memes @lemmy.world

1mo ago

Some people just defend the status quo.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/34790413

Stop Killing Games @lemm.ee

3 0

98 comments

Their fault. I remember a time when publishers allowed for people to run their own dedicated servers, for FPS at least. They could have modified that existing model, but instead they took that ability away from the user whilst almost simultaneously making excuses about the problem they created.
If their servers can't run forever, give us dedicated servers on a larger scale FFS!
- I really believe it has nothing at all to do with running the servers or their maintenance costs.
  It's about control. It's a rare sight to see any kind of multiplayer experience that isn't all about selling shit through MTX. If you could run your own server, you might be able to also give yourself the shit they want to nickel and dime you for without paying, and that would really ruin their model.
  
  Yeah, but the point is if they've already shut off their servers and moved on to the next thing, who cares? Just let the dedicated fans and other nuts run their own servers and they can wash their hands of it entirely. They weren't going to make any money on it after pulling the plug anyway.

It's such a garbage argument when you can just counter with "okay then, release software which allows the public to run them for themselves".
There are plenty of famous games, including Minecraft (only the most famous game in history) that manage to do that just fine. Acting like it's impossible just so that you can force people to buy the next game is bullshit.
- "okay then, release software which allows the public to run them for themselves".
  Or shit at the very least release documentation on how it works and let the open source community take care of it lol
  
  Both? Both. Both is good.
- It's such a garbage argument when you can just counter with "okay then, release software which allows the public to run them for themselves".
  Which you can help by signing European Citizens' Initiative. If you are EU citizen that is.

Here is a completely noncontributory comment.

I stumbled across a copy of a physical book from the author of the comic this is from. I wondered to myself if this meme is in it.

It is.
- THE PROPHECY HAS BEEN FULFILLED!
  THE CHOSEN ONE IS AMONG US

They cant run servers forever. Which is why they should release the server code when they decide to shut down.
- Yeah that would be awesome but it’s easier said than done (to no surprise, I’m sure).
  One of the big issues I see from a developer standpoint is the potential for leaking proprietary code that they may not want to publicize like things related to authorization, server side anti cheat implementations, etc.
  Why would they care? The product is done right? Well every project is not written from scratch and so to publish this stuff it could incur risk to the org’s other current/future projects in addition to helping outside sources get a leg up on said other current/future projects.
  This could be dealt with potentially as well but that means extra dev resources and time and potentially inter-org collaboration to develop common OS standards but again that’s work that does not generate $$$
  I’m not defending these assholes mind you, I just understand the blockers in the way. The greedy fucks could indeed do this but they never will because of said $$$
  
  common OS standards
  By OS, did you perhaps mean open or open-source?
  Because it seems most people understood it as operating system.
  
  One of the big issues I see from a developer standpoint is the potential for leaking proprietary code
  It is no longer proprietary then.
  that they may not want to publicize like things related to authorization,
  If it has any impact, then it means they were insecure all along. Or in other words, they had CWE-656 vulnreability.
  server side anti cheat implementations, etc.
  There are lots of effective opensource anticheats. Server-side, obviously. See minecraft anticheats.
  and potentially inter-org collaboration to develop common OS standards
  So, POSIX?
  it could incur risk to the org’s other current/future projects in addition to helping outside sources get a leg up on said other current/future projects.
  It's called anti-social behaviour. "Why help someone else?"

"They can't run servers forever!" Open source the server then Let people who want to play it run it themselves then
EDIT: typo
- I remember being able to run a private World of Warcraft server on my computer back in like, 2009. Surely if WoW can be reverse-engineered, so can many other titles.
  But yes, it would obviously be better if they’d just open-source it.
  
  Surely if WoW can be reverse-engineered, so can many other titles.
  This is solving wrong problem. Or rather, this problem should not exist at all.

they can't keep running servers forever
That's exactly why we need it to pass.
Which EU citizens can help with by signing it. We are 40% there, we need your signature.

I think Microsoft should be pressured under this with their deprecation of Windows Mixed Reality. They're totally fine with just bricking tons of highly sophisticated, expensive devices people already bought.
And then they have the gall to talk about "sustainability."
Not gonna support it anymore? Give it to the community. Patch out the requirement for your top-secret black-boxed corporate garbage.
- That all costs money though .......
  Money they earned when they said it will be around in the future, so fuck-em.
  
  100%. They shouldn't be able to leave a device completely inoperable like that.
  I'm not alone when I say I just want my perfectly good VR equipment to continue working, dammit lol. Monado is crazy impressive, but if M$ just released some driver specs or something we'd happily have these things working on Linux within like a month. Then we could just go our separate ways lol.

"Stop Killing Games" is literally a way to force companies to let you host your own servers. That's the intention. The company loses nothing, they can wash their hands and move on.
In fact, they can even continue to sell games without servers.

If they're not gonna run servers, then they should distribute and open source the server software so players can run their own servers.
- Whenever google cancels a cool project a small part of me wishes they would open source it.
  
  Only a small part?

I feel like wayyy too many engineer minds lean back on “too vague” without understanding how many judgment calls judges make in cases every day. It’s not uncommon for them to have to decide what someone’s intent or knowledge was when taking a certain action.
- Software engineer here. I find the petition to be very specific, and totally feasible.
  Anyway, this isn't a true referendum where its text would become immediate law as soon as it passes. It's a petition that would be presented to legislators who would write the actual law. The petition doesn't need to be written in legalese.
  (Also: if the customer paid them even one cent, then they DO owe the customer something. Also: They should be forced to release the server software when they shut down the servers.)
  
  It's a petition that would be presented to legislators who would write the actual law.
  Oh-ho-ho! It's about to get better: they can instead say, that existing laws cover this. Which will have even greater impact.
- That’s someone who shouldn’t be a judge, that’s what a jury or maybe even mediators would be for. A judge is black and white, and shouldn’t judge on anything they aren’t 100% educated on.
  
  You're absolutely wrong.

To all the people saying they should release server source code: You don't even need to do that (as nice as it would be). At the very basic level all that is needed is:
remove DRM (which probably cost more effort to add in the first place)
a description of the API for any online components (which any decent dev team will already have internally documented)
- Depending on the game, a lot of mechanics live on the server side. Not sure which game this is about though.
  But think of any competitive game like League. All the processing and tracking is on the server. Change that and you change the game.
- remove DRM (which probably cost more effort to add in the first place)
  Denuvo charges monthly. And, looking at history of games, takes no effort by developers. Heck, they even can take their own pirated game with DRM removed. And even if removing DRM costs money, they have nobodu, but themselves to blame.

Meanwhile ragnarok online a 2002 mmorpg is alive and kicking with hundreds of private servers..
- This is so weird after I was just thinking "I wonder if there's a way to play RO the way it was circa 2007 or so when I remember it..."

If your game relies on your servers, I won't buy your game.

If two guys and a basement can run the guild wars 1 servers for next to nothing (their words) than yes, company's very much could run their servers forever.

Switch this meme with "people want video games they own" and it's this thread. There are still plenty of games you can self host: Palworld, Minecraft, Satisfactory, Factorio, Terraria, Space Engineers, Counter Strike 2, The Forest, ARMA III, 7 Days to Die, Rust, Valheim. The average person obviously doesn't care about self hosting their own game server.
- They can connect to a server of those who do care about self hosting their own game server.

Maybe its my lack of trust in the government from being in the US, but you guys seem to have a ton of faith that your legislators will take this and not make it a shit show and worse than the status quo.
- its my lack of trust in the government from being in the US,
  yes.
- *it's
  
  I always get this one wrong.

Getting back to the old status quo

It would be great if servers were just running in the background with an update

Or just release an offline patch so the game can be still playable?
- While this could technically work to keep games playable, for a lot of games where the point was to play it online (not games that were forced to be online for arbitrary reasons like Sim City) then it doesn't make much sense to do. If I had an offline version of Overwatch 1 then yeah I could still look at the characters, skins, and do practice, but that's not really the point of the game. Games like OW1 are part of the reason people are calling for being able to set up their own community servers so the game could still be playable by dedicated fans without requiring the developers to support it forever.

If you want to make this a law, how would anyone handle this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3jMKeg9S-s&t=73
This argument holds true for developers of all sizes and is somehow totally ignored by most here.
- If a game has reached EoL then they're just being straight greedy worrying about someone else making a little money off it. Running a public server costs money too.
  And again, nobody said they have to release a ready to go and fully functioning standalone binaries. Just the documentation on how it works as a bare minimum would go EXTREMELY far for the open source community and then the whole "ThEY DiDnt MaKE anY ConTrIBuTIOns" goes up in smoke
  
  Stop killing games said that games need to be kept in a functioning state afaik. That means exactly that. I am very for modding games but modding a game does not entitle me to the original creators intellectual property, but merely the part j have added.
  Also what documentation? :)
- Because it would almost certainly not happen in reality. The server being released means everyone could spin up one for free. You wouldn't be able to monetize it to any significant degree.
  If you want to be generous toward Thor, he is a security expert trained to focus on any hypothetical risks, however unlikely. If you don't, he is a game developer with monetary interest in this not passing and vast experience conning people.
  
  It may be true that it may not actually happen. However:
  I have elaborated on monetization in another long comment.
  it cannot be wrong to have monetary interest in your product.
  A law (which is the goal afaik) needs to account for unlikely scenarios, thats why its usually so hard to make new ones
  I am not against leaving games playable, but the fact that people like the game means that the devs did a good job and their fate needs to be accounted for. Devs who make good games are not an enemy
  
  idk https://pretendo.network/ seems to be doing pretty good. It would be nice to just host my own small server after the game is done for just me and some of my friends.
- One thing that would go against monetization of servers after hostility to get the original to go down would be that anyone could spin up a free one in competition. Once the server binaries are available to everyone, anyone can run a server. Why would someone pay for something they can get for free?
  
  This still doesn't cover for the abuse of studios which is the main concern here, after all making games harder to kill off shouldn't come with making the production or maintenance more risky or significantly mor expensive. A malicious party trying to kill a game because they dont like it or part of the community is still a valid motive.
  Regarding your Question, minecraft servers are a good example of this: there are many servers out there which monetise in game resources or grind shorteners for real world money. I dont think that it is a stretch to say that a non sandbox game could be adjusted to work in such fashion. Also the point is not that there are other options, but that someone may easily make money with stuff the dont own and have never contributed to in its making.
  At the end of the day all of us still want new games to be made. Therefore we need to accept that the people making them need to be able to have a steady income doing their job. Monetising ones own creation is, and should be, well within your rights. Even if some of us dont like it providing a platform in form of a game, as a service / with ever fresh content can be a valid value proposition and there are many studios out there doing this successfully while being well respected, think of Deep rock galactic or path of exile.
- I prepared for this argument very long time ago.
  He omits a number of unrealistic assumptions:
  Bots buying game somehow is not infinite money glitch for developers. Assumption of complete lack of mental capacity of dev.
  Nobody except 'Bad Guy' can run server. Or if there is, none of them will run server just to play game instesd of profiting. Assumption of complete lack of mental capacity of players.
  'Bad Guy' somehow makes more money from servers than spends on botting.
  And now I will add new assumption I missed:
  'Bad Guy' spends less on botting, than it costs to reverse engieneer protocol or make new game.
  EDIT: forgot most important assumption, that was in another message:
  Game should not loose players, or there will be nobody to profit off.
  
  You dont need bots to ruin a game, ddos is sufficient and cheap enough to come by, probably even easier in the future. Argument 2 already covered in other comment below

Maybe build a game server
- It is already possible, but very time consuming and expensive. You need at least team of reverse engieneer and developer.

ITT: Time travelers from 2009, thinking my_game_dedicated_server.exe is still how all online games work.
I'm sorry to inform you that this is 2024, AWS has invaded every cubic centimeter of computing, and most companies couldn't extract a business-critical system from the rest of their infrastructure in a way that another company could run it even if they had 3 years and 100 million dollars to get it done.
- Found the executive. You're the crow in this meme.
  No. They can release source code or documentation for others to work off of, no one is asking them to deliver a fully functioning standalone version.
  
  For that matter you could just do community developed servers.
  Look at headscale
- Stop Killing Games was stated by Ross Scott, and he asked a few people in game making how hard this initiative would be on that end
  Its anywhere from a few hours to a couple days worth of work for a person or small team unless they designed it so badly they should be fired
  There is no excuse
- My yin, being required to provide what they do have and nothing more would be a huge boon to community driven efforts to preserve it. "Not everything can be perfect so therefore we should do nothing" is a bad take.
- That's BS
  You don't start big. You start small and then scale up from there.
- AWS
  Which runs very same dedicated server. And, as it was pointed out above, source code is fine too.

98 comments