> Look at Ukraine, how weak they were and how good they defended themselves.
How can you type such nonsense? Look at 2014 Crimean annexation - thats "how good they defended themselves" without western training and billions in weapon aid. After four years they have million plus dead but "this is fine" for the west.
There was no fight in Crimea, Russians rented a base there and one day decided not to extend the rental agreement and that they own Crimea now. Most of the Ukrainian soldiers switched sides and joined Russia and it was over without a bullet fired.
So US may decide that they now own Germany because they have the Ramstein Air base but I don't think it will go as smoothly.
There are old videos from the time on Youtube, check it out.
[citation needed] - if I look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_of_the_Russo-Ukrain..., the only source that says that there are more than 1 million killed and wounded (!) Ukrainian soldiers is the Russian Ministry of Defense, which I wouldn't consider very trustworthy...
It had its server reimplemented by enthusiasts [1] with no access to this "one of a kind cloud" for decades now. Heck it even supposedly had game client ported to new engine [2].
> B-but we can't release the binaries due to licensing...
Release the source. As a developer you should be able to write code that allows to stub out all the propriety parts. The community will replace your speedtrees, matchmaking, netcode, anticheats and so on.
Change is hard we get it, but the excuses are on par with any other industry..
If you ever want a clear demonstration of the phrase "litany of excuses", all you have to do is post online calling for a game company to provide any kind of post-sale support or user-friendly EOL plan for their game.
1. "Game companies don't make any money, so they can't provide any development support after the sale, which barely pays for initial development!"
2. "Game companies are under immense time pressure so they can't waste time on EOL plans or developing the server to be eventually severable and releasable!"
3. "Game companies cannot release the server binaries because of vague licensing reasons!"
4. "Game companies cannot release the server source code because of other vague licensing reasons and secret sauce IP!"
5. "Game companies cannot release the server source code because of cheating!"
6. "Game companies might not even have the server source code when it's time to EOL the online service! You can't expect them to save a backup!"
7. "The game company might shut down and that means they have to just suddenly pull the plug!"
8. "Servers are expensive and complicated to run, and surely the community wouldn't be able to do it!"
9. "The server source might not compile anymore, and surely the community wouldn't be able to fix it!"
You'll hear variations of these excuses and others whenever you suggest these guys lift even a finger to non-disruptively turn down their game.
You can't make a person see a problem if his livelihood depends on not seeing it.
In my gaming circles, people who work on SaaS solutions are against SKG even though they are avid gamers and even open source contributors. They just recoil on a thought of an EOL plan. Same on HN.
"Think of the indies" is just same old "Think of the children" astroturfing.
Or they have an indie game theyre "making" and being forced to build an EOL plan for a game that will statistically be a flop is silly to them.
I feel a carveout for total says, say $200k USD or less, would be reasonable. Otherwise you're just conscripting indie time.
I was working on a game, but I'm not looking forward to releasing updates everytime steam changes their relay. Considering scrapping multiplayer completely.
Indie game devs don't care about EOL plans because they're not building a game as a service.
If the indie game has multiplayer, it's much easier for everyone involved to ship a server binary like Valve has done for ages. No indie is setting up a proprietary autoscaling game server infrastructure on AWS that they will have to maintain for years and have an end-of-life plan for if the SKG initiative passes.
The only companies that SKG would inconvenience are AAA/live service studios. They have enough money to find a workable solution, or more likely, spend billions in lobbying against this initiative.
> it's much easier for everyone involved to ship a server binary like Valve has done for ages
This is drifting some from the original specific topic toward the broader conflict, but, not for everyone involved, surely? Will the audience run your server binary, under normal circumstances? Or will they say “Wow, you couldn't even be bothered to put up some basic servers for free? Jeez, you're saying I have to set up a whole account somewhere else and pay them just so I can have a multiplayer game, or set up weird-looking technical shit on my computer that might expose me to hackers? Nobody else asks me to do this, what is this bullshit”? Of course there are intermediary options here (one of which I describe below), but those don't necessarily let you do the “we didn't want to be in the hosting business” plan straightforwardly, so you might still have to take on a lot of the fixed planning costs.
The incentive gradient among consumers tilting so hard in the direction of indefinite active support becoming table stakes seems to be a core part of the vicious cycle here. “I shouldn't have to set stuff up” implicitly cedes control; if they're not doing the coordination, then someone is, and that someone gets hidden responsibility and power without compensation or effective voice, which is an unstable combination by default. This is a similar issue to what happens with convenient, centralized, subsidized social media and chat platforms.
Minecraft is actually an interesting borderline case here: the player license authentication and name/appearance binding is all centralized, and that could suddenly go away and leave everyone in the dark, but individual world servers can be run independently and there are a number of third-party hosting businesses based on this. Microsoft later felt compelled to offer Realms as a first-party means of setup, but IIRC those do take a recurring fee so it's not in the same unstable zone. But then we have a separate issue where, as far as I can dimly tell, a lot of people started expecting “game companies do the work to keep us safe on Their Platform” as, again, table stakes, and so they implemented non-repudiable digital signatures in chat to allow people on non-centrally-hosted servers to still report each other's chat messages to central moderation, which I must assume is another ongoing cost. (In the modded world there are mods that strip this.)
There are entire youtube channels dedicated to these circlejerks and they are forced into my recommendations all while we loose freedoms to 'fight foreign propoganda'.
Id bet some money it has more to do with certification. Consoles ban 3rd party controllers that provide a competitive edge. Steam controller is exactly that.
They are enthusiast targeted brand and majority of enthusiast (heck even entry level cases) have windows in it.
Enthusiasts care about the details - airflow, cable management and of course aesthetics. Noctua doesn't. I respect their engineering/no bullshit approach, the price bump is worth it but they lost my money on multiple builds by sticking to their 'brand color'.
They're the Soylent of the fan world - everything you need but spark zero joy.
I'd be interested in seeing sales figures for same fans in their brand and other colors.
A large part of their business is also industrial applications. I doubt industrial customers care much about the colour and more and volume discounts and ability to provide custom solutions.
How can you type such nonsense? Look at 2014 Crimean annexation - thats "how good they defended themselves" without western training and billions in weapon aid. After four years they have million plus dead but "this is fine" for the west.
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