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Comment by hedgewitch | Hacker News Reader

> Steam

This is a bad example because Steam's DRM is notoriously terrible and even multiplayer games that use Steam's multiplayer services can be played entirely without Steam with a particular open-source emulator (granted they don't also have their own servers that you connect to, which is an entirely different issue).

Windows 11 and TPM are definitely points towards most computing moving in the direction that Mac OS has. The thing to remember, though, is that most users don't actually care. They only care if your bog standard apps run.

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>This is a bad example because Steam's DRM is notoriously terrible

You don't grasp Valve and the industry has already won any game where the networking code has been pulled out already acts like DRM, any client-server app requiring username and login accounts, or has some piece of code living on some remote server, means you no longer own your own stuff.

Valve and the rest of the computing industry is boiling you all slowly. AKA look at this list of games from crackwatch.

https://old.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/p9ak4n/crack_wa...

You'll notice more and more games are "online only". Diablo 3 is literally diablo 2 /w drm, they wanted to kill piracy.

Starcraft remastered, and reforged require internet to play, that means we've lost the battle. The public has eaten up client-server back ended games. You don't get that the whole point was to monopolize their own products and kill the local infinitely copyable binaries PC games used to be coded as, AKA PRe steam 99% of games were complete you got singleplayer+multiplayer inside the same game.

MMO's/F2P are literally just PC games with their multiplayer ripped out, don't think so? Listen to the ultima devs here, when Ultima online was successful, publishers and devs went over their entire PC game list to convert their local apps to client-server apps and stuck "MMO" on the front so they could steal PC games from the public.

https://youtu.be/lnnsDi7Sxq0?t=1134

EA killed ultima 9 when the UO beta got massive interest, that lead to the death of PC games as local applications, the industry from then on there was a massive war to back end all PC games, they couldn't immediately do that to quake and urneal because we'd been treated too good with Warcraft 1-3, Descent 1-3, Quake 1-3, and build engine games like Duke 3d. The entire industry has always wanted to kill piracy and Ultima online gave the entire industry the go ahead once they realized that many of our fellow programmers and gamers were irrationally stupid beyond their wildest dreams.

Anyone playing quake and Descent at the time fear the loss of dedicated servers and level editors which used to come with the games, we knew if Ultima online was successful that Publishers would want to back end every fucking PC game and that's the end of the personal computer and the return of IBM and mainframe computing.

"Signed exe's" and trusted computing is the return of mainframe computing of the 60's in new bullshit language but I don't expect the mmo/steam generation to do anything but froth at the mouth. When they were the ones killing gaming and gave birth to microtransactions.

You can't put MTX in diablo 1, warcraft 1-3, or starcraft 1 because they are local applications that run entirely from your pc. None of the code has been stolen out of the game carved back behind a user account and login requirement. Like with most PC games these days.

We're losing gaming history and generation mmo is to blame for their general cluelessness of the evil of mainframe computing.

Ummm...more and more games are forcing you to be online during play because, in reality, that's what people want. People want their universal auction houses that connect with other players and feel more "alive." People want their Wonder Trades and other seemingly inane social features. Do all games need it (eg. the StarCraft and WarCraft III remasters)? No, but that has less to do with "ONLINE GAMES ARE EVIL" and more to do with them wanting to keep people firmly in the Battle.net ecosystem. There's an entire player retention strategy that goes into that that has nothing to do with piracy.

Moreover, MMOs in general necessitate a central server. They're a completely different genre that is isolated from the fears you're expressing and, more to the point, they're not a particularly popular genre when compared to session-oriented competitive multiplayer games, so they're not actually why those games are forcing you to connect to a central server.

The main thing you're missing when complaining about the "loss of dedicated servers" is that centralized services consolidate the userbase, allow them to programmatically split the userbase by region, and ensure that, as long as people are playing, they can always be found. But, more importantly, you're never locked out of the "populated" servers for an arbitrary amount of time because they're perpetually full, which has been a problem in a number of games with dedicated servers.

Also, you have to remember that the games industry is approximately 5x larger (by revenue, probably more by userbase, especially considering the rise of f2p games and increasing prevalence of deep discounts) now than it was in 2000. What the majority wants inevitably changed because "the majority" changed purely by virtue of there are 5x+ more people with their own opinions.

So, sure, things are changing and are moving away from self-hosting, but there are a lot of cultural factors (and undeniable conveniences) that have influenced it far more than "companies are evil and they just want to control us."

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