this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2025
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I was pointing out elsewhere that I hadn't heard of this guy before today, but Chet Faliszek, who you may know from indie hits like... let's see... Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress 2, Half Life 2 and Portal 2, seems to not be on board for very similar reasons.
https://bsky.app/profile/chetsucks.com/post/3lsd7rsd3j22n https://bsky.app/profile/chetsucks.com/post/3lsf4vxbtls2p
I don't fully agree with either of them, but targeting a specific guy just because he happens to be the one that got into a call/response thread with the figurehead of the thing you support is pretty toxic interneting, and I don't like it.
Ross specifically didn't engage with him beyond a comment politely informing him of his mistakes and misunderstandings because he was rude and hostile from the very beginning.
I wouldn't condone harassing him about this. He didn't directly engage with Ross either, so we can both respectfully keep our internet bickering separate.
And you shouldn't. While his resume sounds impressive and I'm sure he knows way more about game dev than I ever could, he too is plain wrong here. He approaches the initiative as "this could never work in the current landscape" while the whole point of the legislation would be to legally obligate changing that landscape, or not sell in the EU. This is how iphones got USB-C, so why couldn't it work here?
Edit: I meant Ross didn't engage with him before this as he obviously threw some hands in the latest video
With all due respect to Chet...
Dude is a writer.
He writes plots, and character dialogue, and storylines.
Not code.
Certainly not server or networking code.
He's waaay out of his element on this.
Also, he is misrepresenting and strawmanning the fuck out of Ross!
Ross did not at any point say that 'All server code needs to be able to run on PS5s'.
Ross did not at any point say that 'the server and client should be the same thing'.
He instead gives a very technical and detailed breakdown of what he is proposing, which either flew right over Chris's head, or Chris is just intentionally strawmanning him, taking a picture that has a PS5 in it and cherry picking and decontextualizing what Ross actually said, such that it might make sense to a twitter brained idiot that believes whatever their favorite person says without even looking at the other side of the argument.
All of the complex legal and usage rights that Chet just implies Ross greatly misunderstands or didn't mention at all, and isn't considering?
Yeah, Ross gave a detailed explanation about how the whole fucking point of this is to redefine the legal and financial landscape and rules around this currently existing paradigm/framework regarding how servers and liscensing work, so that future games are still capable of being produced, still capable of being quite profitable...
...but in a way that game studios/publishers that want to make a fully online only game have to make just a teensy weensy bit less profit off of their MTX money printing machines, and spend a bit of it on making it possible to EoL release some server code that other people could theoretically run, if they wanted to foot the server hosting costs on their own.
...
Here's the goddamned timestamp Chet didn't even link to:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=HIfRLujXtUo&t=2231
Watch this and tell me if Ross even approaches the same universe as saying 'PS5s need to be able to run servers' or 'the client and server should be the same thing'.
He throws out 'maybe we should make a regulation that says an EOL online game needs to be mandated to be runnable on consumer hardware'.
And then temporarily includes a PC and a PS5 in his diagram.
And then immediately says, 'but hey, if thats not doable because of hardware limitations, then maybe another option could be to still mandate release of server code, but with specific hardware requirements.'
As in, you know, a PC or Server Rack or rented VPS server with X amount of total processing power, memory and storage, minimum specs.
Which is what every dedicated server or more complex system for any game on the goddamned planet is currently and/or has ever run on.
...
Also, you literally can run a server on a PlayStation!!!
https://hackaday.com/2022/02/10/turning-the-ps4-into-a-useful-linux-machine/
Tada! Linux Distro for a PS4, supports NGINX, and with modern Proton and WINE, you could run a whole lot of dedicated servers that only even have Windows binaries for at least older games on one.
I'm sure we all remember the clusters of PS3s being used to create a sort of poor man's supercomputer.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster
In case this is news to anyone... those PS3s... they're networked, together, to be able to distribute compute loads intelligently and efficiently.
You know, like servers.
...
For the love of god, people need to stop having 'technical' opinions on this issue if you're not even going to bother to actually listen to both sides of the argument, especially if you don't actually know anything about the tech that's involved.
Watch the entire video.
This is a very complex and detailed topic, and if you are only getting your info on it from fucking tweets and youtube shorts, you are misinformed by definition.
Some things are actually so complicated that they cannot be easily explained or understood in under 1000 words.
Its very, very clear to me that every single prominent 'reputable' critic of Ross has absolutely no experience with actually running and maintaining server clusters, nor developing and implementing any actual code that makes any of that shit work... and then they expand out of their domain of expertise and give 'expert commentary', like a fucking new nurse with an associates degree deciding they actually know how to perform a brain surgery.
Nothing Ross is proposing is fundamentally impossible, it is in fact quite reasonable, and he freely admits when he is venturing beyond his own expertise, unlike everyone else criticizing him.
I repeat, there is nothing technically impossible or unduly financially onerous to game publishers to what Ross is proposing.
The proposed reforms are a very complex legal issue, and Ross is totally open to varying degrees of specific, exact details of what game publishers would have options to do.
Its not going to be some retroactive thing that applies to every game that has ever existed, it would be new guidelines going forward that make the playing field just a bit more tipped in the direction of not totally fucking end users, by forcing new server architectures to adhere to be a bit more modular in design... which again, is completely doable and possible, there are already all kinds of different server stack configurations for all kinds of other large scale networks.
...
Nobody is demanding 'release all your proprietary source code!'
Nobody is demanding 'keep paying liscensing fees for some server component of a game you don't support anymore, forever!'
They're saying:
Build new games in such a way that, when they EoL sunset, you can withdraw those modules and release a closed source, proprietary server hosting solution, such that if a group of enthusiast players wanted to host their own standup, funding it out of their own pockets, not legally allowed any rights to the IP, not allowed to substantially modify that released server code, not to expect any ongoing support whatsoever... to just be able to run the damn server.
...
I can, right now if I wanted to, find the server exe for Battlefield 1942, and standup and host a server for it, and people would be able to use it.
https://community.pcgamingwiki.com/files/file/1000-battlefield-1942-windows-standalone-server-1619/
There it is, right there.
This used to be the norm.
I could make my own mod for BF42 that is capable of overriding a specific player's specific kit, to give them a different primary weapon, and I could hook that into my server, and also a mysql or postgres database that keeps track of which players actually have access to the fancy gun, going by the same system a server admin has to ban or unban players.
heck, i think i could also password protect the server, and basically use an id system of all players having their own unique password to id them, intercept the inputted password when it hits the server, have a script that checks that against the list of player passwords, send the actual game server password back to the server to let the player in, and then also now my game mod and sql db know what this player has for weapon upgrades.
While it would be more complex to achieve this with a more modern game... nothing makes this fundamentally impossible with a more complex modern game, other than lazy, in reality, almost certainly contracted out, server architecture.
Studios used to actually... you know, be largely defined by their engine, their netcode, their inhouse shit. Now everything is contracted middlemen, and people can no longer conceive of doing it any other way.
...
You just have to offer companies, companies that are all absurdly wealthy, some kind of incentive trade off structure:
or, 2) If you don't put what would be a tiny, tiny financial amount of effort into doing this, well, now you have to refund some defined set of MTX purchases to players that have now just poofed out of fucking existence.
You can get more complicated with all the various technicalities of this, but something approximating that would work.
...
And yes, this means Free to Play games that are entirely funded by MTX stop being a viable business model if they can't figure out a way to release a usable server model alongside either a sanitized and properly encrypted/obsfuscated and PII/financial data stipped out version of their entire player database so that people can actually keep their digital items...
Or, just develop a kind of giant passkey, UID-like constructor/deconstructor system that encapsulates every possibly variable item or level or ability or attribute they have, and is then encrypted and decrypted by client and server, and provide these keys to every player ... like a CD Key, or ... any moderately complex website with a bunch of possibly varying input request parameters for filling out some kind of multi field form input.
But more to the point, if this is somehow too harmful to the F2P business model?
(which it shouldn't be unless your dev team has no actually competent coders
GOOD.
They are a fucking evil scourge that massively exploit and cause psychological harm to almost entirely children, and they are basically always trash tier games anyway with disgustingly toxic plauerbases.
Switch over to an MMO style recurring subscription model of whatever $$$s a month, have an upfront cost if you want to, and maybe start making more of your in-game new content actually reasonably obtainable by actually playing the game.
...
Thank you for attending my TED~~Talk~~Rant.
Considering any Valve game that came out after Half-Life 1 as an "indie game" is just... Wrong. Also mentioning a writer who talks out of his ass about programming stuff is just... Stupid.
He hasn't been with Valve for a while. His last game was The Anacrusis, an indie game from a studio he founded. It launched, it bombed and it got converted to a community edition. I guess you not knowing it exists explains why that happened.
He is perhaps the most specific example of what this petition would require in the industry I can think of. Along with KO City, which also converted their game from third party published paid to free to play and then to a community server edition.
So no, you're wrong on that one.
Maybe you should have listed those, instead of saying that the Valve games he worked on were "indie hits." (Even though it would still be wrong since the other games you now bring up weren't hits.)
Chet is also still a writer and not a programmer. Taking his opinion on software development as gospel is still silly.
I was being sarcastic, those aren't indie hits, they are genre-making, classic games that define multiple generations of gaming. The guy is a massive part of gaming history.
Also not just a writer. You can go find elsewhere in the thread where I link to him breaking down a number of technical issues in the process of migrating Anacrusis from dedicated central servers to the peer-to-peer community edition. I'm not surprised. Not only did he start the studio, but he's a Valve vet, their whole thing is horizontal working.
I'm also not surprised because most designers, producers or creative directors working in an online game like TF2, Portal 2 or Left 4 Dead would be pretty savvy about networking issues, the same way most screenwriters can understand how a movie is shot.
The sarcasm was clear, btw, to me at least. You meant indie as in small. "Small games like, oh, I don't know, Team Fortress 2!"
Nevermind the fact that they have everything to gain from people buying their games as much as possible of course they’re gonna be against skg. If they kill their games they can sell more
Who is "they"?
Of the two guys in question one seems to be a tiny indie dev making single player games. The other is a hugely established figure working on a multiplayer game, but I'm going to say Faliszek's career isn't particularly contingent on this argument, considering that he's a narrative director, first and foremost.
See, this is kind of the problem we're having. You guys are just... saying stuff.
I don't agree with the ultimate takeaway of either of these guys on this issue, fundamentally, but if you're going to stand here and say that they are arguing against this because they are making money out of some server-disconnection racket then you're going to make me stand here and call bullshit because it just doesn't follow.
And so the drama spiral goes deeper and the internet becomes a little crappier.
Not worth a well thought out reply. Fuck corpos killing games if I pay for something it’s mine don’t come to me and take it away. Period. Skg is for consumers. Anyone against it is against me and my wallet
Which corpos? These guys are both indies at the moment.
You keep wanting this to be a "us versus them" of big companies vs users and that's not the conversation that's happening here.
But hey, by all means I would love to have Faliszek act as a Valve corporate representative and have the irrational side-taking on the Internet argue itself into a singularity.
That is the conversation that was misconstrued by pirate software. Skg is consumer vs corporation. It’s for consumer right so companies don’t sell you a thing and then rip if from your hands without warning
No, that's what you want it to be.
The reason this is a perfect shitstorm of online grief is that you're here really wishing this is some Star Wars scenario where your side is the Rebel Alliance and on the other side there's a bunch of developers going "That's not how the Force works!".
You can't boil down a complex technical and legal issue to "it's consumer vs corporation" and hope that magically makes servers portable or implementation feasible. And you can't lump people who know what they're talking about and aren't part of a particularly large corporation with your good guys vs bad guys fantasy just because they disagree with you on the issues.
Ok bro
I don’t buy always buy software. But when I do I also make sure I have an offline back up. I would download a car.
Thor is a guy who got fired from Blizzard, got mad, made an indie game studio, has been saying he's been developing this game for uh... 7 years now, while in actuality he's been livestreaming for 10 hours a day for that time, basically not developing shit.
Chet is a writer, with literally no coding experience, who is now taking his first steps into trying to make an indie game, that is multiplayer.
Neither of these people have ever seen or used or coded any of their own network code for running any kind of server architecture, ever.
That does not seem to be accurate in Faliszek's case. He did not "take his first steps into trying to make an indie game", he led the studio that did make it, led development on the game and then proceeded to go through the exact process we're discussing to make it community-runnable.
He has DEFINITELY seen the code needed to run the server architecture, if the 30 minute video breaking down the process of decoupling the game from central servers he posted today is any indication (which I did watch, including the parts that are about organic farming, because Chet actually IS interesting enough for me to spend my day checking out his manifesto).
Ah, ok, Chet was in a meeting with some actual networking coders who explained a single, particular, server architecture to him...
Where I can guarantee they were all at least mildly annoyed that he's decided to change the scope of the game, so now they have to change the architecture, instead of just... designing it from the ground up to be able to add that at some point, as opposed to ... having to reengineer the whole thing.
So, yep ok you got me, he has seen... actually no, he hasn't seen the code, because the people who actually can code, whom he just got out of this meeting with, know he couldn't read it or understand it.
So they gave him a white board or powerpoint presentation on the relevant concepts and how they relate to each other at a very high level.
How do I know this?
Because I have been in that group of actually tech-competent people, giving the new or totally inexperienced project manager, the same presentation, many, many times.
That and, there's no code in this video, at all.
Its pretty normal for people who actually understand code to... do code reviews with their team, go over it with a fine toothed comb, works well as a screenshare on Zoom or something like that...
...
You first say 'seems' and then say 'DEFINITELY'.
You again struggle with being precise, accurate and consistent.
Not good traits for someone who claims to understand highly complex technical problems.
...
What Chet is doing is the classic...
...style thing that insecure project leads do quite often, you used to be able to see just metric fucktons of this kind of shit on linkedin, all the damned time, before it fully became a parody of itself.
He's panicking man, haha!
These are all brand new concepts to him, and he only bothered to, or was forced to learn them, after he screwed stuff up so bad that now his employees need to explain to him how badly he screwed up, and how complicated it will be to fix it.
If Chet was a competent project lead, and leader of a business, this video would not include '(my) company fail(ed)'' in the title, nor would he have ordered ... worse than a slew of new features, but a slew of new features that can only work if the backbone, the foundation of the game is basically redesigned, as will various bits and bobs that only currently work with the exact prior configuration that now has to change.
If Chet was a competent project lead, he would have outlined a development process that had contingency plan pivots built into it from the start, accounting for possible future changes to business conditions that should be expected over the course of dvelopment.
Not suddenly jump tracks after something he didn't initially plan for as a possibility, neccessitating a sudden crash course in why and how its actually really difficult to rebuild the foundation and support beams of a building after all the floors and walls and electrical and plumbing have been put in.
I've had good project leads, amazing project leads, and terrible ones.
Chet is acting like a terrible one.
...
Like I said, dude is out of his element, and is lashing out at others (Ross), doing projection, because he is insecure and too cowardly to admit it.
Also just... any project lead with a 'manifesto' ... this is a gigantic fucking red flag that this person is insecure and overcompensating, initially inflexible and stubborn, and then after he refuses to listen people he ostensibly hired because he values their subject matter expertise ... well, then, his 'vision' cracks at the seams everyone was telling him would likely occur, and then he panics.
Seen it happen first hand more times than I wish I did.
...
Oh right, uh yeah, when you are being a project lead, and business director, for the first time... yeah that absolutely is 'taking your first steps into trying to make an indie game.'
Has he... ever done those things before?
No...?
First steps.
He seems to have used those first steps to jump headlong into the deep end, not realizing the pool hasn't been properly cleaned in two years, but yeah, he did take those first steps into this pool, for the first time.
If I am a coder with a lot of experience in, I dunno, sql database structuring and queries... and then boss asks me to also learn the weird, proprietary version of javascript that the weird, 3rd party tool we use uses to make a complex, 200 field input page with interdepedent logic, and hook that all into the sql database?
Well, I say I have prior experience with javascript in general, but not this unique implementation of it that tears out half the standard core functions and replacss them with custom ones... so i am 'taking my first steps' into this particular dialect or variant of javascript, might take me a bit to familiarize myself with the differences and get my bearings.
Software development is not just 'a speciality'.
It is actually hundreds or thousands of different specialities, which are lumped into a broad category, and non-tech lay people basically always think its 100 times less complicated than it actually is.
Yeeeah, you haven't worked in gaming at all, have you?
I mean, I believe that you've been paid to code at some point and I'm hoping you're not just being a dick on the Internet for sport, but man, all these I'm-such-a-competent-software-engineer rants are not giving you the authority brownie points you think they are.
Whatever, if you know you know. I'm not interested. Just... in the off-chance anybody here reads this far down this thread, couple of things: one, stop it, what are you doing. Two, this is not what a person that knows what they're talking about sounds like. He'll try to tell you it is, but it is really not.
I have worked in gaming, and I've already told you that, but you already said you don't read things that I write, so yeah.
And, yes, I am at this point being a dick, to you, on the internet, for sport, because you are so entirely disingenuous and full of shit that it is quite amusing to me.
I don't actually give a shit whether or not you in particular agree with me or like me or believe me... because its been clear from the get go that you are both woefully uninformed but also totally stubborn, obstinant and set in your opinion, and you aren't capable of discussing the technicals you claim to understand.
The other actual experienced software / server engineer in this thread also tried to reason with you, more politely, and you just took a rhetorical approach of overwhelming them with questions... so I am now overwhelming you with relevant info, and you don't like it.
You're now just mirroring some of my latest rhetorical approach back at me, albeit in very, very condensed form... you're not even clever at debating.
You are a power user that thinks themself to be a seasoned senior software engineer, but you're not.
But hey, since you asked me to stop, I will stop humiliating you now.
Toodles!
Dude I have never been or wanted to be a "seasoned senior software engineer". I mean, respect to them, can't get things going without them, but I don't think of that as an aspirational badge of honor thing.
Also, I'm shocked to find I've been mirroring your "rethorical approach". You really do overestimate how much of your posts I've been reading, because I could not tell you what that is. Is the "approach" to wonder if your callousness comes from not having first hand experience? Because let me tell you, I got there all on my own.
Anyway, it's good that we both find each other's opinion entirely irrelevant, because I sure have better things to do and not enough self-control to do them instead of this. Toodles indeed.