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My hot take: Thor/PirateSoftware is right about some aspects of Stop Killing Games and the damages it could cause to the games industry. He's wrong about a lot of it because he clearly has still never properly researched SKG and loves to speak before he thinks, but I do tend to agree with his concerns about the business side of things and how studios will be affected.
For example?
Patching a live service game so that it can run "offline" isn't a small task, the cost of which will inevitably be pushed onto the players. I feel like SKG sorta trivializes the amount of work that is needed to make this happen when they reference homebrew server emulators for previously-shutdown MMOs, as those custom servers take a LOT of effort from the communities that maintain them.
Publishers of live service games will likely increase the costs of subscription fees/microtransactions in order to fund the necessary conversions once a game reaches end-of-life. This creates a new problem for developers/publishers which, to the best of my knowledge, SKG doesn't suggest a solution to. I don't see a scenario in which raising development costs (especially at a time when video games are already more expensive) is beneficial to the industry as a whole.
I don't think this is a reason to be against SKG as a whole, though. Especially not to the "eat my entire ass" level. But it is a nitpick that I have with it.
Why does the game need to be patched to run offline? Why not just release the server code/binary?
Because the game will still attempt to connect to the real servers, unless otherwise modified.
I feel like that is the absolute bare minimum change that you could do to a game to let it continue to function. Think of all the code changes, bug fixes, optimisations and such that get done in even one patch release. However, the organiser of SKG has released a video debunking all of Thor's claims, including the idea that it would require live service games to be redeveloped into offline ones. He also doesn't think it should retroactively apply to existing games. So it would be much easier for a new game to be coded from the start to be able to be disconnected. Here's the relevant section of his video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=HIfRLujXtUo&t=2228s
I think... a URL shouldn't be that hard to program for. At the laziest, you just let it check for an .ini or something.
I mean, a proper server browser would be nice, but I'd much rather the game just not be shelved permanently.