I can explain the technical realities of this industry to you all day, but I cannot understand them for you. When you run out of actual counter-arguments and retreat into throwing out ad hominem insults and blaming “AI” for my formatting, it just proves you have no capacity to refute the facts. Calling me a bootlicker doesn’t make your technical ignorance disappear.
You claim that DDoS protection, data compliance, and live engineers are optional costs. That alone exposes your complete lack of experience in IT operations. If you spin up a public-facing authentication server for a global product without enterprise DDoS mitigation, it will be packet-flooded and taken offline by a botnet within fifteen minutes. If you are authenticating digital licenses, you are verifying user accounts. That means you are handling Personally Identifiable Information, which immediately subjects you to GDPR compliance frameworks. And if you think a global server cluster runs indefinitely without engineers to update expiring SSL certificates, patch OS vulnerabilities, and restart crashed instances, you live in a fantasy world. Those aren’t strawman costs. They are the non-negotiable reality of operating anything on the modern internet.
Your comment about having to run down to GameStop to trade a game with a friend proves you don’t even understand the 2013 infrastructure you helped destroy. The Family Sharing plan didn’t require a retailer at all. It allowed up to ten designated friends to instantly access your entire digital library directly from their own consoles via the cloud. The retailer partnership was a completely separate feature designed to let you trade in digital licenses for store credit—a secondary market feature people are begging for today. Consumers killed an infrastructure that would have let them instantly share games across the country from their couch because they were misinformed then, and you are clearly still misinformed about it over a decade later.
Now you are backtracking and claiming no one expects a live service game to run indefinitely. If you acknowledge that servers eventually shut down, and you still can’t refute the fact that stripping out server-authoritative code to build an offline mode requires months of expensive, manual engineering labor, then your entire argument evaporates. You can’t admit that servers must eventually die, and then complain when a publisher refuses to perform hundreds of thousands of dollars of uncompensated labor to build a bespoke offline off-ramp just for you.
Beyond all that, your hopes, dreams, and unreasonable expectations are moot. The industry doesn’t care what you think, and isn’t going to give you what you want, because people like you complain far more than you spend. The market has changed beyond recognition since those Xbox One/PS4 days and now you and your ilk represent a rounding error. The industry will continue to move forward providing their real customers with what they actually want, with or without you. Maybe you should look into a new hobby you can afford.
Doomsider@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Absolute nonsense, you spewed a bunch of AI garbage at a person who has worked in the server space before.
An authentication server does not need to store personal information. You inability to understand the actual technology is obvious at this point. You grossly overestimate the amount of work an engineer would need to do to keep an authentication server running. You say the kind of garbage a Cloudfare salesman would. You server would be taken instantly offline! What a joke.
Certainly if you are targeted by a botnet you are going to have problems, but nothing last forever and if you don’t put a target on your back then it is not a problem generally. I get people like to pay protection fees to the digital “Mafia” to protect them from the masses because of their shit business practices.
In fact, the problem with botnets is because of corporations security practices not despite them. They have created their own problem because of lax security and then an expensive solution is used like Cloudflare instead of them just securing their Internet connect devices to begin with.
I am not backtracking shit. Please point out where I said or Stop Killing Games said anything like this. At this point you are just being fucking obtuse pretending the discussion is about keeping live service games going indefinitely.
You say the industry doesn’t care what I think but then blame consumers for dictating what corporations are doing!? Clearly you are being disingenuous here.
The only person who needs to pack up and go home is you. Cheers!
TimothyOilypants@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
How many years have you spent in the video game industry?
Doomsider@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I never said I was in the game industry. Since you ask, yes I was heavily into the development of games in the past. I was also a reseller for VPS so I have spent a large amounts of time in CLI configuring servers around the world.
We are obviously not going to see eye to eye here because we come from completely different paradigms. It is okay. I don’t like where corporations are taking us. I see the greatest games studios being bought up and shuttered by corporate greed.
I will not pretend that they have advanced the art of video games. They have instead invested in the commercialization of video games trying to extract as much value as they can. Luckily, indy developers have stepped up where massive corporations have failed. Most of the best games I have played in the last decade have been non-mainstream.
I think your cynical comment about not being able to afford gaming has some truth to it. I personally have eliminated Windows from my household because I grew tired of having a spyware OS. I don’t spend the money I used to on video games and I have taken months long breaks from playing everyday to work on other projects and to spend more time with friends and family.
TimothyOilypants@lemmy.ca 1 day ago
I have hundred of game credits to my name. My opinions from direct, lived experience, not assumptions about my niche expertise may apply to an industry I don’t really understand.
Great! Those games will continue to exist. Not everyTHING needs to be for everyONE. If AAA gaming isn’t for you, then move on. This entire minority circle jerk about DRM, digital only, etc, etc. is a giant case of “bean soup”.
There are 3,700,000,000 gamers around the world. Most of them don’t give two shits about any of this. THEY are the people AAA the industry exists for, not you.