wsve

Huh?? Nobody enters mathematics because "We gotta get this Collatz conjecture solved already!", you enter it because you love the process of arriving at the solution.

It's like saying "If your goal is reaching the top of Everest, you should be ecstatic they built a train line that brings you right up to the peak!"

Nobody goes into these fields only interested in the final result, they go into it interested both in the challenge and revelations of the process and the triumph and recognition of achieving the final result.

There's no joy to be derived from a completed crossword puzzle if you weren't the one solving it...

That is less descriptive and less helpful an explanation than your previous comment was...

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?

> 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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

That's right, my bad, I just meant that he's clearly doing just fine but said something very wrong instead

> 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

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.

> 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

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

For releases you're generally building it all at once in a merge request/deployment pipeline anyway