“ reportedly enforcing uncompensated overtime, allegedly trying to pay staff below minimum wage, and a toxic work environment cultivated by an alleged abusive leadership.”
Hi-Fi rush comes out of nowhere to massive critical acclaim just to be shut down anyway because Starfield sucked ass. Why people ever do business with these shitass publishers I’ll never understand
Because the indie space is also a graveyard. Investors are increasingly wary of funding anything but a “guarantee” and plenty of studios have had to shutter because the funding they were promised was rescinded.
The major publishers are at least a paycheck that can keep a studio going for another year or two.
Because the indie space is also a graveyard. Investors are increasingly wary of funding anything but a “guarantee” and plenty of studios have had to shutter because the funding they were promised was rescinded.
Maybe gaming has become too bloated as a concept if no company can ever produce a product with their own money any more, instead always listening entirely to investor cash.
So… only independently wealthy people should make games?
Game dev takes time. The way you shrink that time is to do it full time instead of working on it in your spare time for a decade or so. Because of increased cost of living, the ability to just take a few months off and burn your savings is increasingly not viable.
That is where investors come in. Whether it is a kickstarter campaign (NEVER PRE-ORDER!! RAWR!!!), a venture capitalist, or a major publisher. And all of those have consequences.
But, increasingly, it is only the major publishers who are even trying. And they are increasingly selective of who they try it with. NoClip have been making an indie game as a way to better understand the market and they have a SPECTACULAR video where Danny O’Dwyer talks about his experience pitching the game to publishers and what kinds of responses they get. And it is really telling that he gushes over how nice one publisher (I think it was Humble?) were in that they actually responded and said they couldn’t move forward rather than just ghosting him.
Sure but that’s only a piece of the puzzle. Housing, food, and general living costs are so insane now that any decent savings would be obliterated much more quickly. UBI would be a better solution here, but that’s almost a pipedream at this point.
Um I disagree. The biggest barrier is having the capital to do the thing. I think a number of states have a reduced/free option if your income is below the poverty line (calculated as having low or negative income in the startup phase, not necessarily based on assets), or being lucky enough to have a spouse with healthcare. That said, it’s entirely doable to go without healthcare, albeit risky. I started a contracting company 3 years ago with almost no money and the tools I had from my apprentice/jman years, and still don’t have health insurance, though I’m hoping to get some later this year.
Taking a look at big-cash high profile releases like Redfall and Starfield…is “guaranteed failure” what they’re going for? Because those indie games were pretty much the main reason I kept subscribing to game pass.
Man it is never enough with these greedy fucking assholes. I don’t even own one and I’m mad about this… It’s with everything lately… Soon we’ll have ads in our fucking dreams like Futurama…
I can’t even smoke anymore… Stupid anxiety… THC triggers panic attacks and I’ve finally gotten to the point where even if my bowl is 90% CBD it still gets me…
Not to get all serious n shit but as a fellow sufferer i hope you’re getting your anxiety treated. I didnt listen to my friends when they told me it progressively gets worse and kept gutting it out until i was non-functioning and had to get a pro to get me back on my feet.
None of my biz just hope you’re taking care of yourself
I have to try again I suppose. I kinda gave up after every med I tried turned me into a zombie and made work really difficult because all I wanted to do was sleep. CBD really helps stop a panic attack, but the majority of my father’s side of the family has anxiety issues so I think my brain is just broken lol
Never know, you could have undiagnosed adhd which when untreated for a lifetime manifests as anxiety and depression. Like me. Or it could be something different.
It might take you a bit to find it but that’s normal. Those friends of mine warned me it often takes time to find the right mix so you’re not unusual… Just prepare in advance to keep sloggin’ until something hits. It will, but it will take more time than you’d like. I wish i had a better sales pitch.
Finally don’t consider your genes or brain broken, that’s just our brain doin’ the same ol’ self-hate as usual but with extra stolen labcoat to slip our defenses
you could have undiagnosed adhd which when untreated for a lifetime manifests as anxiety and depression.
I see all the adhd memes and comments that usually makes me feel like “hmm maybe I do have this” but I also see a bunch of people saying “we all think that even if we don’t have it” lol thanks again for the concern!
It also bugs me that Bethesda keeps saying that the game is about exploration and finding new planets, but so far every planet I’ve visited has some kind of building upon it. Its clear that people have been on this planet before, so why the hell should I explore this planet? At least give me some incentive or a better reward for finding a true empty planet.
You’re not wrong, but OTOH, it’s pretty funny to see a planet having a building on it equated to the planet being explored, considering Earth was still being explored thousands of years after the first buildings.
Yeah thats true. In Bethesda’s dictionary exploration means: find minerals, 7 life forms and 3 unique geological formations. And by unique we mean like on the other planets.
This why kernel level anticheat is the stupidiest idea. It’s already hard enough to have the developers coordinate on a mission critical component of the OS. Now imagine dozens of profit hungry, lowest effort publishing companies all meddling and putting their greasy hands into that code at the same time. No, thank you.
I believe Ubisoft considers these games as “life service,” despite them effectively being single-player.
Kernel-level anticheats are specifically anti cheat. Although, if you take cheats to kernel level, they become anti-cheat in name only. For all the normal players out there, it is practically malware. No software ever should have permissions to track everything you do, see everything you have, and brick your OS just because.
With the caveat that there’s a lot of space in which users can do things that even kernel level anti-cheat can’t detect. Like it can’t see what’s going on inside plugged in hardware to know if an attached video capture device and the mouse and keyboard is actually all connected to an embedded system that analyses the video stream and adjusts the actual user input to automatically fire if it detects an enemy that would be hit or to nudge the looking direction a bit so that firing would hit.
I’ve also seen reports of exploits that use the presence of cheat detection combined with other exploits to install cheats on target systems to get their target banned from the game entirely. Which both forces them to deal with a situation they never intended to in the first place (they never tried to cheat), it also gives plausible deniability to actual cheaters who get caught.
One of those cases happened during a live tournament. Dude is playing and all of a sudden can see enemy locations through walls. He knew what was up and left the game to avoid being banned, which makes the tournament itself a bit of a joke.
There’s also the reverse effect where kernel level anticheats provide the illusion of no cheaters so people can cheat more openly without being reported or kicked from the lobby/server like the old days.
This was a scam from the start. They fucked themselves because their trailer was popular and they promised the world. Their goal was to create a shit early access game with pre-made assets, get lots of buy in when it was released, endure some bad reviews, promise to fix things but then slowly dump support for the game. I’ve watched this exact thing happen probably ten times now.
What killed them was the hype and popularity. They were called out immediately for what they were doing and got stuck having to now make an actual game or face legal repercussions.
At the very least these cash grabs are getting spotted early and they’re not getting to sneak by without facing consequences.
Scam is still scam, they could have been realising true gameplay trailers instead of wasting time on rendered false gameplay that does not reflect a game at all
This just feels more like incompetence rather than malice.
Yeah although I would argue one does not preclude the other. As in, of course with Hanlon’s Razor, this is because of incompetence not malice. But it’s also a scam, just one born out of not being any smarter/better.
I’d agree with you but then you hear about all the sketch shit with the discord and the volunteers. I think they intended to make a game but planned for it to just be a quick cash grab and then they could just slowly dump it. It’s honestly a great strategy, just look at every game the atlas devs have made. They’ve basically mastered the strategy.
Technically yes it’s still a scam. It’s just one that didn’t pan out for them. In this one particular instance anyways. It will continue to work for others.
I don't think consumers were the target of the scam; if they were, I don't see a reason why they wouldn't have accepted pre-orders for the game. In fact, I think they know that accepting pre-orders would have left them open to false advertising lawsuits which is why they didn't go for them, and I think they were well aware that people could just refund the game so trying to scam consumers (in this instance) was probably not worth attempting.
Instead, I think the investors were the target. The brothers who own(ed?) the studio have been living off investor money for the last few years, and which how suspicious their finances are (their ludicrously high travel expenses, in particular) I'm sure they've hidden away a bunch more money.
The game that exists is a shameless, cheaply-made asset flip that I suspect only exists at all because it makes it much harder for investors to sue for fraud when there's an actual product. If they'd just tried to take the money and run without releasing anything it'd be obvious fraud, but now they can claim they tried their best, expectations were too high, etc, and it's difficult for the investors to prove otherwise.
This makes the most sense by far. Owners of a company always pay themselves a salary, and for a tech company with investors I'm sure these people were able to give themselves an extremely high salary. That salary money is legally their money forever no matter how crappy or failed the company's output winds up being. Unless you can prove that an actual crime was committed to acquire that money, then it will remain legally theirs.
I get the impression there is a lot of this bait and switch in the mobile gaming circuit with great game play shown on IG ads but the actual gameplay is nothing like advertised?
Due to the way Steam refunds work I feel this wasn’t their end goal unless they really didn’t think it through at all.
The theory i subscribe to is that they intended to release a “decent” game but had no experience or intent to make it themselves. The marketing hype machine was to build community hype, which would drive investor funding so they could pay for new talent or to just outsource most of the work. I’m guessing that either didn’t materialize or they mismanaged that plan.
Nope, no Kickstarter or obvious public funding before the early access “release”.
There’s a chance some people weren’t able to get refunded but due to Steam’s refund policy I suspect most got their money back.
If it was always intended to be a total scam and never release they’d likely have used their own launcher to bypass the Steam revenue share and refund policy.
Management response: Dear customer, thank you for taking the time to try our cake. This is a cake, which is sweet and tasty by definition. We made the cake so customers can enjoy the cake and taste the typical cake ingredients which taste sweet and tasty. The cake experience as we created should appeal to everyone because cake is tasty.
I love this. Just like what happened with the gold skins in MechWarrior Online.
The “truck” has a terrible design, and often is incapable of completing basic tasks a truck is expected to do without great difficulty or some weird quirk.
The “truck” has a terrible design, and often is incapable of completing basic tasks a truck is expected to do without great difficulty or some weird quirk.
My first live sighting of one of them I realized how god-awful ugly they really are. Even in some bronze/pewter terrible color. Or maybe it got left in the rain and that's just corrosion.
Yes, it was funny when the entire game would stop just to focus on killing the gold skin user. Didn’t matter what team they were on, they became the collective target of everyone in the match. Good times, indeed.
Is the Cybertruck even a truck? I don’t see the “truck” part.
I know very little about cars, and even less about trucks. When I think of a truck, I think of a bed in the back where you can haul stuff from Home Depot.
That’s not entirely true. The high end of aftermarket covers are electric, require the semi permanent installation of rails, wires, and the box, and are fairly cumbersome to remove. They’re not permanent in that they can be removed, but practically no one does this. Rivian’s truck has one built in as well. Most legacy manufacturers leave this to dealers to do as it’s an easy high profit accessory for them to upsell.
For legacy automaker pickups, that’s true. It’s a dream accessorie: a factory, waterproof, roll away, electric, secure tonneau that doesn’t eat bed space is a HUGE draw.
Someone on my discord posted the warranty terms and apparently it doesn’t cover unusual damage or useage such as exposrure to rain, sunlight or being used off a paved road. So no its not a truck, in fact it doesn’t even stand up as a car.
I know very little about cars, and even less about trucks. When I think of a truck, I think of a bed in the back where you can haul stuff from Home Depot. Where is the “truck” part?
Generally if you get a truck and do truck things with it, there’s 2 specific things a truck will have that no other class has:
A protected bed that you can put bulky and dirty/stinky items into for transport
The ability to pull a large trailer
But hilariously your average crossover is fully capable of hauling an inexpensive trailer and a couple thousand pounds of whatever if not more than that, which covers 99.9% of the lifestyle arguments most pavement princes truck owners make for why they need a truck
Yeah, for sure trucks do not own pulling trailers, and they are fairly bad for cargo also. Truck fans will hate it, but a minivan can take care of both of those probably just as well, if not potentially better. The one use case is oversized cargo, which is almost never hauled by anyone. In the off chance you need that you can rent a truck or uhaul.
I’m in the market for a truck and actually drew this same conclusion. Trucks are terrible in fuel efficiency and would likely not be my daily driver.
The main reason I want to buy (vs renting a truck or uhaul) is primarily availability. When I’m doing a weekend project, on more than one occasion I could not rent a truck because everyone else had the same idea.
Over the past year, I’ve rented the Home Depot truck four times, totaling about $400 which includes fuel and late fees. The main difference between renting a Home Depot truck vs a uhaul is that you don’t pay mileage. Renting the Uhaul once is about $200 with mileage and gas.
Uhuals can be reserved, but at that price point it’s not worth it.
If you’re a new homeowner and either have a lot to fix or a lot of projects in mind, a pickup is great. Daily driving it is useful for when you have to grab materials after work. I opted for an older $2000 Ranger 4cyl 2wd earlier this year for that so I’m not killed by fuel economy. It gets 20mpg on my commute but I do also split that with a 50mpg motorcycle. It’s also great for when you see random bulky things on the side of the road you want. I did start with a 4x8 trailer but it’s not as convenient. I admit, part of that was because my wife s car was the only one with a functional hitch.
But I’m talking a Ranger. Like an F-050. 115hp. This little guy has hauled so much already. The only thing it can’t technically do is tow a car and I don’t have the capital left to buy a nonrunning project car. I’ve been eyeing the new Maverick in hybrid form. But maybe by time I have the cash for such a new vehicle I won’t be doing reno projects anymore
'member when we were able to self host servers of our games? I member. CoD4 was awesome because of that, later the pirated version of MW2 too. These games (the first MW and MW2) are still alive because of that.
Riccitiello also came under fire in 2022 for referring to developers who don’t focus on microtransactions as the “biggest f*cking idiots” before apologizing.
Classic CEO brainrot. There’s more to life than just maximizing profit.
Maybe this will be the kick in the rear that gets people to drop them enmasse. I’d definitely explore the other options for any new projects I was starting.
Even if they drop this fee, is it really worth the headache in the future when they try something again?
No, Unity has always been an inferior engine to others such as Unreal Engine, Lumberyard, Blender, etc. In fact, the Unreal Engine 3 UDK became free well over a decade ago, and it’s basically Unity if Unity weren’t the scummy corporate vampires they’ve always been.
I’m sorry but Blender game engine was pretty cumbersome to use. It was officially dropped awhile ago and last I heard it was picked up by the community
Meanwhile Larian studio reminding everyone that a good way to make money and avoid layoffs is to be nimble and make good games.
Big Corps sees nimble and good studio making a good game, starts layoffs immediately.
The real murderers are the people that sell their studio to a big publisher. They immediately seal the fate of their teams. They will have layoffs eventually…
I love Larian and am ride or die with Swen et al. Have been ever since Divine Divinity was “we have Diablo at home” but ended up being a shockingly good (for its time) hybrid ARPG/CRPG.
But Larian are very much not the example of “how to do business”. Like Digital Extremes, they are a “legacy” studio that is INCREDIBLY lucky to have survived. Larian themselves had to deal with really shitty publisher deals (Beyond Divinity and I think also Divinity 2?) and games so bad it almost killed the studio (even Mortismal himself will acknowledge that Divinity 2 was a trash fire before the DLC… and was still a mess after). It was mostly “lucking out” and embracing Kickstarter before everyone hated it that saved them. And… Dragon Commander still got close.
And you know what has REALLY made them stable? That’s right. A deal with a major company to work on one of the most famous IPs in gaming (tabletop and video) history.
Larian are smart to try to maintain their size and not overly grow. But, like countless game devs have said and gotten shouted down for, they are far from “typical” and got REALLY lucky. Hell, Swen himself has mentioned the same in between the blurbs that outlets love to reference.
You forgot to mention they sold 30% stake of the company to the world‘s largest game conglomerate Tencent. They‘re also working on a supposedly much larger game than BG3 now and plan to release it within the next 4 years which means they will have to at least double their staff. Honestly, judging a developer entirely by a recent success isn‘t a good practice even when it‘s as massive as BG3. Most people who talk about Larian have a very warped impression. Even when their games are great recently, the tides can change rapidly in this industry.
Yeah did someone just run or interpret reports incorrectly? If a person subscribes to Game Pass and plays Hi Fi Rush for X months, I’d consider that a sale.
If they play it exclusively, sure. But people play tons of games on Gamepass. HiFi Rush and a dozen other games splitting that $15/month/account is a lot less rosy.
I’ve had Gamepass since the beginning, and since it was launched it I’ve bought maybe 1 or 2 Xbox games that weren’t on gamepass, whereas I used to average 2-3 a month. My overall spending on games has dropped massively since getting gamepass - especially on Xbox.
Just the fact that they played some minimum amount should tell them the game contributed to the subscriber’s enjoyment of Game Pass. Otherwise if they are both selling a game and giving it to Game Pass subscribers for free I’m not sure what they are expecting. Can’t have your cake and eat it too, but I’m sure they would like that.
Maybe they are hoping that Game Pass is like extended demos and will lead to more game sales. But there are too many new games all the time for most to hold my interest.
I think they expected more casual gamers to sign up for game pass while the more dedicated among us would still be buying new products.
Honestly, they’d probably be doing better if they didn’t put games on there day 1. Sony doesn’t put their biggest titles on PS+ at launch for a reason.
Halo and starfield had shit sales because we didn’t have to buy them. If they required people to buy the triple-A in-house titles at launch, the double-A stuff like HiFi Rush could still be released on gamepass day 1 as an incentive for people to subscribe.
As it stands, Starfield and Forza burned the money that should be used for HiFi Rush and Ori.
Absolutely agree, just recently instead of buying Manor Lords I just found a good deal on a month of Game Pass. I played it as much as I wanted (for now) for less than $10.
Hmmm it’s almost like Jim Ryan was on to something when he said gamepass wasn’t good for the industry and publishers didn’t like it during the antitrust trial with Microsoft.
It blows my fucking mind how stupid some people are just to be able to play the next rehashed bullshit CoD on gamepass instead of paying $70 a year for the same garbage.
The problem at this point is not so much that they don’t have games - they have released plenty in the past few years and most have been received positively.
The problem is that they released those games too late, and by that point, the ship had already sailed. After a streak of disappointing years with the XOne, they needed strong titles to pair up with XSeries. Instead, they released jack shit for an entire year, and after that the disappointment just grew further with the likes of Halo Infinite, Starfield and the weird vampire game nobody asked for.
By that point, everyone already got themselves a PS5, a Switch, a gaming PC or a handheld device. Xbox needed to show their fans they believed in their mission and were capable of delivering strong titles on their platform, but everyone saw their releases and said “Meh”.
The strong titles eventually came, but by that point they had already decided to port them over to the competition to offset the cost, and everyone saw the writing was on the wall for the platform.
Spencer can go on stage spewing whatever bullshit he wants, but nobody outside of the most diehard Xbox fans believe that the platform has a future - and it’s very hard to convince people to invest on your platform when it’s not certain how many more years it will be supported, and whether your store will remain accessible or shut down a few years down the line.
I know people hate the idea of console exclusivity, but without it, that’s what really killed the Xbox for me. I’ve got a gaming PC and a PS5 (not Pro), and I could afford an Xbox Series X if I really wanted to. I simply don’t know of any games on the platform that I want and can’t get somewhere else.
And that’s not coming from a reflexive Microsoft hater. I had an OG Xbox (and loved the old Duke controller), 360, and One S. I just barely played the latter.
It’s too expensive to make those kinds of exclusives anymore, which means they take longer to make, which means there are fewer of them. Sony can’t make enough PlayStation exclusives to justify me buying a PlayStation anymore, so I don’t buy one, so they put them on PC too, so there’s even less reason for me to have a PlayStation. Console exclusives are on their way out of fashion.
It doesn't help that the One S is an underpowered cheapo console, but that MS demands that all Xbox games must run on the One S with a pretty high FPS. You had major developers delaying or cancelling their Xbox release because they couldn't get it to work on the One S.
Part of the problem might be that I literally have no idea what their current console is called? Whoever was in charge of naming the last threeish xbox consoles should be fired out of a cannon
Yeah, totally agree on this. If you put the last two names in front of me and asked which was newer, I’d have no idea. The new one has multiple versions too so it makes it more confusing.
They had all that free marketting from people assuming the third one would be the 720 and they ditched it in favor of calling it the Xbox One, which everyone was already using for the name of the first Xbox. Still baffled by that one.
I can’t think of a single company worse at naming products and services than Microsoft. They have an abysmal track record. Some examples off the top of my head, all of which make web searches near-impossible:
They renamed Office 365 to just “365” (and then “365 Copilot”). The mind boggles.
They named their light extensible code editor “Visual Studio Code”, despite the fact that they had a long-established IDE (for code) called “Visual Studio”.
They called their application framework “the .NET framework”.
They called the replacement framework “.NET Core”, and after a few major versions, changed to calling it “.NET”, but it’s totally distinct from the .NET framework.
They called their ninth major desktop operating system “Windows 7”, then followed up with “Windows 8” and… “Windows 10”.
Their native web app replacement for Outlook is called “New Outlook”.
They recently renamed their Remote Desktop app “Windows App”. I have no words.
One would almost think they are having a laugh, but no it’s for real (I don’t think are intentionally trying to come up with such comically stupid naming policies).
Yeah, sometimes I wonder if they do these bad names for the free publicity of people complaining about them. But then there’s plenty examples where the name isn’t just clunky, but rather actively confusing for potential users…
Teams (New) is the next version of teams except I literally don’t know what they’ve done because I can’t see any difference.
New Teams appears to be a totally different project except again it looks identical but the calendar is different, they’ve actually managed to make the calendar worse, which is impressive since it was pretty goddamn unusable to start with.
I don’t understand why they have two development strands going on simultaneously.
My favorite is still Microsoft Zune… Which was a music store, music subscription service, a desktop app, and a physical media player.
It’s like they want their stuff to literally be unsearchable on the internet. Renaming Remote Desktop to Windows App is a prime example of this. Good luck trying to search for that and get what you want.
You all have no idea the idiocy of their naming and the confusion it causes with their business software: Microsoft Dynamics - This is an array of business software. Some of it is the same core platform with different features but many of the applications are acquisitions and run on different back-end platforms.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Customer relationship Management). They originally named their software to be the name of what it actually does. Not a bad idea so when people searched for that name, results would point to their software eventually. This is their Salesforce competitor.
After building market and name recognition and gaining market space, they renamed it to Dynamics Customer Engagement (CE). Then soon after split the product into modules or sub-products and called them: Dynamics 365 Sales, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Dynamics 365 Field Service (which was a module acquired by Microsoft but was originally called field one sky), Dynamics 365 Project Operations (which was originally called Project Service Automation).
They had MDM (Microsoft Dynamics Marketing) which was an email marketing platform. This MDM is not to be confused with MDM (Mobile data management) but was actually just the first iteration of their marketing tool. They re-wrote it from scratch and called it “Dynamics Marketing”. They then re-wrote it a third time (they are in the process of finishing the re-write) and it is now called “Microsoft Dynamics Customer Insights and Journey’s”. A name that just rolls right off the tongue.
Accounting Software Microsoft GP - This was a Microsoft software acquisition of accounting software called “GP”. Microsoft has been the steward of this project for a very long time but it is currently being phased out and is in end-of-life. Microsoft SL - Another acquisition. Accounting software called Solomon. Microsoft still sells and support this software. It serves a particular niche. Microsoft F&BO - This is a complicated one so I am just going to map out the names of what it was and what it has become but this is Microsoft’s SAP/Oracle competitor for large organizations: Axapta -> Dynamics AX -> Dynamics Finance and Operations (F&O) -> Dynamics Finance and Operations and Supply Chain -> Dynamics Finance and Business Operations (F&BO) Microsoft BC - Microsoft Business Central was originally acquired by Microsoft as “Navision”. They renamed it Microsoft NAV and more recently re-wrote and re-named it to Microsoft Business Central (BC).
Long post but they really just suck at names and rename things constantly. From the business side, I think it’s intentional as it causes people to re-evaluate the software without any baggage from the name.
Microsoft suck at naming things in general. It’s a problem across every single branch of the business, people keep calling Office 365 0365 because Microsoft insists on calling it O365 and people think that’s a zero. Also the name makes no sense anyway, why not call it Microsoft Office Online?
Then we have Microsoft Azure, except they renamed that to Entra despite the fact that both names are stupid. Then of course there is the entirety of the Windows OS lineup.
Entra isn’t Azure. Entra ID is what they renamed Azure Active Directory to. But not always; there’s also Azure Active Directory B2C (yes, that’s the fully expanded name). And various other Azure-branded things that may or may not belong together.
Microsoft are spectacularly bad at naming things.
It’s a miracle they haven’t renamed Windows 11 to “360 365” or “Live 6.5” or “Active-DOS Series X” or something.
Don’t know what you mean. Xbox, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Xbox One S, Xbox One X, Xbox Series S and Xbox Series X all make perfect sense and leave zero grounds for confusion at all
Not quite as important as the right to repair, but close in spirit: I would love to see a legal requirement for shut-down online games to release the server specs needed for the community to replace/maintain them.
Edit: And data export for existing players, so our game progress can be reconstructed on community servers, of course.
shutting down most central servers is a death sentence anyway. I'm not putting another decade of grinding into a private server when my Diablo 3 characters are gone.
Yeah… For battle royal and extraction shooters I think it would also be pretty hard to come close to the experience on private servers.
Granted, I wouldn’t mind being able to play e.g. Hunt Showdown with some friends on a private server/in a private match. It wouldn’t be what it is today, but it could still be fun.
It’s not like games with large populations are really getting shut down anyways. The games that are killed are already dead for most people. I really only am bothered by it when it’s a clearly single player/offline friendly game.
Agreed. But not impossible. Insignia got original Halo 2 Xbox Live servers back online. Most nights you can find a game easily with 20-40 people online during peak hours. It requires a soft mod and maybe 1-2 hours of set up to get online. If anyone could just turn on their old Xbox and play, I’m confident those numbers would be in the hundreds at least.
Allowing people to run private servers is an easy way to allow those that want to play to keep playing in an era where most games have some level of online functionality.
Well, when companies are cutting off people’s purchases and wiping works from our cultural history, a little bit of disregard for the law that is complicit with it is pretty much necessary.
Say, it’s through copyright violation that we can still play games from Mario Maker 1 even though the servers were shut down. People figured out how to copy it even though they weren’t allowed to.
If this is wrong, maybe the law should be fixed to provide a proper path.
This is not enough, the code is old with vulnerabilities that will be exploited with automation nowadays. To correctly do this you need open source server code, or to have it maintained.
What do you mean by specs then? The protocol? The “protocol” is the ABI of the server binary, the logic of it. The networking protocol is super simple. You need the server code for replicating any server.
I mean whatever is needed for the community to replace/maintain the servers, just as I said.
That would obviously include the network protocols, but might also include data structures, API contracts, map data, timetables, and any number of other things.
I wrote in general terms deliberately, since it would mean different things for different games, and to allow for the possibility of releasing source code instead of descriptive specs.
(And no, source code is not the only way to do it. If that were the case, the community-developed game servers that have been made through reverse engineering could never have existed.)
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