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!”

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.

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.

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…

‘im in over my head, i need to repeat everything i’ve just learned for the first time today as a vlog post to simultaneously help it stick in my brain while also outwardly appearing competent and responsible to easily impressed rubes’

…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.

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.

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

To preface, I support SKG. I’m not at all disagreeing with the movement, and I understand the point of SKG is to be setting a standard going forward that will force developers to stop doing this bullshit.

My argument wasn’t that SKG is bad. My argument was that the developers arguing against the movement are getting hung up on and bikeshedding about multiplayer and live service games. I was trying look at it from the perspective of a developer and explain that we (consumers) understand that it’s not reasonable (for various reasons) to demand that they release the entire stack of backend services used by a game.

Games like Pal World still manage to publish their dedicated server binaries without publishing the dedicated server browser, and that’s all we actually want. Shitheels like PirateSoftware are being disingenuous and framing it as though the movement is entitled and asking for the impossible.

Now, to respond directly:

All of these things are already somewhat modular and very scalable in implementation, by very, very intentional design.

For horizontal scaling, yes.

So… running a rented VPS or decently beefy home server that is just geared toward handling a much, muuuuch smaller total player count, with just one of every required module, instead of being networked to 5,000 other server units dispersed around the globe?

Respectfully, and as someone who has run community game servers, it’s still not that simple or straightforward. A single private server can exist on a beefy machine or VPS and be fine. A private server designed to scale horizontally has much higher minimum requirements.

I’ll use Minecraft as an example:

A private server for friends or a small community is exactly as you described. You download Paper, install MariaDB for SQL, and throw it on a VPS.

A large community server is a lot worse. You still have MariaDB and Paper, yeah. But now you have multiple shards of Paper, with one shard per world. These shards need to have a low-latency way to communicate and share information with each other, so now you need to set up a Redis server. And now since you have multiple shards, you need to set up the Waterfall/BungeeCord server software to act as an ingress. On top of that, with multiple shards you’re going to want multiple nodes, and that now involves creating a private network.

You can run all that on a single dedicated server, but it’s not going to be as cheap or simple to set up. Multiple gigabytes of memory are being wasted just on overhead for those services.

The problem here is that with newer games like Destiny 2, the server architecture is almost definitely designed for large-scale usage. If Bungee released the server and matchmaking software tomorrow, only people like us would actually have the experience and resources to host it. And if their server software was designed to only run within a container orchestration environment like Kubernetes, it would be even worse.

In contrast to Destiny and going back to my other comment, Team Fortress 2 was designed before horizontally scalable dedicated game servers were common. It’s easy to distribute and easy to host.

Have you ever run any dedicated private game servers, have you ever managed a remote server cluster/cloud/whatevercorpobuzzword?

My previous paragraphs should speak for themselves.

Just design a basic non scaling model that works for a lower player count with a simple dedi server model.

Which won’t ever happen with AA or AAA devs unless it’s legally required. It costs development time, probably won’t ever be used internally, and doesn’t bring in money. The suits won’t allocate resources towards that out of the goodness of their hearts, which is why SKG needs to be successful.

This is actually remarkably easier and more simple to code than what the industry does now… if you’ve ever run or coded any servers.

It’s really not.

In an ideal scenario where you have time to actually plan things out, you have a shared, common library for the game logic and two different projects that use the library for dedicated servers running under self-hosted or scalable environments.

If something like player inventory storage is handled by a dedicated service in the scalable environment, you can’t use the same code for the self-hosted environment. To solve that, you create a InventoryStorage interface, a SQLBackedInventoryStorage implementation, and a MemoryBackedInventoryStorage implementation. Now you have abstraction, which makes the code harder to follow for on-boarding and maintenance purposes.

Or, you could have two different implementations of the dedicated server. That comes with even worse problems stemming from code duplication. If you want to make sure those two implementations are fully compatible with each other, you also have to add full integration tests… and the only common interface between them is the game client network protocol.

Also uh, obviously they won’t release the source code. That would indeed be an insane legal/financial nightmare.

Food for thought: what if the server source code is written in some scripting language like JavaScript or Python?

But… a compiled binary for a server?

That’s gotten a final update that strips out what they don’t directly own?

This is almost always going to be a viable option, but it’s not a 100% guaranteed solution.

Particularly when it comes to shit like patents, you’re entirely at the whims of the patent holder. A hypothetical example: the game absolutely needs to license some super-optimized physics simulation for its gameplay, and the only way they get that license is if it’s not distributed to other parties. The easy solution is to only run the simulation on the server side, but if the server has to be distributed as well, that’s a bit of a problem. Because it’s patented, they can’t just create their own copy of the library.

Uh yeah, if I somehow decompiled the Source engine and its Havok code, and then freely distributed that or built something with it I sold for money, I’d get sued into oblivion Xen.

Good reference. Well played.

Nah, it absolutely is, this was the standard norm for the vast majority of games until the new industry norm became games as service, always online.

I really should have phrased that differently.

It’s reasonable to expect dedicated server executables.

It’s not reasonable to expect the entire tech stack used for the online services to be made available. For a shitty example that’s straight to the point, I don’t think Oracle would appreciate it if their SQL server was released alongside the server software to run a MMO.

They intentionally introduced this new paradigm that fucks consumers, the old paradigm of releasing server tools often even before EoL worked fine, they just got greedy.

Absolutely.

I’m concerned that some of the petty drama is poisoning the well and nobody will take this seriously in a long time because of it, because I do think action is needed and is urgent.

Me too. Any post about this petition instantly gets filled with toxic comments like “fuck that cunt piratesoftware!” and it seems to have overshadowed everything else. I initially approved of the movement until I saw all the cult-like zealousy surrounding it. Hopefully other consumer protection movements like right to repair can make ground without devoling into internet shitflinging between youtubers.

You don’t need to be the sole reason the petition failed. If you actively spread misinformation about the petition, you’re a dick. Period.

Where’s the so-called hate-campaign.

I wanna hate on him, because he’s an ignorant prick, fyi. No need for any actual consequences he suposedly caused or didn’t cause.