GOG being pushed out of the market. They’re one of the only stores that actually give you ownership of your games, and they don’t have the same indomitable foothold that Steam does.
It would be all too easy for Microsoft to strangle one of their key markets by taking a loss on sales and offering publishers 150% sales price in exchange for exclusive distribution of 90s and 2000s era PC games or console ports.
This has been explicitly attempted 3 times already, and that really didn’t work out well for anybody who tried it.
Epic Games Store still resorts to bribing people with free games to keep their monthly active user numbers up, hemorrhaging money to attract users who are rarely interested in anything more than freebies.
EA and Ubisoft tried to forgo Steam releases in favor of their own stores and launchers in an attempt to keep 100% of the revenue. They eventually relented, releasing their games on Steam again. Even Blizzard joined in, adding Diablo 4 and Overwatch 2 to Steam.
And Microsoft’s attempt to dethrone Steam by releasing games through the Windows app store just ended up with Valve funneling considerable resources into helping Linux and WINE become a viable alternative to Windows for gaming.
Unless Valve enshittifies or legal shenanigans ensue, they’re pretty unlikely to be pushed out of the market. No single game or game series is good enough to capture the entire market of Steam users and permanently drive them to alternative platforms. On top of that, Steam has a huge following of users who are loyal to the company, which is both insane and insanely hard to compete against.
or they will also become Streaming Platforms
Maybe, maybe not. I don’t see it happening, though. Valve makes money hand over fist from digital sales alone, and they have more to lose in pissing off their customers by selling subscriptions than they have to gain by selling subscriptions.
I am concerned about GOG and PC hardware prices, though.
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.
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.
I think a lot of the devs speaking out are missing the forest for the trees.
There are unquestionably technical challenges involved in having to release the server software for games. These aren’t the days of Team Fortress 2, and a lot of multiplayer games require clusters and massive tech stacks to handle authentication, persistent storage, and cross play. Add on to that legal challenges like licensing of third-party software, and yeah, it’s nearly impossible for a publisher to just release source code or an executable file for the server software.
Multi-player games being killed is an issue, but it’s not the big issue that preservationists and consumers care about. The big issue is single player games being designed with the requirement that they connect to publisher servers for activation or for some multi-player component, then the publishers shut down the server and render the entire game inoperable. For example, I have an old CD copy of Bioshock for PC (a completely single player game) that I can’t do fuck-all with unless I crack it, because it’s tied to Games for Windows Live.
It’s not reasonable to expect a developer to make their proprietary server code available after a game reaches end of life, and I absolutely agree with the devs on that point. It’s more than reasonable to expect a developer to not be allowed to lock the entire game behind a limited-life service that isn’t strictly required for it to be a playable game.
Oh yeah. And the rechargeable mouse that needs to be flipped upside down to charge simply because the designers hated the idea of people leaving it plugged in constantly. Or the Mac Pro wheels that cost almost as much as an entire handheld PC.
The first flagship phones with the headphone jack removed.
The normalization of phones without expandable storage.
A phone where you buy the charger separately.
A walled-garden ecosystem without sideloading.
An OS that removed support for kernel extensions.
An authorized repair program that replaces instead of repairs.
A line of ATX-sized desktop PCs with storage modules that are only accepted if they’re the same capacity as the ones you originally bought the PC with.
Their entire software and hardware is an affront to personal ownership, right to repair, and consumer rights.
To be fair to Ubisoft, the newest Prince of Persia game was a great metroidvania game.
To be fair-er to Ubisoft, they can go fuck themselves for closing down the studio that made said game only a few months later.
They can make good games. They just clearly would rather rehash the same tired formula that they’ve been running with for the past decade while unreasonably expecting to make more money each time.
Buddy, quit while you’re ahead not too far behind. You’re just proving what @Tattorack said: you don’t understand the difference between patents, copyright, and trademarks.
For people interested in what’s been going on with Limited Run, here’s a 90-minute video that goes into a lot of detail about the sketchy stuff they did before this latest controversy:
Unfortunately, it’s not that straightforward anymore. Emulation of modern consoles exists in a legal gray area that may or may not be illegal under the DMCA.
With something like the Switch, the ROMs are encrypted in a way that they can only be unencrypted with keys that are derived from data baked into the console itself. Yuzu for example is still protected as an emulator for some hardware/software platform, but it wouldn’t be able to run retail games without being able to decrypt the ROMs.
And that’s kind of the problem. Creating tools for preservation and interoperability is permitted by the DMCA, but tools that are made in part or whole to bypass DRM measures is explicitly not. That conflict hasn’t been tested in court either, so the first ruling is going to be the one that sets the precedent.
This is my problem with your argument, you’re saying that because of piracy they’re entitled to crack down on emulation.
My argument isnt that they’re entitled to crack down on emulation because of piracy. My argument is that people blatantly and publicly using emulators to play pirated, unreleased games emboldens Nintendo.
I believe Nintendo isn’t willing to test that gray area in court without having something to support their anti-emulation position. What they want to do is bully devs into settling because it’s a low-risk way to kill development on the emulator without opening up that can of worms that could make Switch emulators unambiguously legal. But, the more evidence Nintendo gets to support their argument, the more confident they become in thinking they would end up winning if they don’t get that settlement.
Keep in mind that when they did finally go after Yuzu’s devs, they went after them for creating software to circumvent the Switch’s DRM (that gray area I mentioned) and not for creating an emulator. If they were actually confident in thinking the legal answer to “is an emulator that decrypts ROMs illegal” was “yes,” they would’ve just went after Yuzu a long time ago instead of waiting 7 years into the console lifestyle.
Don’t get me wrong: Nintendo deserves no sympathy here. They could do many things to make their games more accessible, but they chose not to.
That’s not to say asshats like this deserves any either, though. The homebrew community and emulator developers step in to make Switch software interoperable, and they end up being the ones getting screwed over by both Nintendo and the people who provoked Nintendo.
I don’t normally victim-blame, but streaming an unreleased game is really asking for it.
It’s one thing to pirate a game for yourself. That’s just called being poor or being someone who doesn’t believe in copyright. The only party who can argue they’re being harmed is the developer, who may or may not have received a sale otherwise.
It’s another thing to pirate an unreleased game and stream it for others. If you do that and receive ad revenue or donations, you’re profiting off of someone else’s work. Not only that, but you’re also harming the console modding community by incentivizing the publisher to go after homebrew developers and emulator developers. It wasn’t a coincidence that shortly after some asshat streamed an unreleased Zelda game being played on Yuzu, Nintendo decided to finally come down on the emulator with an iron fist.
In conclusion, between pirating a game to enjoy yourself and pirating a game to play on a for-profit streaming platform, one of those two things is morally gray and the other is someone being a selfish fuck.
Epic Games is also a private company… and they’re the posterchild for “fuck the consumer, we want a monopoly.”
It might have something to do with Epic being partly owned by Tencent and Disney, but it more likely comes down to the philosophies of their CEOs. Gabe came from a corporate shithole and runs with the diametrically-opposed view that good service = loyal customers = profit. Sweeney, not so much.
I don’t think people are upset at you calling out Nintendo for their rampant lawsuits, but instead at your dismissive reply when someone provided a list of games to answer your question.