Hacker News Reader

Comment by ThrowawayR2 | Hacker News Reader

> *No it isn't, there is no reason for any piece of software to be split between your computer and another company. ... You can still play Quake 3 and UT2004, you'll notice a big fat error in overwatch because it is logging you into a server required for it to function."

There is a reason and it's a darned good one: piracy. It was well discussed on professional game development sites in the '90s and '00s; building a online game or game with a large online component meant that it was immune to being pirated.

View on HN

Also hardware/horsepower. MMO's work at a scale different than 2, 4 or even 8 player games do. Often its not possible, practical or more prone to issues to try and have a client only model for some games.

Eve Online is a good example of this.

> There is a reason and it's a darned good one: piracy.

This is not a good reason at all, especially from the consumer's perspective.

Game development is a risky and often thankless undertaking as it is, that the developers sought profit in the face of widespread IP theft is neither immoral nor unsurprising.

It is when they are stealing the game files and code using public internet infrastructure, aka selling you incomplete software.

It is not theft to not consent to sell a particular sort of product, and instead to sell another. Software as a service is not theft.

> stealing the game files

The correct term is "fraud". Just because copyright trolls misuse words that way doesn't mean we should sink to their level.

> often thankless undertaking

Why would i "thank" someone that puts unnecessary restrictions on how i can use the program i paid them money for?

> neither immoral

I see it as very immoral to deny me access and control to the software i paid for, especially when that happens because the developer treating me in a guilty-by-default way for something they have no idea if i'll do or not.

You paid for access to a client and limited term access to the services it requires. If that's not acceptable to you then _do not purchase it_.

It's a game. No one is forcing you to play it.

> If that's not acceptable to you then _do not purchase it_.

> No one is forcing you to play it.

That has nothing to do with whether the product is moral.

>Why would i "thank" someone that puts unnecessary restrictions on how i can use the program i paid them money for?

You could thank them for writing the program for you in the first place, if they didn't then you'd have to do it yourself.

Out of curiosity: how does piracy for a single play or local multiplayer game from the '90s and '00s compare to today? Things like legitimate sources for digital distribution and regular sales could have an impact on piracy without requiring Internet connectivity for DRM.

The long term trend in PC gaming was to slowly move parts of game programs onto servers in corporate offices so they could control them and extract monopoly profits. The goal for any capitalist organization is monopoly profits. You can do that in many ways.

League of legends and DOTA 2 were just real time strategy games that have been coded to use the mainframe model, instead of the locally run application model like quake 3 and Unreal tournament.

That was the whole plan for all new PC games. Think about this - league of legends makes pure profit selling flags to display skins that are already on kids machines because we know how computers work. That was the end game for the game indsutry to resell the same game assets like skins and characters over and over at insane margins.

That's exactly what we got with lootboxes and mobile - aka a platform that is completley locked down and there is no software ownership. Go to google and select images, and put in "mobile game revenue 2019" or any other year just prior to this one. Then compare it to PC or console game revenue. The software industry is obsessed with locking down the PC because they see the mad profits from mobile. That's why we got drm in windows 10...

It's all been slowly building from early succeses of walled gardens like mmo's and steam in 2004, to fully server locked multiplayer games that companies control like league and dota 2. To mobile gacha games that sell gambling for pokemon like characters to kids for sick profits without the kids getting any ownership of the software they are paying for.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com