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wsve

252 karmajoined hace 3 años

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wsve
·hace 4 días·discuss
Geez man. I've seen your replies in this thread multiple times. At this point, I have to wonder: why are you so against legislating the actual sale of ownership of video games? How could enacting this theoretical legislation, that you believe is a consumer "preference" (hard disagree, but I'll allow for argument) be in any way detrimental to you? What compels you to lick the boot to a polished shine?
wsve
·hace 4 días·discuss
> Rent and Subscribe would NOT be clear because they imply ongoing payment.

Yes, exactly. Video game distributors should be forced to choose a pricing model: "Sell", or "Rent". No more "License, until we or the DRM service decides to revoke access for any reason/we go out of business/the DRM service goes out of business".
wsve
·hace 4 días·discuss
Don't blame "regulation" on this, as if politicians do this because they're dogmatically "pro-regulation". That is not a real political stance, and it's childish to frame these bills in that manner.

California AB 2426 is a very deliberate and well considered bill, because it does exactly what it was designed to do: feign consumer protections, while leaving easy loopholes for those companies the bill protects. Those legislators who signed it did not have consumer protections in mind. Gavin Newsom is not interested in rocking the boat of corporate power, and neither are the lobbyists who pushed for that bill.

Don't blame "regulations". Blame, and vote out, the authors and signers, because they clearly do not have your interests in mind.
wsve
·hace 6 días·discuss
Maybe, but regularly reframing regulations that people like (consumer protections, OSHA, lemon laws, etc.) as regulations will hopefully remind/reinforce that the whole "pro/anti regulations" framing is a childish mindset.
wsve
·hace 6 días·discuss
All your examples make clear to the customer that their access is temporary and conditional on their continued and ongoing payment, and that ownership of the good/service is retained by the seller.

On the other hand, "buying a game" is given the guise of ownership, despite true ownership still being retained by the seller, obscured by the fact you're making a one-time payment. It'd be reasonable if the terminology used was "rent" or "subscribe" to a game with a periodic payment, but that's not what's advertised.

It is deceiving, unnecessary, and anti-consumer.
wsve
·hace 10 días·discuss
I think you missed the truth behind this article: private Minecraft servers are not piracy, or illegal, in any sense. The EULA that server admins must agree to in order to use the server states that other servers are allowed.

There's no reason to move to an open source client, since Minecraft is already more open that the vast majority of games, and has shown no signs of closing that access in the future.
wsve
·el mes pasado·discuss
That's right, my bad, I just meant that he's clearly doing just fine but said something very wrong instead
wsve
·el mes pasado·discuss
> A single match might require separate proprietary systems for matchmaking, player inventories, anti cheat, metrics tracking, and database management. Many of those come with licenses that don't allow you to just give away the code for free.

None of those things are required to be supported by this law. It's the minimum viable product to enable multiplayer play.

- Ditch the matchmaking, players can build their own communities and use server lists for discovery - Ditch the anti-cheat if you can't distribute it, it's not necessary for online play - Ditch the metrics, of course - Let the player download their inventory save file or something, idc
wsve
·el mes pasado·discuss
The law isn't requiring that all online features of the game be available. Just a minimal viable product to play the base game online. No storefronts, no news prompts, no matchmaking servers, just server lists. You don't need AWS for that.
wsve
·el mes pasado·discuss
> Second is an actual concern about this specific regulation. This is a concrete concern about the incentives it creates.

Like I said in my OP comment, the problem with saying "this regulation will push devs to subscription-based game models" is that it does not explain why that would happen. It just assumes it would.

This argument to me is like saying "forcing people to wear seatbelts will push them to take the bus instead". Why would this be such a problem that people ditch their whole mode of transit? I see it that way because I can't think of a single case where designing your game server architecture with decommissioning and redistributing to your users in mind would be difficult or costly at all, and I have seen no convincing explanations
wsve
·el mes pasado·discuss
Consider the infrastructure you're talking about. What parts of the game service would need to be implemented with micro services and/or calls to a cloud computing and storage? It would be matchmaking, storefronts, news updates, etc.

Running a single dedicated server on a home computer to play with whatever community you've curated requires none of these. Any sane game server architecture would already be essentially a single executable since you want performance and synchronicity within a single "match" or "world".

You say most games won't be able to release server software. Can you provide an example of a game which could not possibly be disentangled from its cloud architecture? I'm having trouble thinking of any
wsve
·el mes pasado·discuss
For releases you're generally building it all at once in a merge request/deployment pipeline anyway
wsve
·el mes pasado·discuss
Please reread my initial comment. That's the assumption everyone is making, but WHY would it actually cost so much more? What's so much more expensive? Some games already do this, why would it be so much more expensive for others?
wsve
·el mes pasado·discuss
Why would releasing your server executable as a standalone be difficult to impossible to comply with the law? Many games already do this
wsve
·el mes pasado·discuss
> The most obvious example is pretty much any form of inviting a player/having idenities. The storage of users and inviting them is what brings in the scaling complexities in your average online game, and that's when you'd use a service harder to have a self hosting equivalent of.

A bill like this isn't asking for a 1-to-1 level of service once the company servers are turned off, it's a minimal product to make multiplayer play at all possible. The assumption is that, like with most fanbases for a product, you'll have to form a community of people to engage with it on your own.

The solution is to do what so many older games like Quake or Minecraft or TF2 have done since day 1: Release the server executable, and allow direct LAN connections (and disable login requirements).
wsve
·el mes pasado·discuss
> so they become more attractive than they currently are by definition.

Please reread my comment. You're doing the exact same thing. You're saying this like it's a given, but it is not. WHY would it be more attractive?
wsve
·el mes pasado·discuss
Blanket dismissal of regulations is about as silly as a blanket dismissal of laws. Some laws are "bad", some are "good", but the point is who do they hurt, and who do they serve? Regulations are tools, like laws, and can be written to serve the needs of the people, for good things.
wsve
·el mes pasado·discuss
> I've seen some supporters of this style bill push for 'offline play' being a requirement.

That seems a bit silly to my eyes, self-hosting a server seems sufficient. But not included in this bill, so not an issue here

> Think if fortnite died tomorrow how many different servers it would take to host. Could an argument be made that an end user couldn't be expected to launch a dozen aws services? More dev time, more costs.

In this specific case, it's not so hard to imagine a single home computer handling the traffic of 100 connected users for a game of battle royale, the server compute for those kinds (baked-in world, low physics) games can be cheaper than running an instance of the game. Just some physics calculations, networking, and game state.

The main point would be if you start development from the premise that your server executable will be released to the users, the architecture/performance considerations are not that different at all.
wsve
·el mes pasado·discuss
> gives the game developers a perverse incentive to further embrace more exploitive revenue models such as free to play and subscription based services?

This is what I fail to see an explanation of anywhere in these comments. WHY would this law make a subscriber-based revenue model so much more enticing? WHY would this law make single-purchase games with multiplayer servers suddenly so non-viable from a business perspective?

The latent assumption I keep seeing is that the mere existence of a regulation in an area will drive people away from that model, but that's simply not how businesses operate. It's a cost/benefit analysis. So what is the cost?
wsve
·el mes pasado·discuss
Agreed that's what they were likely trying to do with that comment, and I'd argue the problem with it is that it fear-mongers about regulations while failing to actually scrutinize what the negative effects are.

Also, we should really drop this restaurant analogy, it's ill-fitting and clearly distracting from the main point.