It’s an unreliable solution, because there’s no guarantee that even dedicated and talented individuals will be able to reverse engineer every online server, if that game has those individuals in its customer base in the first place. The solution seems to be either legislation, which this campaign is seeking, or for the market to outright reject online-only games, which it isn’t doing. I don’t even really have an alternative to online-only games in some genres, like FPS for instance, to send my dollars toward instead; sports games are in a similar position, since the sports organizations all signed exclusivity contracts.
Comment on The end of Stop Killing Games [Accursed Farms]
daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
I’ve always thought that the only solution to this problem is being able to reverse engineering central servers and thus being effectively being able to pirate online only games.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 day ago
ICastFist@programming.dev 1 day ago
The solution is legislation, as without that, we can’t expect companies to decide to release either the executables or source code for running the servers, other than a handful looking to get some attention and goodwill.
chrislowles@lemmy.zip 1 day ago
Ross mentions reverse engineering towards the end of the vid so it’s definitely top of mind now for the future of the initiative, bar rebooting it with someone else. Agreed that it’s really the only alternative when the industry is as steeped in back alley deals and skeevy dishonest commentary as it is.
normalexit@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Reverse engineering the server is reverse engineering the whole game. It’s going to require skilled engineers and a significant time investment. It may be possible, but not practical.
Also, the client will likely verify it is talking to a legitimate server by checking a certificate, so you may also have to hack the client too.
At some point you’re better off working a job and coming up with the $50 or making your own game with hookers and blackjack.