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.
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.
I disagree. I care about preserving multiplayer games.
DRM servers going down is a thing and I think we can all agree that it should be regulated. In practice it exists in that grey area where Youtube also lives where... yeah, sure, cracking it is not technically legal but nobody is going to enforce that so if you want to play it you bypass the DRM and go on with your day.
But I do care about keeping some version of those multiplayer games. It's a massive loss not seen in media since the early days of television to have a massive cultural artifact just poof itself out of existence at regular intervals. We need a solution to that.
If what this argument is about is just forcing people to keep their activation and authentication servers online or removing DRM then it's been a pointless argument.
It's not what the petition says, not what the advocates for the movement are talking about and not the core of the issue, though. The Crew, which started the entire argument, wasn't a single player game with discontinued DRM, it was talking to centralized servers all along. The Matrix's MMO or Vanilla WoW before that became a commercial product did not fit the bill here, and yet were the things we all think about when we think about this issue.
The reason this is a perfect shitstorm of online grief is that you're here really wishing this is some Star Wars scenario where your side is the Rebel Alliance and on the other side there's a bunch of developers going "That's not how the Force works!".
You can't boil down a complex technical and legal issue to "it's consumer vs corporation" and hope that magically makes servers portable or implementation feasible. And you can't lump people who know what they're talking about and aren't part of a particularly large corporation with your good guys vs bad guys fantasy just because they disagree with you on the issues.
I don't disagree. My caveat would be that this can't be a blank check to just pull the plug at will. There are different types of server dependencies and different types of remedies here.
I would consider a time-gated mandatory refund for software that stops working within a certain term. That seems like a significant disincentive for the specific type of thing we're talking about. I'd consider carving exceptions in EU regulation for modding and community server replacements of discontinued software. I'd consider obligations to remove certain server checks (e.g. DRM-only or activation checks) on discontinued software and so on.
You lose some face when you go online with delusions of large GaaS releases suddenly generating some magical portable package that runs on end user hardware, but that doesn't mean there isn't an issue or available solutions. 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.
Which corpos? These guys are both indies at the moment.
You keep wanting this to be a "us versus them" of big companies vs users and that's not the conversation that's happening here.
But hey, by all means I would love to have Faliszek act as a Valve corporate representative and have the irrational side-taking on the Internet argue itself into a singularity.
Of the two guys in question one seems to be a tiny indie dev making single player games. The other is a hugely established figure working on a multiplayer game, but I'm going to say Faliszek's career isn't particularly contingent on this argument, considering that he's a narrative director, first and foremost.
See, this is kind of the problem we're having. You guys are just... saying stuff.
I don't agree with the ultimate takeaway of either of these guys on this issue, fundamentally, but if you're going to stand here and say that they are arguing against this because they are making money out of some server-disconnection racket then you're going to make me stand here and call bullshit because it just doesn't follow.
And so the drama spiral goes deeper and the internet becomes a little crappier.
Because local servers and plugs aren't the same thing.
I think this whole conversation is mixing two types of disagreements and is going to end poorly for that reason.
One disagreement is technical: can developers provide communities with a safe, functional iteration of their servers to deploy freely in such a way that discontinued games continue to operate?
The answer is "probably not". The devs speaking out aren't wrong about this. This requires rebuilding the entire concept of server architecture for games and centralized servers. Not only are older games probably unsalvageable for that process, but any game that is buying online services would be priced out and you'd end up with only the largest publishers being able to afford basic features like, say, matchmaking.
The other is of design philosophy: is it okay for live service games to exist in their current form, where they run for a bit of time and then, at the sole discretion of the IP owners, they go away with no recourse to ever run them again in any form, ever. Are we cool with that?
I am not. Some of these devs seem to be. I mean, they'd love if there was an alternative, but if the choice is between getting to have MMOs and quirky massive shooters they would rather keep the space deregulated and creatively available than restrict it.
The first one isn't much of a matter of opinion, but there are intermediate steps that can be taken. But because a bunch of people are disagreeing on the second issue with people who a) know a lot more than they do about the first disagreement, and b) aren't particularly inclined to meet them halfway on the second, we end up with this bit of entrenched online drama where ignorance, activism and disagreement is quickly becoming toxic.
I don't have an answer for this, other than maybe... please stop? That'd be nice.
I think the discussion about preservation of live games and consumer rights in server-based games needs to be had. But it needs to be mature and educated. The more the collapse of this petition turns into shitty, petty arguments full of disingenuous misrepresentations and misinformation (on both sides) the more inclined I am to say let it all die and maybe try again with a better understanding of what's being discussed, from scratch.
I was pointing out elsewhere that I hadn't heard of this guy before today, but Chet Faliszek, who you may know from indie hits like... let's see... Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress 2, Half Life 2 and Portal 2, seems to not be on board for very similar reasons.
I don't fully agree with either of them, but targeting a specific guy just because he happens to be the one that got into a call/response thread with the figurehead of the thing you support is pretty toxic interneting, and I don't like it.
I think maybe I'm spoiled by the movies, but... I kind of hate it? I hate all the ways they had to cherry pick Dune stuff to turn it into a survival crafting MMO like Conan, especially in the parts where the lore fits worse than Conan. And the story is extremely videogamey. I think the new films are already a bit overly literal when it comes to choosing between the politics and the psychedelia, but man, does Dune Awakening do videogame-ass videogame dream sequences.
The disconnected, patchy reality of the original Cryo Dune got to the right feel accidentally, but there's something to seeing the setting reduced to a skin over Conan Exiles that seriously rubs me the wrong way.
That may be legitimate if the Windows settings are the factory settings. That's why I was pointing at memory management, because if you have a 32 GB device and you're assigning 3GB to VRam while the SteamOS version does something different things may get funky results in some games, especially running at higher resolutions and so on.
So it's entirely possible that the out-of-the-box setup of these machines on Windows and SteamOS are legitimately that different but that a better Windows config would mitigate it, which is still bad for something sold with a preinstalled Windows image, for the record. Or maybe the overhead of Win11 is just that big, I don't know. Would certainly love to see someone look into it.
I can tell you that bumping the default VRAM allocation on Windows handhelds has taken some AAA games from unplayable to quite solid in my experimentation, but I'm not gonna sit here swapping OSs and games back and forth for benchmarks. At least not for free.
Whenever I hear the Ubisoft narrative I feel nothing but boiling wrath for all the people who chose to not play the two Prince of Persia 2D platformers they made. I am thoroughly bored of their open world fare, but it's astonishing how reliably their most creative, better games are their worst performers.
Narratively it goes off the rails and it has some pacing and balance issues as well, but it's still a great game.
And how refreshing is it to see a great looking RPG that doesn't feel the need to be an action game? Maybe they can convince Square to stop making crappy button mashers and go back to making good to great turn based games for all those cool combat animations.
On the Deck itself there are APU customizations at play, but not here. I don't know that the underlying OSs are fundamentally different. I know one is arch and the other is Fedora, but they're both immutable distros and should mostly be running the same things when launching in game mode.
For battery life it could just be a configuration difference in how the benchmarks were run on both OSs, or even down to the manufacturer software. Benchmarking hardware is hard, what can I say. I can say Dave2D isn't great at it, which I suppose is not the point of his channel, but I certainly wish some of the more technical channels weren't distracted right now, because there's an interesting three-way comp to be had here and some digging into interesting things.