Matthew "Queso" Niederberger

I know there's not too many of us in the competitive multiplayer indie games field but, as described it would put a ton of us out of business. When you dig into what's actually being proposed it would actually simply immediately kill development on the vast majority of independent games reliant on server/client architecture. It would also, pretty explicitly, drive most larger developers off doing live service games. You might not like live service games. That's extremely different than saying developers should be banned from making live service games without extreme architectural and legal constraints that incentivize their death in multiple ways.

And like, I would love better games preservation. I advocate heavily in my studio for making our games playable when we inevitably go offline or out of business. We've put over a decade of work into our networking systems to make it possible for us to do. But most devs don't have that capital and luxury. Games preservation is not more important than allowing people to create the art they want to. People have the right to create art that will self destruct. You can address the consumer rights issues with huge developers rapidly vanishing games and licenses without binding all devs to a poorly thought out scheme that misunderstands games as a product, service, and art-form.

And I don't think it would really even preserve many of the games that still managed to launch. It would incentivize tearing out and removing chunks of the game forever, because they can't be made sanely survivable past product end of life. You'd be saving corpses of games, made to meet the bare minimum standard of "playable". (And lord would I love to see EU regulators try and define what playable means in the context of games that are updated weekly with a mix of feature adds and removals.)

The creator of the petition stands behind the defense of "it's not law yet". But his intent is very clear, and that intent, if seen through, harms us all. Worse yet, he wants it pushed through quickly and easily. It's very explicit in his videos. This is not a sane regulatory scheme. This is not a narrowly targeted petition to hold bad actors accountable. It is, quite frankly, entitlement made manifest and used as a cudgel against all game developers as if we are a single entity out to harm consumers. It's a danger to video games as an artistic medium and indie developer's livelihoods.

I find it really fascinating how sports seem just at the boundary of game design. The invention of sports is often so much slower than "designed" games, like video games and tabletop games. Now tabletop games were like this for a long time too. The rules of chess, and casino card games, moved and changed slowly. I wonder if there will be a similar move for more "designer" sports in the future. But sports certainly seem the most resistant. High player count, physically embodied gameplay, needs for non player referees outside the most casual levels of play, and high costs for equipment all certainly slow things down. It seems anything becoming a sport has to come from something else. Activities like mountain biking and skateboarding were activities adapted from intrinsic fun on new hardware innovations. I played Quadball in college, a sport adapted from the fictional sport of quidditch, with the core idea of the game ready formed outside the realm of game design. I wrote for the rulebook for a few seasons as well and applied game design to aspects of the rules that were becoming problems in actual play. But do other sports hire game designers? Do the people that change the rules in the NFL or MLB consider themselves game designers? Is there really a gap here I don't see that separates sports from games? Or is the field of sports design simply underdeveloped? Is SASUKE/Ninja Warrior a sport, and do it's course builders consider themselves game designers?

Easily my biggest pet peeve in video games is people using the word "pixel" to describe small distances in (near) continuous 3D space.

It's actually a ton of fun to start at a baseline and put your own twist on it. There's nothing wrong with that! Just like there's nothing wrong with starting from near scratch! But for me, I love taking an underdeveloped idea in a work or in a genre and bringing it into focus without having to reinvent the wheel. I find it really satisfying. Where I often find building up an entire world of ideas into a single piece of work really exhausting, because that leaves me so little room to chase down the ideas that really catch my interest.