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Comment by dadrian | Hacker News Reader

> There is no technological reason this is the case, but pure greed by publishers.

Ah yes, because server-side infrastructure is notoriously free and cheap to run, with no ongoing operational costs, and requires no employees to maintain.

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My reading of the request is to allow the players to host and run their own servers, as was done in times of yore.

So in that case, there would be no ongoing cost to the publishers.

Not all games are CS1.6. Some game servers quite literally require access to tens or hundreds of gigabytes of game data, in addition to support from various login and database servers. It's possible to do the leg work to make all of this available to the community but it's not trivial, and it wouldn't be "no cost to the publisher".

They're advocating for publishers to patch the game to let players run homebrew servers after the official servers shut down.

Or, in the case of single-player games that phone-home, to just disable the phone-home part.

Read the FAQ: https://www.stopkillinggames.com/faq

So why do they do it and not let the game run on the user devices locally?

Oh, might it be the difference between a one time purchase and a regular monthly fee?

That being said, I just purchase games I can run without internet, if they are singleplayer.

Don't paying players somehow offset that? If not, it would be nice to see by how much.

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