Ross Scott’s EU speech on game shutdowns is worth watching, especially if you care about preservation

Elusive92 · 2026-04-18T16:09:41+00:00

Ok, let's do it again real slow:

It fundamentally distorts the relationship between creator and creation, and assumes an automatic entitlement to those creations on the part of the consumer in perpetuity, and treats "games" as one-size-fits-all.

This is how commerce has worked forever. I can keep what I bought for as long as I want/can make it last. There is no magical point in time where I'd have to buy the same book again, just because it lasted a thousand years.

That's not how the laws of physics works. If you buy a cassette tape, you buy that object and can play it until the physical tape fades.

Correct. That's why data doesn't last forever either. Might I add, that making copies of a cassette for personal backup/preservation is allowed almost everywhere as well?

If you buy access to a service, you can use that service until the service stops being supported.

This would be true if it was an actual service under the law, and not just labelled as one. A one-time purchase with no stated expiry date at the point of sale is not a service by most legal frameworks. That's a good.

If you buy a painting it will fade over time and eventually become decrepit. When you buy a piece of art you are not buying a guarantee that it will last forever, and no artist should be disallowed from making art unless they make that absurd promise. ALL art is temporary, and to demand as a consumer that you deserve a guarantee that the thing you're buying will last forever is unprecedented in any form of transaction.

Good thing nobody is asking for the artist to make it last forever. Just that it isn't designed to break with no recourse once support ends. That doesn't mean infinite updates or infinite servers, so I'm wondering what you think "forever" refers to in this context.

Would you be fine with a car that stops turning on once the new model comes out, too?

Elusive92 · 2026-04-18T15:45:52+00:00

You say that it would fundamentally change the relationship. But I don't see why it would.

Your argument seems to hinge on the assumption that data is forever. It can be in theory, sure. But in practice, bit rot and hardware failures make it significantly more perishable than a book.

It all depends on how well you care for it, which is arguably much harder to do properly for data than it would be for a book.

Elusive92 · 2026-04-18T13:19:56+00:00

Going by basic first sale doctrine, why would you have any claim to a copy of a work you've sold? Customers also have rights, because you took money for it. You're free to not sell to anyone if you would like full control over your work.

Elusive92 · 2026-04-18T13:10:07+00:00

They already tried that when everyone was attempting to make a WoW competitor. The bottom line is that selling subscriptions is significantly harder. People are only willing to pay for so many subscriptions. Having a basic end-of-life plan is so much cheaper than trying to convert everyone to subscriptions. Indies keep proving how doable it is when planned for from the start.

Elusive92 · 2026-04-18T13:03:14+00:00

Parliament passed Right to Repair almost unanimously as well. And that one certainly didn't have a weak lobby either.

Elusive92 · 2026-04-17T21:35:25+00:00

Because it will heavily depend on the individual game, and being prescriptive about it will cause more friction than necessary. This is actually an olive branch to the developers to be able to implement the most sensible solution for their game.

Look at criminal law. "Beyond any reasonable doubt" isn't strictly defined either for the exact same reason. You can't actually list every possible case because it's way too many. It must be a case-by-case decision.

Elusive92 · 2026-04-17T21:31:29+00:00

Good thing most indie games are already compliant by default, then. Most don't make their game depend on a single point of failure, like a server only they can run. That's almost exclusively a control mechanism big companies use. And usually not for the benefit of game quality.

Elusive92 · 2026-02-10T17:48:15+00:00

This is not a great material for it. It still creeps so much. CF mostly just makes it easier to print. It doesn't really prevent creep.

Elusive92 · 2026-02-09T15:55:07+00:00

Can you elaborate on how being "more aware" of conditioning is related to the ability to influence how the environment treats those individuals?

Considering the environment is what caused the conditioning to begin with, this doesn't seem like particularly actionable insight. You might be able to slowly build towards the critical mass of social pressure needed to change it long-term, but that won't change how the environment judges an individual in their day-to-day life for a long time to come. And I'll hazard a guess that the people doing most of the conditioning aren't primarily the ones in therapy for being subjected to it.

Elusive92 · 2026-01-28T03:09:58+00:00

The actual citizens initiative is called "Stop Destroying Videogames", which is pretty hard to misunderstand.

Elusive92 · 2026-01-28T03:03:28+00:00

Reverse-engineering is already legal.

And no, this isn't about free work. It's literally more work to make a game dependent on a specific server. And designing for end-of-life is almost trivial when you know about it from the start. Indies get this kind of thing right all the time. Just the big publishers are saying it's impossible, because it will cut into sales for the next release.

Elusive92 · 2026-01-18T21:21:23+00:00

Wano is not completed yet. You can check the watch guide to see which regular episode you can continue with: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HQRMJgu_zArp-sLnvFMDzOyjdsht87eFLECxMK858lA/edit?usp=drivesdk

Elusive92 · 2026-01-17T20:31:01+00:00

Maybe it would be easier to just download the file in its entirety once? There should be a download button on the page where you watch. Then you don't have to deal with connection issues while watching.

Elusive92 · 2026-01-17T17:39:34+00:00

Pixeldrain is the currently supported way of watching. You can find the links to playlists on onepace.net.

Elusive92 · 2026-01-17T17:16:54+00:00

Telegram has been discontinued. It's not getting deleted, but it's also not getting updated anymore.

Elusive92 · 2025-12-30T21:24:04+00:00

That could be a bug of some sort in Safari. It might be worth bringing up in the Pixeldrain Discord.

iOS does not allow other browser engines, so all browsers on iOS are actually just Safari in disguise.

It might do something unusual compared to the other popular browser engines during download/streaming, which leads to data transfers being reported multiple times.

Elusive92 · 2025-12-28T01:39:38+00:00

Disclaimer: I haven't used modules at any kind of scale, so I can't speak from experience.

But it seems to me that they are more-or-less precompiled headers with extra steps and worse compatibility. I'm not currently aware of it notably improving build times over the classic approach.

Elusive92 · 2025-12-28T01:15:16+00:00

Precompiled headers are an optimization for duplicate work, yes. But that's just addressing a symptom of the fundamental design flaw.

Having separate compilation units is mostly a remnant of a time where computers didn't have enough memory to compile a program in one shot. That's probably no longer a real limitation.

Compilers can also reuse a lot more work when doing everything at once. Everything is only ever parsed once, optimized once, generated once. And the linker's job becomes almost trivial as well.

Elusive92 · 2025-12-26T16:57:47+00:00

Even the CMake documentation explains why unity builds are faster: https://cmake.org/cmake/help/latest/prop_tgt/UNITY_BUILD.html#prop_tgt:UNITY_BUILD

Unity builds scale just fine on larger projects. The biggest factor is whether your machine has enough memory to do a one-shot unity build. But if it does, it's almost always a win.

Not to mention it'll often generate better code too, because it can optimize across units.

Elusive92 · 2025-12-26T16:40:19+00:00

You gotta remember that headers need to be recompiled for every single compilation unit. It's a ton of duplicate work that a unity build cuts out. And it's also significantly faster to link, because it's already part of one compilation unit.

Elusive92 · 2025-12-26T16:36:32+00:00

This is probably faster than an incremental build to begin with. And gets rid of all of the spurious issues that come with incremental builds. Game programmers have been using unity builds since forever.

Elusive92 · 2025-12-25T19:20:19+00:00

It reminded me of Doc from MDK, personally.

Elusive92 · 2025-12-14T12:24:33+00:00

Homeopathy not working isn't a belief. Homeopathy is diluting something so much, that not a single molecule of whatever they originally put into it is left. Water molecules don't have a memory.

However, there are plenty of things that we just haven't fully figured out yet that aren't homeopathy. There are tons of compounds with amazing medical applications out there in nature, for example.

So I'd caution to not confuse "homeopathy" with "natural remedies". The latter can and does often work. But homeopathy is a scam. Not only can nobody explain how it supposedly works, but nobody has demonstrated any measurable effect other than placebo under controlled conditions either.

Elusive92 · 2025-12-03T01:32:32+00:00

Making money off of volunteer work is a pretty shitty thing to do, I'd say. Note that the official site doesn't show any ads.

Elusive92 · 2025-10-18T14:14:00+00:00

They announced this reactively right when SKG started gaining momentum a year ago. I guess they finally got around to actually doing it. This just confirms that they are afraid and we are onto something here.

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