about bestowing gifts.
Open sourcing something from the start and essentially giving up any ability to profit from the use of your work when companies are often making huge profits from it seems less easy in comparison.
The JetBrains local autocomplete is hilarious but occasionally useful. I find it really hit and miss in terms of when it will decide to autocomplete and whether it will exhastively complete all elements, miss some out or get itself into a loop over several.
The out-of-the-box stuff is supposed to be kind of stupid. Are you guys really not editing your own snippets and shortcuts? Have people really been typing out "def do_something(foo, bar, baz)\n\t" manually?
The reason I picked the last year is to see what the current landscape is. If this is a common practice in need of regulation then I'd expect a large number of current titles present the issue. If it's a 'few' then how many exactly does that imply? If we're talking less than ten then that would be less than 0.05% of games released last year (let alone the number releaded over the last ten).
Someone linked this page which has 440 dead games over the past few decades which is 2.2% of the output of 2025 but obviously includes many more years, mobile, console releases and so on: https://stopkillinggames.wiki.gg/wiki/Dead_game_list
There are several fundamental issues with your approach.
First: unless the average lifetime of a "dead game" is below two months, your focus on games from last year will exclude most dead games. To give an analogy - you're trying to determine how many humans die before twenty years old, and determining this data by looking at babies born in 2025.
Second: the list is unlikely to be complete, especially since many supporters of SKG most likely haven't heard of it. I have seen many people advertising SKG towards their friends or audience, and I've never heard any of them mention this list.
Sure but this is back of the envelope and surely a question any legislators will be interested in. If you have better data I’m all for seeing it.
For the record I’m not using the number of dead games from the last year just the number of released games in the last year as a point of comparison. If I used a wider period and considered more platforms than Steam that would include more games and make the percentage significantly smaller. So the bias is actually in favour of SKG with this ballpark.
> There are no self-destruct mechanisms put into games.
That’s not accurate. I used to play the Android version of EA Tetris [1]. I liked the game so much that I paid to remove ads from it. One day, I opened the game, and the game told me that I wasn’t allowed to play it unless I installed an update for it. I installed the update, and launched the game again. The game then told me that I would not be allowed to play it after a specific date. After that date passed, I tried opening the game again, and it refused to let me play the game.
For more examples of games that contain self-destruct mechanisms, see the Stop Killing Games wiki [2].
Mobile presents even larger problems as games and apps get orphaned by quickly moving APIs which don't have backwards compatability. It's not clear to me what the Stop Killing Games answer to that problem would be.
A form of copy-protection basically. I get the desire for the emotive framing though but I think the EOL implications were simply not considered. I also agree with the idea that at EOL that copy-protection should be removed. There are however a vanishingly small number of games that are built this way so I'm not sure regulation is the best way of approaching it.
But this is an additional and much less effective layer of copy protection compared to the actual copy protection. The game wouldn't be meaningfully easier to pirate without it.
IMO this means it isn't a form of copy protection.
License verification via a server is a pretty common and normal method of copy protection. For example the JetBrains IDE I'm using at work right now does this.
If it didn't work then players would have no issue with the server being taken offline! But that isn't the case so clearly it impacts people.
If you're doing license verification in a way that stops me from playing my legitimately purchased copy & you don't give me a way to continue playing my legitimately purchased copy, it's literally a self-destruct mechanism.
But the discussion wasn't just about license verification - there have been instances of account requirements that weren't tied to license verification, just to social features, yet the game still didn't work without logging in.
Thank god there are no recent, decades long, examples of the might of the US military having issues with small populations of underequipped people willing to defend their homes from them as an aggressor.
But sometimes not good ones. Lot's of domains make tradeoffs about what features of C++ to actually make use of. It's an old language with a lot of cruft being used across a wide set of problems that don't necessarily share engineering trade offs.
Open sourcing something from the start and essentially giving up any ability to profit from the use of your work when companies are often making huge profits from it seems less easy in comparison.
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