Just so we're clear, the first pass of localization of every game you've played in the past decade has been machine-generated.
Which is not to say the final product was, people would then go over the whole text database and change it as needed, but it's been frequent practice for a while for things like subtitles and translations to start from a machine generated first draft, not just in videogames but in media in general. People are turning around 24h localization for TV in some places, it's pretty nuts.
Machine generated voices are also very standard as placeholders. I'm... kinda surprised nobody has slipped up on that post-AI panic, although I guess historically nobody noticed when you didn't clean up a machine-translated subtitle, but people got good at ensuring all your VO lines got VOd because you definitely notice those.
As with a lot of the rest of the AI panic, I'm confused about the boundaries here. I mean, Google Translate has used machine learning for a long time, as have most machine translation engines. The robot voices that were used as placeholders up until a few years ago would probably be fine if one slipped up, but newer games often use very natural-sounding placeholders, so if one of those slips I imagine it'd be a bit of drama.
I guess I don't know what "AI generated" means anymore.
I haven't bumped into the offending text in the game (yet), but I'm playing it in English, so I guess I wouldn't have anyway? Neither the article nor the disclosure are very clear.
That said, the game is pretty good, if anybody cares.
Dude I have never been or wanted to be a "seasoned senior software engineer". I mean, respect to them, can't get things going without them, but I don't think of that as an aspirational badge of honor thing.
Also, I'm shocked to find I've been mirroring your "rethorical approach". You really do overestimate how much of your posts I've been reading, because I could not tell you what that is. Is the "approach" to wonder if your callousness comes from not having first hand experience? Because let me tell you, I got there all on my own.
Anyway, it's good that we both find each other's opinion entirely irrelevant, because I sure have better things to do and not enough self-control to do them instead of this. Toodles indeed.
Yeeeah, you haven't worked in gaming at all, have you?
I mean, I believe that you've been paid to code at some point and I'm hoping you're not just being a dick on the Internet for sport, but man, all these I'm-such-a-competent-software-engineer rants are not giving you the authority brownie points you think they are.
Whatever, if you know you know. I'm not interested. Just... in the off-chance anybody here reads this far down this thread, couple of things: one, stop it, what are you doing. Two, this is not what a person that knows what they're talking about sounds like. He'll try to tell you it is, but it is really not.
You are factually wrong about that. A whole bunch of running an online game is dependent on the platform, depending on how you're running it.
If you built a game without cross-play and are relying on the first party for some of the online functionality, then making it work outside of it is extra effort. And even if that third party service isn't Xbox or Steam it is very likely to be a third party service like Pragma or whatever, so it's still something you'd have to replace.
So no, most of your Xbox games won't work if you remove all traces of Xbox Live. That's not how this works. And if your answer for future games is for it to be illegal to buy third party networking tools then your plan isn't going to work, either.
But also, it's not what's being proposed in the first place. This Ross guy even assumes it won't work like that explicitly. His argument is that third party providers would change to comply. Which... maybe? But then you're just moving the problem around. How would they change to comply? Who handles their costs when a client drops support? That's not how any of this works, their services aren't free for a reason, you can't just have them continue to provide them for free to every client by law.
You are wrong. A corporate entity will always provide some service under any version of "SKG".
I guess you could make it so it doesn't, but then all console games are excluded (since they all use some central first party API), all Steam games are excluded for the same reason and you'd be forcing developers to build their own substitutes for everything from hosting platforms to login platforms.
I suspect you're misunderstanding what some of the stuff means or you're visualizing something that just doesn't fit how online games are built. Are you picturing a situation where no third parties are providing anything at all? No Steamworks, no Xbox Live, no servers of any kind hosted anywhere? Because that can't be the requirement, unless you want to make every game since Quake 3 illegal.
No, that's the migration to EoL. He talks through the difference in very articulate ways. Specifically, it's the transition from those features being centralized to them being handled without their support. So the game goes from a central server to peer-to-peer, matchmaking goes from their service to the Steam API for it and so on.
That's what end of life looks like if you need to keep the game running, The game won't run without matchmaking, so you need a matchmaking solution. They went with this. They could have gone with a server browser. One thing wouldn't necessarily be less work than the other, the idea is they had to reimplement that chunk of the game in a way the community could maintain.
If you just put the game out and don't enable some solution for matchmaking then there's no matchmaking and you can only play by yourself.
If you're frustrated that this is done with such complications imagine how it feels for the people doing this on the way to a certain layoff or bankrupcy. Which is the whole point people are trying to impress here.
I was being sarcastic, those aren't indie hits, they are genre-making, classic games that define multiple generations of gaming. The guy is a massive part of gaming history.
Also not just a writer. You can go find elsewhere in the thread where I link to him breaking down a number of technical issues in the process of migrating Anacrusis from dedicated central servers to the peer-to-peer community edition. I'm not surprised. Not only did he start the studio, but he's a Valve vet, their whole thing is horizontal working.
I'm also not surprised because most designers, producers or creative directors working in an online game like TF2, Portal 2 or Left 4 Dead would be pretty savvy about networking issues, the same way most screenwriters can understand how a movie is shot.
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.
He hasn't been with Valve for a while. His last game was The Anacrusis, an indie game from a studio he founded. It launched, it bombed and it got converted to a community edition. I guess you not knowing it exists explains why that happened.
He is perhaps the most specific example of what this petition would require in the industry I can think of. Along with KO City, which also converted their game from third party published paid to free to play and then to a community server edition.
That does not seem to be accurate in Faliszek's case. He did not "take his first steps into trying to make an indie game", he led the studio that did make it, led development on the game and then proceeded to go through the exact process we're discussing to make it community-runnable.
He has DEFINITELY seen the code needed to run the server architecture, if the 30 minute video breaking down the process of decoupling the game from central servers he posted today is any indication (which I did watch, including the parts that are about organic farming, because Chet actually IS interesting enough for me to spend my day checking out his manifesto).
No, I'm just unwilling to engage in the complexity on 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.
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.
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.
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 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.