I’m sorry to say that I have not and will not be attending that TED Talk. I’ve already done way more homework for this piece of online drama than anybody should, I’m not reading, dismantling and responding to an essay this fine evening.
At a glance, while I do agree that Faliszek is deliberately ignoring some elements of the argument, but I saw the whole video. The way Scott presents the argument, even acknowledging that he argues that server code may need a dedicated server beyond the capabilities of end users, is just not feasible.
This wall of text seems to just go back to the usual talking points of “in my day servers didn’t need matchmaking” and “let F2P die”, at which point it’s just resetting the argument loop, in that the other side of the argument just goes “but I like F2P games”, and we’re back to the start.
Why is it not feasible? This is simply bullshit. If a company can do it the end user can do it as well. Even if they needed a thousand servers with 5090s to run the application it would still be a way to do it.
And nobody is saying that this would be the requirement. The requirement is “to keep it in a playable state”. How they achieve that is up to them.
If someone is short an succinct, they write a wall of text with a million questions
If you reply to them with a wall of text that actually answers their gish gallop of questions, they say you are not succinct enough and won’t be reading any of it.
Go look at my exchange with them.
This is an overconfident ideological troll who has never run or developed any kind server or networked anything, has no actual career experience in the kinds of large companies to understand how they actually make business decisions around such stuff.
OK, so you’re now hosting the post-support servers for Anime CCG Pocket Collection 2045, the briefly popular collectible monster card game.
Where do I make an account? Does my old account work? Did you get all my personal info along with the game code to make that happen? Where are you storing my passwords? How are you linking my account to the first party account I used to buy the game? Who do I send a letter to exercise my access rights according to GDPR? In fact, are you GDPR-compliant? How do you know? How do I know? Who is running moderation on the chat? Are bans issued and enforced? Who is to blame if there are legal ramifications from something related to moderation? If I want to buy a skin for the game’s popular Electric Squirrel mascot and my transaction doesn’t work, where do I get a refund? If you don’t handle MTX in your private server, then who makes the code changes to allow players to just buy everything without MTX or to not allow things to be bought? I mean, the entire game is built on collecting Monster Cards, so if everybody has everything it’s gonna get weird. Are you rebalancing the game as part of this process or nah? Hey, there is no seasonal content in the game and it feels broken. Can you re-run some old seasons? Who decides which ones? Do you even have the right content server data for that? Where are you storing my inventory and the data for my Electric Squirrel Home Building feature? Are you paying for the server costs of doing that? What happens to my data if you run out of money the way the original developer did? Hey, I also want to run a server, but the entire thing is supposed to matchmake globally and cross-platform, so who says you’re the official host of the game now? Why can’t I run it instead?
Dedicated servers are more or less trivial, it’s not about having a rack of 5090s. Plenty of games with small servers rent those out or let people self-host them, from Minecraft to Conan.
The problem is running a service.
That’s why this is so hard. Multiplayer games revolving around standalone matches are whatever, but modern GaaS stuff is… fundamentally not that. Running the game and making the game are not that different from each other, and running the game gets expensive. As in, making-the-game expensive.
We need a solution so that enterprising communities can at least try to work around all those issues without getting immediately shot down by IP holders, and we need a solution to preserve some form of this type of fleeting, fungible media in some form. I just don’t know what that is, and I’m pretty sure it’s not a one-size-fits-all thing that maintains the game you paid for running as if the servers hadn’t been taken down. I just don’t see how you set that up as a general rule that everybody can just comply with.
EDIT: Oh, holy crap, I could have saved myself the fantasy scenario. Turns out Faliszek went ahead and broke down exactly what it took to do this for their game. Because they did do it, despite him being actively hostile to this initiative.
I’m gonna pat myself in the back a bit for having caught a lot of the actual pitfalls he describes, but I still recommend giving it a watch. It’s not an angry video, it’s super informative and well worth the time.
Speaking of TED Talks, I’m not reading all of that.
But nobody is talking about running a service. Sure, someone might open up Anime CCG Pocket Collection 2045 Big Continuation Service, run like the original even with support staff. But maybe I’m fine with Joe’s ACPC2045 server, because he’s my mate and we just want to goof around.
There are plenty of fan projects out there that run entire big services for their games. Keeping MMOs alive but also entirely new services based on stuff like Minecraft.
If ACPC2045 wants to make this into an expensive complicated (for them and us) endeavour, let them. There will be plenty of other games that will handle the new requirements with grace because they are not incompetent. Look how quickly Ubisoft was able to turn around with The Crew 2.
Understandable. You can ignore the big blurb (or go watch Chet’s much better version, which is also half an hour, but still). The point is that’s just me rattling off the top of my head all the complications I can think of for a modern game.
The thing is yes, you are talking about running a service. Because that’s what a bunch of these games are. That’s what The Crew was, at least if you ask Ubisoft.
And if you’re regulating this issue you can’t say “let them do the complicated thing we can’t salvage”. Everybody is going to have to comply with the requirements, big and small.
So it’s one thing to carve out exceptions for community servers for an MMO, it’s another to set requirements on sunsetting server-based games by law (Minecraft doesn’t count, it doesn’t have matchmaking and was always local-hosted).
The world you’re imagining is a world where Ubisoft still has The Crew 2 and Activision still has WoW, but Lethal Company or Among Us maybe don’t get made. Because if the requirements for both are the same the percentage of their budget compliance takes is massively different.
That’s the problem with this on paper, right? You can’t target just one scenario that pissed you off. Laws are for everybody. You need to find a solution where you define your terms well enough to ensure that a) you get the outcome you want from the big boys, and b) the small fry and the edge cases don’t get tossed with the bathwater.
Yeah, but see, my mate Joe, he just doesn’t run the sign up page or authentication or the matchmaking or the seasonal DLC or the voice chat or the community forums.
He just enters some stuff by hand into the Oracle DB and off we go.
I’m serious. Big corporations tend to overcomplicate this stuff all the time. Especially because they tend to run several components as one. But when you break it down each one is not that complicated. I’ve done that. As my job. Saying it’s not feasible is a massive strawman.
Because as always, if they can do it so can we. This will never change.
But again, it’s not just a technical issue. It’s cost and functionality and compliance and legal requirements, too.
Also, eff no, it IS complicated. And expensive. You’re handwaving a ton of stuff there, it’s not just some Oracle DB.
And again, you’re not saying “can we do it”, you’re saying “can we make it mandatory to do it for everything?”
At this point you have to go back to the big blurb you didn’t read or the video you didn’t watch. It’s the specifics of what you need to do. At scale. For every live game, so like 80% of the mobile industry, a decent chunk of console and PC.
And each of those has a litany of technical, legal and financial requirements, each different from each other, by design.
You can’t just write into a law that it needs to happen and have it magically materialize. That’s not how this is going to work, even if the inititative succeeded.
I’m currently watching the video and he is approaching this as if some company would continue complete support with every functionality still available without any interruption. His idea of the “simplest matchmaking” are freaking lobby codes. He can’t even fathom a future without Steam.
For him almost everything involves accounts and big companies and legal entities and central authorities. Stuff you do not need. Never ever. He is caught up on self made problems.
If you put into law that a game has to remain playable developers will figure it out. Either they are stupid and tie everything to central unchangeable entities or they will add a config file where you enter an IP address and call it a day. Capitalism will find the cheapest way to comply.
Well, no, he specifically considers a future without Steam and acknowledges ongoing support for the game is dependent on Steam for matchmaking.
Because matchmaking is a central service.
And the reason he wants to keep all these dumb features nobody wants like matchmaking and cross-play and… you know, unlockables, is that he sold the game with them and doesn’t want to take them away from players when they continue to support the game as a community.
I don’t know, that seems reasonable to me.
The story he’s telling you is precisely “developers figuring it out”. Of course he’d want to still have cross play. Of course he still wants matchmaking. He made the game, that’s the point.
And his game is pretty easy to fix, all things considered. It’s a Left4Dead-like, you only need a handful of people in a session that can run over P2P. Expand what he’s describing to peristent worlds with hundreds of people, seamless matchmaking and microtransactions and you have a very complex web to tangle. A web that, by definition, you can’t afford. Because if it made money you wouldn’t be taking it down.
And again, neither Faliszek nor me are saying we don’t want games preserved. I’m saying that wishing really hard for games to keep working doesn’t make them keep working. You HAVE to fix all the legal and technical issues. That’s the job.
I skimmed your response that stresses how this is a very complex issue that cannot be meaningfully understood without lenghty exploration of topics that require significant technical expertise, legal expertise and business expertise, and I acknowledge my preferred expert who isn’t actually an expert was disingenuous, but I’m gonna stick with with opinion because I’m tired and I saw some arguments I’ve seen before.
Ok, got it, this isn’t a complex policy reform proposal to you, its primarily a vibes based assesment of a popularity contest.
Well, if, somw other time, you wanna maybe actually read what I wrote some time and actually go over any particular reasons why you think it is impossible for an end user to run a dedicated server (it isn’t by the way, tens millions of single individuals do this every single day), or any other objections you have to this initiative…
I’ve got a degree in Econ, another one in Poli Sci, a decade in the tech industry as a data analyst, server admin, db admin, software dev, worked for 2 different Fortune 500 companies, and I’ve also been involved in game dev teams and written many of my own mods and custom game modes over the past 20 years.
I kinda have pretty close to the perfect blend of experience and education relevant to the intersection of various fields this whole entire issue requires to truly understand it, if you want to have a more in depth discussion with someone who has more relevant technical experience than being a creative writer.
I’m gonna be straight with you, I’m not gonna want to actually read what you wrote some other time.
Just to correct the record on this more reasonably sized dose of surprisingly overt strawmanning, I don’t think it’s impossible for an end user to run a dedicated server. I think it’s not feasible to require a version of a modern persistent game server infrastructure, from login to matchmaking to data storage, to be converted or provided to be run or financed by end users. Especially not in a way that still allows pre-existing commercial clients to run normally. I mean, for one thing, would you be running one instance or several? Who’s handling how to point the client at the right place? Who’s responsible for the legal obligations regarding data storage and personal information? How do you handle monetization hooks in games where scarcity is baked into the design?
Whatever, the technicalities have been deliberated and I’m sure your perfect blend of experience and education is very aware of all that, has memorized the PnL of a dozen different live service games, is aware of all the costs and has accounted for all those wrinkles. For all I know it’s all in that manifesto, I’m not gonna check. Ultimately if your rant ends up with “maybe F2P live service games SHOULD die” the argument isn’t technical and it’s not fundamentally about preservation.
Just to correct the record on this more reasonably sized dose of surprisingly overt strawmanning, I don’t think it’s impossible for an end user to run a dedicated server.
Well then maybe you should have actually said that.
The way Scott presents the argument, even acknowledging that he argues that server code may need a dedicated server beyond the capabilities of end users, is just not feasible.
If you wanna say things that are, you know technical, complicated… maybe… do that?
But ok so you wanna be more technical now, let’s see.
I think it’s not feasible to require a version of a modern persistent game server infrastructure, from login to matchmaking to data storage, to be converted or provided to be run or financed by end users.
Ok, well, you are just objectively wrong on all of your clauses there.
Dedicated enthusiasts can and do build home servers, all the time.
People have been emulating and running long officially dead MMOs for almost 20 years.
Login, matchmaking, storage… yep, all of that stuff still works. Sometimes you have to figure out a bit of a workaround, or run your own little side shunt thing as I described via example of Battlefield 1942 in my post you didn’t read.
These days, its easier and cheaper than ever to just rent a virtual server to host… literally whatever you want.
The only real problem that would occur is if say, OverWatch 2 suddenly died… and… a group of enthusiastic OW2 players wanted to be able to support the entire current playerbase.
Yeah, that indeed would likely be unfeasible.
But uh… all you have to do is meet the base requirements for the server binary, the now incredibly cheap compared to 10, 20 years ago storage requirements for the base system… and then you scale up to meet the actual traffic from the number of regular players you want to be able to support.
Theoretically, you could set up a nonprofit to legally finance scaling up to huge player counts, and have a subscription to this nonprofit server provider…
Or you could just have many, many, smaller independent post EoL, enthusiast servers, capable of more or less doing it out of an informal amount of charity.
The fixed costs of standing up a server are almost always so small as to be manageable by one or a few people.
The variable cost, where things can really get expensive… is from scaling up massively.
But you don’t have to do that.
Especially not in a way that still allows pre-existing commercial clients to run normally.
TitanFall 2 has been dead for a decade. No more official servers.
Its got a community made custom launcher that hooks into the community modified servers they run.
Game is literally exactly the same.
You can go play this right now, if you have a legit copy of TitanFall2.
Basically its the same withing with StarWars Galaxies, to just give two examples right off the top of my head.
I mean, for one thing, would you be running one instance or several?
Could be either, depends on what the EoL game wants to do for its final shutdown server release.
Probably it would be much, much easier to both the business and enthusiast post EoL server operators to set things up for many smaller, distinct, divergent individual instances, instead of designing a lemmy like federation system.
You know, how like every major MMO ever basically has different realms or shards or whatever? Welp, now instead of 8 or 16 or 32… theres 456 smaller ones.
Who’s handling how to point the client at the right place?
Ideally this would be a very simple and minor patch to the client to enable this right before EoL, but as with examples I’ve already given, you can wrap the game in your own launcher, essentially ‘hijacking’ it in some sense, to be able to override the now defunct, default server address, and also include a server browser in that launcher.
Then, you have that custom community launcher open source, so everyone can verify it isn’t malware.
But, there are many other possible methods and variations on this that are very specific to each exact game, that will or could work, even if the business doesn’t bother to do a final patch on the EoL client.
Who’s responsible for the legal obligations regarding data storage and personal information?
Uh, the people running the servers? The enthusiasts?
Why would they have personal information beyond a UID, login and password for the player?
The business would have to be immensely, catastrophically stupid to not scrub all other PII and financial type information out of the player db before they made a EoL final release version of it available.
How do you handle monetization hooks in games where scarcity is baked into the design?
Well there’s many possible ways you could do this.
One would be… the business just rips em out, disables them entirely on EoL release.
Yep, that’d break shitty pay to win games that were designed with so much scarcity that obtaining game currency or items through gameplay alone is uh… unfeasible.
Or, you could, just quickly modify the giant basically ini file that describes all the loot drop rates for getting things in game by… 10, 100, 1000, whatever, or let the enthusiast server operators modify these drop rates on their own.
Or maybe its something like cosmetics you would normally have to pay real money for? They’re all free now, woohoo! Just put in a little overide in the ‘checks players real world bank account’ routine to just return TRUE, basically, haha.
There are an astounding number of ways this could be handled, either by the EoL final patch/release, you could just basically rip all that out, make everyone have as much of it as they want, or give the enthusiast post EoL server admins some gui or cli access to the already existing code in the server system to allow them to do a more fine tuned and tweaking approach to this… maybe everyone just gets an automatic allowance of whatever $50 real world dollars translates into in the game currency(ies) every month, who knows.
All you have to do is say ok enthusiast server admins, you are NOT allowed to make money off of our compiled binary we are releasing to you, you have no right to do that, and we will sue you into oblivion if we think we can prove you are.
Existing computer laws and liscenses already very well cover companies going after people who decompile their proprietary code and make money off of it.
Whatever, the technicalities have been deliberated…
Yes, now they have. I made many of these points I made here, and more, in my post you didn’t read, so, uh yeah, kind of a one sided discussion here with a person who’s already made up their mind, yeah.
No, I’m just unwilling to engage in the complexity in your terms. Which is to say, I’m not going to parse several pages of line-by-line forum bickering for the sake of your verbal incontinence.
You can choose a subject and we can talk about that subject, or you can keep it legible with an overall argument.
But you are not interesting enough for me to spend my day reading your manifesto.
I’m sorry to say that I have not and will not be attending that TED Talk. I’ve already done way more homework for this piece of online drama than anybody should, I’m not reading, dismantling and responding to an essay this fine evening.
At a glance, while I do agree that Faliszek is deliberately ignoring some elements of the argument, but I saw the whole video. The way Scott presents the argument, even acknowledging that he argues that server code may need a dedicated server beyond the capabilities of end users, is just not feasible.
This wall of text seems to just go back to the usual talking points of “in my day servers didn’t need matchmaking” and “let F2P die”, at which point it’s just resetting the argument loop, in that the other side of the argument just goes “but I like F2P games”, and we’re back to the start.
Why is it not feasible? This is simply bullshit. If a company can do it the end user can do it as well. Even if they needed a thousand servers with 5090s to run the application it would still be a way to do it.
And nobody is saying that this would be the requirement. The requirement is “to keep it in a playable state”. How they achieve that is up to them.
This person is a lost cause.
If someone is short an succinct, they write a wall of text with a million questions
If you reply to them with a wall of text that actually answers their gish gallop of questions, they say you are not succinct enough and won’t be reading any of it.
Go look at my exchange with them.
This is an overconfident ideological troll who has never run or developed any kind server or networked anything, has no actual career experience in the kinds of large companies to understand how they actually make business decisions around such stuff.
OK, so you’re now hosting the post-support servers for Anime CCG Pocket Collection 2045, the briefly popular collectible monster card game.
Where do I make an account? Does my old account work? Did you get all my personal info along with the game code to make that happen? Where are you storing my passwords? How are you linking my account to the first party account I used to buy the game? Who do I send a letter to exercise my access rights according to GDPR? In fact, are you GDPR-compliant? How do you know? How do I know? Who is running moderation on the chat? Are bans issued and enforced? Who is to blame if there are legal ramifications from something related to moderation? If I want to buy a skin for the game’s popular Electric Squirrel mascot and my transaction doesn’t work, where do I get a refund? If you don’t handle MTX in your private server, then who makes the code changes to allow players to just buy everything without MTX or to not allow things to be bought? I mean, the entire game is built on collecting Monster Cards, so if everybody has everything it’s gonna get weird. Are you rebalancing the game as part of this process or nah? Hey, there is no seasonal content in the game and it feels broken. Can you re-run some old seasons? Who decides which ones? Do you even have the right content server data for that? Where are you storing my inventory and the data for my Electric Squirrel Home Building feature? Are you paying for the server costs of doing that? What happens to my data if you run out of money the way the original developer did? Hey, I also want to run a server, but the entire thing is supposed to matchmake globally and cross-platform, so who says you’re the official host of the game now? Why can’t I run it instead?
Dedicated servers are more or less trivial, it’s not about having a rack of 5090s. Plenty of games with small servers rent those out or let people self-host them, from Minecraft to Conan.
The problem is running a service.
That’s why this is so hard. Multiplayer games revolving around standalone matches are whatever, but modern GaaS stuff is… fundamentally not that. Running the game and making the game are not that different from each other, and running the game gets expensive. As in, making-the-game expensive.
We need a solution so that enterprising communities can at least try to work around all those issues without getting immediately shot down by IP holders, and we need a solution to preserve some form of this type of fleeting, fungible media in some form. I just don’t know what that is, and I’m pretty sure it’s not a one-size-fits-all thing that maintains the game you paid for running as if the servers hadn’t been taken down. I just don’t see how you set that up as a general rule that everybody can just comply with.
EDIT: Oh, holy crap, I could have saved myself the fantasy scenario. Turns out Faliszek went ahead and broke down exactly what it took to do this for their game. Because they did do it, despite him being actively hostile to this initiative.
I’m gonna pat myself in the back a bit for having caught a lot of the actual pitfalls he describes, but I still recommend giving it a watch. It’s not an angry video, it’s super informative and well worth the time.
Speaking of TED Talks, I’m not reading all of that.
But nobody is talking about running a service. Sure, someone might open up Anime CCG Pocket Collection 2045 Big Continuation Service, run like the original even with support staff. But maybe I’m fine with Joe’s ACPC2045 server, because he’s my mate and we just want to goof around.
There are plenty of fan projects out there that run entire big services for their games. Keeping MMOs alive but also entirely new services based on stuff like Minecraft.
If ACPC2045 wants to make this into an expensive complicated (for them and us) endeavour, let them. There will be plenty of other games that will handle the new requirements with grace because they are not incompetent. Look how quickly Ubisoft was able to turn around with The Crew 2.
Understandable. You can ignore the big blurb (or go watch Chet’s much better version, which is also half an hour, but still). The point is that’s just me rattling off the top of my head all the complications I can think of for a modern game.
The thing is yes, you are talking about running a service. Because that’s what a bunch of these games are. That’s what The Crew was, at least if you ask Ubisoft.
And if you’re regulating this issue you can’t say “let them do the complicated thing we can’t salvage”. Everybody is going to have to comply with the requirements, big and small.
So it’s one thing to carve out exceptions for community servers for an MMO, it’s another to set requirements on sunsetting server-based games by law (Minecraft doesn’t count, it doesn’t have matchmaking and was always local-hosted).
The world you’re imagining is a world where Ubisoft still has The Crew 2 and Activision still has WoW, but Lethal Company or Among Us maybe don’t get made. Because if the requirements for both are the same the percentage of their budget compliance takes is massively different.
That’s the problem with this on paper, right? You can’t target just one scenario that pissed you off. Laws are for everybody. You need to find a solution where you define your terms well enough to ensure that a) you get the outcome you want from the big boys, and b) the small fry and the edge cases don’t get tossed with the bathwater.
Yeah, but see, my mate Joe, he just doesn’t run the sign up page or authentication or the matchmaking or the seasonal DLC or the voice chat or the community forums.
He just enters some stuff by hand into the Oracle DB and off we go.
I’m serious. Big corporations tend to overcomplicate this stuff all the time. Especially because they tend to run several components as one. But when you break it down each one is not that complicated. I’ve done that. As my job. Saying it’s not feasible is a massive strawman.
Because as always, if they can do it so can we. This will never change.
But again, it’s not just a technical issue. It’s cost and functionality and compliance and legal requirements, too.
Also, eff no, it IS complicated. And expensive. You’re handwaving a ton of stuff there, it’s not just some Oracle DB.
And again, you’re not saying “can we do it”, you’re saying “can we make it mandatory to do it for everything?”
At this point you have to go back to the big blurb you didn’t read or the video you didn’t watch. It’s the specifics of what you need to do. At scale. For every live game, so like 80% of the mobile industry, a decent chunk of console and PC.
And each of those has a litany of technical, legal and financial requirements, each different from each other, by design.
You can’t just write into a law that it needs to happen and have it magically materialize. That’s not how this is going to work, even if the inititative succeeded.
I’m currently watching the video and he is approaching this as if some company would continue complete support with every functionality still available without any interruption. His idea of the “simplest matchmaking” are freaking lobby codes. He can’t even fathom a future without Steam.
For him almost everything involves accounts and big companies and legal entities and central authorities. Stuff you do not need. Never ever. He is caught up on self made problems.
If you put into law that a game has to remain playable developers will figure it out. Either they are stupid and tie everything to central unchangeable entities or they will add a config file where you enter an IP address and call it a day. Capitalism will find the cheapest way to comply.
Well, no, he specifically considers a future without Steam and acknowledges ongoing support for the game is dependent on Steam for matchmaking.
Because matchmaking is a central service.
And the reason he wants to keep all these dumb features nobody wants like matchmaking and cross-play and… you know, unlockables, is that he sold the game with them and doesn’t want to take them away from players when they continue to support the game as a community.
I don’t know, that seems reasonable to me.
The story he’s telling you is precisely “developers figuring it out”. Of course he’d want to still have cross play. Of course he still wants matchmaking. He made the game, that’s the point.
And his game is pretty easy to fix, all things considered. It’s a Left4Dead-like, you only need a handful of people in a session that can run over P2P. Expand what he’s describing to peristent worlds with hundreds of people, seamless matchmaking and microtransactions and you have a very complex web to tangle. A web that, by definition, you can’t afford. Because if it made money you wouldn’t be taking it down.
And again, neither Faliszek nor me are saying we don’t want games preserved. I’m saying that wishing really hard for games to keep working doesn’t make them keep working. You HAVE to fix all the legal and technical issues. That’s the job.
Ok, got it, this isn’t a complex policy reform proposal to you, its primarily a vibes based assesment of a popularity contest.
Well, if, somw other time, you wanna maybe actually read what I wrote some time and actually go over any particular reasons why you think it is impossible for an end user to run a dedicated server (it isn’t by the way, tens millions of single individuals do this every single day), or any other objections you have to this initiative…
I’ve got a degree in Econ, another one in Poli Sci, a decade in the tech industry as a data analyst, server admin, db admin, software dev, worked for 2 different Fortune 500 companies, and I’ve also been involved in game dev teams and written many of my own mods and custom game modes over the past 20 years.
I kinda have pretty close to the perfect blend of experience and education relevant to the intersection of various fields this whole entire issue requires to truly understand it, if you want to have a more in depth discussion with someone who has more relevant technical experience than being a creative writer.
I’m gonna be straight with you, I’m not gonna want to actually read what you wrote some other time.
Just to correct the record on this more reasonably sized dose of surprisingly overt strawmanning, I don’t think it’s impossible for an end user to run a dedicated server. I think it’s not feasible to require a version of a modern persistent game server infrastructure, from login to matchmaking to data storage, to be converted or provided to be run or financed by end users. Especially not in a way that still allows pre-existing commercial clients to run normally. I mean, for one thing, would you be running one instance or several? Who’s handling how to point the client at the right place? Who’s responsible for the legal obligations regarding data storage and personal information? How do you handle monetization hooks in games where scarcity is baked into the design?
Whatever, the technicalities have been deliberated and I’m sure your perfect blend of experience and education is very aware of all that, has memorized the PnL of a dozen different live service games, is aware of all the costs and has accounted for all those wrinkles. For all I know it’s all in that manifesto, I’m not gonna check. Ultimately if your rant ends up with “maybe F2P live service games SHOULD die” the argument isn’t technical and it’s not fundamentally about preservation.
Well then maybe you should have actually said that.
If you wanna say things that are, you know technical, complicated… maybe… do that?
But ok so you wanna be more technical now, let’s see.
Ok, well, you are just objectively wrong on all of your clauses there.
Dedicated enthusiasts can and do build home servers, all the time.
People have been emulating and running long officially dead MMOs for almost 20 years.
Login, matchmaking, storage… yep, all of that stuff still works. Sometimes you have to figure out a bit of a workaround, or run your own little side shunt thing as I described via example of Battlefield 1942 in my post you didn’t read.
These days, its easier and cheaper than ever to just rent a virtual server to host… literally whatever you want.
The only real problem that would occur is if say, OverWatch 2 suddenly died… and… a group of enthusiastic OW2 players wanted to be able to support the entire current playerbase.
Yeah, that indeed would likely be unfeasible.
But uh… all you have to do is meet the base requirements for the server binary, the now incredibly cheap compared to 10, 20 years ago storage requirements for the base system… and then you scale up to meet the actual traffic from the number of regular players you want to be able to support.
Theoretically, you could set up a nonprofit to legally finance scaling up to huge player counts, and have a subscription to this nonprofit server provider…
Or you could just have many, many, smaller independent post EoL, enthusiast servers, capable of more or less doing it out of an informal amount of charity.
The fixed costs of standing up a server are almost always so small as to be manageable by one or a few people.
The variable cost, where things can really get expensive… is from scaling up massively.
But you don’t have to do that.
TitanFall 2 has been dead for a decade. No more official servers.
Its got a community made custom launcher that hooks into the community modified servers they run.
Game is literally exactly the same.
You can go play this right now, if you have a legit copy of TitanFall2.
Basically its the same withing with StarWars Galaxies, to just give two examples right off the top of my head.
Could be either, depends on what the EoL game wants to do for its final shutdown server release.
Probably it would be much, much easier to both the business and enthusiast post EoL server operators to set things up for many smaller, distinct, divergent individual instances, instead of designing a lemmy like federation system.
You know, how like every major MMO ever basically has different realms or shards or whatever? Welp, now instead of 8 or 16 or 32… theres 456 smaller ones.
Ideally this would be a very simple and minor patch to the client to enable this right before EoL, but as with examples I’ve already given, you can wrap the game in your own launcher, essentially ‘hijacking’ it in some sense, to be able to override the now defunct, default server address, and also include a server browser in that launcher.
Then, you have that custom community launcher open source, so everyone can verify it isn’t malware.
But, there are many other possible methods and variations on this that are very specific to each exact game, that will or could work, even if the business doesn’t bother to do a final patch on the EoL client.
Uh, the people running the servers? The enthusiasts?
Why would they have personal information beyond a UID, login and password for the player?
The business would have to be immensely, catastrophically stupid to not scrub all other PII and financial type information out of the player db before they made a EoL final release version of it available.
Well there’s many possible ways you could do this.
One would be… the business just rips em out, disables them entirely on EoL release.
Yep, that’d break shitty pay to win games that were designed with so much scarcity that obtaining game currency or items through gameplay alone is uh… unfeasible.
Or, you could, just quickly modify the giant basically ini file that describes all the loot drop rates for getting things in game by… 10, 100, 1000, whatever, or let the enthusiast server operators modify these drop rates on their own.
Or maybe its something like cosmetics you would normally have to pay real money for? They’re all free now, woohoo! Just put in a little overide in the ‘checks players real world bank account’ routine to just return TRUE, basically, haha.
There are an astounding number of ways this could be handled, either by the EoL final patch/release, you could just basically rip all that out, make everyone have as much of it as they want, or give the enthusiast post EoL server admins some gui or cli access to the already existing code in the server system to allow them to do a more fine tuned and tweaking approach to this… maybe everyone just gets an automatic allowance of whatever $50 real world dollars translates into in the game currency(ies) every month, who knows.
All you have to do is say ok enthusiast server admins, you are NOT allowed to make money off of our compiled binary we are releasing to you, you have no right to do that, and we will sue you into oblivion if we think we can prove you are.
Existing computer laws and liscenses already very well cover companies going after people who decompile their proprietary code and make money off of it.
Yes, now they have. I made many of these points I made here, and more, in my post you didn’t read, so, uh yeah, kind of a one sided discussion here with a person who’s already made up their mind, yeah.
You, my friend, have a problem with succinctness.
And that’s scathing coming from me.
And you are fundamentally unwilling to engage in the comolexity you claim to already understand.
Sorry, some topics just are more complex than your attention span evidently allows for.
No, I’m just unwilling to engage in the complexity in your terms. Which is to say, I’m not going to parse several pages of line-by-line forum bickering for the sake of your verbal incontinence.
You can choose a subject and we can talk about that subject, or you can keep it legible with an overall argument.
But you are not interesting enough for me to spend my day reading your manifesto.