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Comment by cableshaft | Hacker News Reader

Almost every app (and many games) being made nowadays are thin clients making api calls where all the work is done on the server.

I don't like it. I like having games from decades ago and still being able to play them long after the companies are dead and its employees working on other things.

On my own time I try to come up with software that can run entirely without the need to communicate with servers, or even without internet access.

The only problem with that is the software becomes that much easier to pirate, but oh well, I guess. I care more about the longevity of my work for my personal projects than whether or not I'm going to make the megabucks with them.

And honestly, for a few games I've worked on for companies in the past, pirates are the only thing keeping those games accessible at all.

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> Almost every app (and many games) being made nowadays are thin clients making api calls where all the work is done on the server.

This is not true of games. Can you name any? Yes, multiplayer games require a server component, but they're not thin clients. And games that are not multiplayer generally don't require a server at all except possibly for DRM. People don't like wasting their data plan unnecessarily and they like being able to play in subway tunnels.

If you think about the economics of it, this makes sense. Margins are razor slim; you need to be able to profit off of whatever is left after the app store takes its cut of your $0.99-4.99 retail price. Having to run and maintain a fleet of servers to handle your games simply doesn't make sense. Better (and easier programmatically) to take advantage of the powerful processors on the devices themselves and have the games run locally. Think of something like Civilization, that has a mobile app; why on Earth would you want a central server that would have to run god knows how many millions of AIs when the phones could simply calculate that themselves?

Diablo 3 comes to mind as the canonical example of this, but it's a PC/console game rather than mobile. Single player mode is still run by a remote server, and if you have a bad internet connection or they have a server outage (which has happened many times) it will be unplayable.

Blizzard has been much better than most companies about keeping its online infrastructure up and running long after a game loses popularity, but even they won't be around forever.

On the mobile side I don't think that's a common strategy (Candy Crush and Angry Birds aren't going to stop working), but the purely multiplayer games like Ingress and Clash of Clans will certainly shut down someday.

I was asking for examples of mobile apps. There are lots of reasons that the "thin client even for singleplayer" strategy is less feasible for mobile games than for PC games.

But still, I didn't buy Diablo 3, and this was one of the reasons why.

Some examples that come to mind are Candy Crush, Marvel Puzzle Quest, Farmville, and Angry Birds. But these aren't mobile-exclusive, and they phone home to retrieve your saved game state from a database.

I'm not aware of an Android-exclusive or iOS-exclusive game that is immersive and not casual. Certainly nothing on even a Diablo-level. Anything close is multi-platform effort.

I just downloaded Angry Birds and it works fine in Airplane Mode. If Rovio goes out of business and it fails to sync my saved game to a new phone, I won't be that sad. I wouldn't say it falls under the "thin client making API calls" style software that cableshaft mentioned.

I bought it, but not until the price dropped to $20.

And yeah, I can't think of any mobile games that rely on servers for bullshit reasons like D3 does.

Over the past few years Square Enix has be re-releasing the old Final Fantasy games (I - IV and maybe more) for mobile (iOS & android) and as far as I remember all of them require always active internet connections to play. I tried to play on a plane recently and could not unless i paid for the wifi. For a single player game that originally had no network connectivity. Or you can download an android emulator and rom and play without needing internet. Now this is not ideal because the input is not the best. The native apps have built for mobile controls, but require internet.

> Can you name any?

Clash of Clans is like that. Even when you just want to do some non-multiplayer thing like rearrange your defenses, if you have no connection the game won't start, and if it loses connection it kicks you out.

I haven't played the game, so maybe this is my unfamiliarity showing, but I thought that Clash of Clans was an MMO strategy game. In that context, how is there any meaningful singleplayer component that could work without a connection to the servers? You talk about rearranging defenses, but isn't that against other players? How could that possibly work if the server can't be reached to actually update the shared game state?

It's the persistent world problem, you can't play WoW offline because it's meaningless to do so.

> This is not true of games. Can you name any? Yes, multiplayer games require a server component, but they're not thin clients. And games that are not multiplayer generally don't require a server at all except possibly for DRM.

Well, who cares. Try playing Star Craft II in 20 years or whatever it takes Blizzard to go out of business. All while v1 will keep working, even in multiplayer (LAN mode over VPN).

Would you happen to be CydeWeys from Sup Com Talk?

No, sorry. I'm pretty much a nobody online, I just have a few games I've worked on that most people haven't heard of.

Imo cloud connected apps are just an inevitable evolution from the technology advancements of recent years. It's just how things are now and will not go away because it has too many benefits, but of course also some downsides.

But tell your argument of independent "non connected" software to administrators who have to manage installations for hundreds of workplaces and they will tell you what a godsend cloud applications are.

I think it will become even more extreme, technologically it would already be possible to have computers or even smartphones be essentially just thin clients, which today is even working for the highest demanding apps like games (eg. Steam Streaming, Playstation network etc). For this to be a reality our network infrastructures have to improve a lot though.

> But tell your argument of independent "non connected" software to administrators who have to manage installations for hundreds of workplaces and they will tell you what a godsend cloud applications are.

Only because desktop OS-es they have to manage are crappy. At my previous employer, we had Ubuntu desktops managed by CFEngine. Now guess how big trouble was to roll-out any software packages, updates or new installations, or how difficult was to configure (or preconfigure) the applications.

>And honestly, for a few games I've worked on for companies in the past, pirates are the only thing keeping those games accessible at all.

Microsoft in Bill Gates' era understood the importance of piracy. He said, "As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours."

Windows Phone in my opinion is suffering because of its nonexistent piracy - sideloading was near impossible for normal users.

Imagine downloading 3gb+ visual studio just to unlock your phone.

My siblings loved my 925 but then they asked, "How do you get apps?"

I replied, "From the store."

They responded, "So, no flashshare?"

I said, "No." And that was the end of it.

I could see the stupidity in Microsoft's previous focus on low end phones targeted at emerging markets. Because emerging markets NEED piracy.

The "asymmetric" way that phones work have tangible drawbacks for consumers, even if they are not power users. However, since the competition in the space is so fierce, I feel confident that it's only a matter of time until the situation improves.

I think in a few years phones will have significant "mesh-net" capabilities and will maintain significant amounts of distributed data using paxos and/or blockchain-style algorithms. It's only a matter of time before the "thin client" and server-driven software era will end.

Hm ... Candy Crush Saga runs perfectly fine offline. So do SeriesGuide, MAPS.ME, and Podcast Addict to name a few apps on my phone. Can you show me an example of an app which is a thin client (and doesn't actually need Internet connection)?

AlphaBear, which is a single-player word game. (This is in no way to support the original article's point, but it did really annoy me about AlphaBear)

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