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Killed the greatest gamer initiative out there for content (fedia.io)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/gaming@lemmy.world
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The "Change my mind" meme with the face of "Thor" from "PirateSotware"
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[–] -3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (13 children)

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.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (12 children)

    Speaking of TED Talks, I'm not reading all of that.

    But nobody is talking about running a service. Sure, someone might open up Anime CCG Pocket Collection 2045 Big Continuation Service, run like the original even with support staff. But maybe I'm fine with Joe's ACPC2045 server, because he's my mate and we just want to goof around.

    There are plenty of fan projects out there that run entire big services for their games. Keeping MMOs alive but also entirely new services based on stuff like Minecraft.

    If ACPC2045 wants to make this into an expensive complicated (for them and us) endeavour, let them. There will be plenty of other games that will handle the new requirements with grace because they are not incompetent. Look how quickly Ubisoft was able to turn around with The Crew 2.

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  • [–] -1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (11 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (10 children)

    Yeah, but see, my mate Joe, he just doesn't run the sign up page or authentication or the matchmaking or the seasonal DLC or the voice chat or the community forums.

    He just enters some stuff by hand into the Oracle DB and off we go.

    I'm serious. Big corporations tend to overcomplicate this stuff all the time. Especially because they tend to run several components as one. But when you break it down each one is not that complicated. I've done that. As my job. Saying it's not feasible is a massive strawman.

    Because as always, if they can do it so can we. This will never change.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (9 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (8 children)

    I'm currently watching the video and he is approaching this as if some company would continue complete support with every functionality still available without any interruption. His idea of the "simplest matchmaking" are freaking lobby codes. He can't even fathom a future without Steam.

    For him almost everything involves accounts and big companies and legal entities and central authorities. Stuff you do not need. Never ever. He is caught up on self made problems.

    If you put into law that a game has to remain playable developers will figure it out. Either they are stupid and tie everything to central unchangeable entities or they will add a config file where you enter an IP address and call it a day. Capitalism will find the cheapest way to comply.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    That's continued support. Not EOL. If continued support is his way to EOL his game that is of course his right. But also impossible to guarantee, precisely because of the reasons he listed. Thus an idiotic impossible stance to uphold.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (4 children)

    As long as a corporate entity is providing service the game is not EOL and beyond SKG.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)
    1. This is about future games, not current games.
    2. Yes, the legal requirement would (or should) mean after EOL absolutely no dependency on outside services unless the infinite availability of that service can be guaranteed, which is of course impossible.

    None of the currently existing services like Steam, Xbox Live, etc are technically needed to run the games. They offer additional services. Hence they are called services. But you do not need any of them to run the core games.

    I'm not advocating for developers to implement these services themselves. I'm advocating for the absence of these services not making my games unplayable. I'm willing to compromise for that to only be the case after support for my games was dropped.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    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.

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