monster99

The rise of internet enabled microtransactions and the masses bought drm laden games they didn't own like mmo's...

Once the masses fell for mainframe/dumb client, companies now controlled the software and could insert bs monetization.

Cut out sugar, bread, and liquids with empty calories. Eat meat, fruits, and veggies -- even frozen ones. You'll drop weight very fast switching to high meat and veg, and dump the carbs/sugars.

For those of you who are skinny and want to bulk up and don't mind eating somewhat bad food: Eat lots of sugary candy and junkfood like potatoe chips. I find it's the easiest way to get fat.

Article is a load of cobblers. The mods tend to be no different then milquetoast centrists because most of them work in the corporate world.

HN is very america centric and anything that goes against "the american narrative" that america is great, the free market is great, usually gets downvoted pretty hard. To suggest HN is a dispassionate place is quite the bit of nonsense. HN has it's mod and user hivemind because it pretends to be rational when it isn't.

Take the topic of software ownership and the mass invasion of privacy, or the theft of game software over the last 20 years by corporate america. The rise of steam, server locked software and invasive privacy invading games and apps which are specifically coded against users controlling them.

Or the fact that the public domain has been destroyed and america has been a place of total corporate lawlessnes for the last two centuries, if one is going to go by scientific evidence, the rule of law does not exist in capitalist societies. You have one class that's completely above the law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act#/...

That's kind of the point George carlin said it best:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acLW1vFO-2Q

The whole educational establishment is to create an ignorant slave class.

It's hard to feel sorry for anyone pushing apps and the removal of local app computing. It's like a theif accusing the other theives of being a theif.

The modern SaS enviroment is scam central taking advantage of the publics computer illiteracy. So color me skeptical.

Man it has very little to do with government and everything to do with your worship of free market nonsense. In a capitalist society capitalists own the government. AKA private power. So the judiary being corrupted to benefit corporate interests is a no brainer since that is the way the system is designed. It is working as intended.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9T3w6vrUis

America has robbed it's own population blind for the last 200 years, all cultural works have been sucked up into an international criminal oligarchy.

Software is being stolen en mass and coded fraudulently to remove your basic rights and freedoms to own what you buy because the masses are technology illiterate.

All apps on mobile spy on you and are controlled centrally, and stupid gacha games are defrauding a tiny minority and they don't even get acopy of the game they are spending hundreds of dollars gambling for virtual characters in.

We live in a lawless world, that's reality.

I don't believe in the ideologies of the time, call me a doubting thomas that the human race is actually intelligent. I know too much about how human beings and corporations actually function to believe in free market mythology.

See here for if you want more acedemic take:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHj2GaPuEhY#t=349

There are all sorts of things wrong in reality with how capitalism actually functions. The reality is most people are too irrational and too stupid for any market to function as a "market". The videogame "market" is a perfect example. For the first 20-30 years of PC game history, we were getting good software for a fair price. Then the masses got internet and shit went sideways.

AKA people started buying software they didn't own, nor control, giving super powers to corporations to extort them and engage in all sorts of abusive practices and raise prices astronically because the internet now gave them access to people with addictive tendencies and impulse control problems 24/7 and in order to gather the worlds evolutionary unlucky regarding gambling addiction all games now have microtransactions.

I watched my hobby be destroyed, my software robbed and my os infested with dishonest code because stupid got internet. Before the internet Microsoft and game companies had no incentive undermine software ownership because it was impossible to do so.

The market for videogames today is a market for lemons, a total shit show of broken games, stolen games, etc. Because a rational game buyer would never buy a piece of software that a corporation controlled.

Difference is, one is about the populations health. Given that the US is backwards when it comes to healthcare.

Given the sea of corruption inside the US since it is an oligarchically run state where the citizens basically have no rights (if in doubt look at IP law).

People who don't sellout to the corporate agenda... watching HN'ers downvote me for pointing out the videogame industry has been stealing PC games for the last 20 years was alarming. We went from owning diablo, warcraft and starcraft games to not owning them... that is a major change and to see a place that calls itself the place of "hackers" and nerds, who theoretically should all be about fighting to preserve culture against the corporate onslaught against our basic rights to own our own software and not have it tied to "the cloud" is disturbing in it's own right.

Seems everyone wants to be a slave to the mainframe and have no privacy and no general computing.

Not getting that the corporations of the world are hell bent on turning the PC into a dumb client and everyones bending over is disturbing.

The stuff Microsoft has in the pipe with UWP and encrypted computing is alarming on its own, "honest files" of the past, not trapped in some vm or some remotely controlled new microsoft file system and license servers for this new Software as a service (aka stealing your software an selling to back to you at inflated prices) is madness itself.

There is no reason for any piece of software whether that be an OS, Office application or Game to be divided between our computers and the companies.

Dude the fact that the industry is stealing games and openly gloats it wants to make all games "services" (aka never give you a local application). Is the end goal.

So yeah, you need to know about the state of the industry to understand where game companies are taking us and it isn't for our benefit.

I do not want every new game to be an app controlled by googles cloud and thats exactly what the game industry wants. They want to move us all to the dumb terminal model of computing.

If you can't see that, you are blind. They openly talk about it on businss sites.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-04-01-making-pir...

Sorry to tell you there was a golden age...

The age before the internet and monetization where we owned are games and internet penetration hadn't allowed companies to steal videogames functionality with drm.

The 90's AAA game modding scene was heads and shoulders above the modern AAA space because there was no internet, there was no incentive to hold back free level editors, file specs, access to contents inside the game files.

The last 20 years has undermind that hugely in big budget games. How could would have it have been to have level editing and a programming SDK for Need for speed Most wanted 2005? OR mass effect 1 + 2 for instance?

We've definitely lost a lot as game companies are forcing games into the mainframe dumb client model. AKA literally preventing you from owning the game you are buying.

Given that has always been the end goal of these companies since the beginning. Game preservation is going to be a nightmare going forward for all these server locked games.

So to say now is the golden age, means you're basically clueless about game preservation and what the mainframe/cloud model means for your basic rights.

The agenda is to turn PC into a more heavily drm'd locked down platform like mobile and control your software remotely.

Software as a service is literally a scam to invade your privacy, get you locked in and then jack up/extort you.

Look at all the DLC for SF V or Guilty Gear for instance. Huge amounts of cut content, sold back to you at ridiculously inflated prices.

Nothing like that existed in the 90's because there was no internet and analyticis to target stupid spendthrifts. Internet Analytics to target the spendthrift gamers has seriously fucked up gaming.

RTS exist, they collapsed and were renamed by the new generation "MOBA's"

League of legends, dota 2 and Heroes of newerth were just real time strategy games with the heroes and the lack of complex base management.

They collapsed into hero deathmatch if you will. So RTS didn't really disappear, the dumb masses merely renamed them MOBA's.

So if we're going by popularity, RTS for newbs (LOL, dota 2) are still very popular.

Complex RTS are definitely rarer things but that's because companies couldn't execute. Supreme commander 1 had a lot of good ideas poorly executed, supcom 2 was just a disaster because they were making it cross compatabile with console...

Company of heroes 1 was great but relied too much on hollywood wow and you can tell that the company of heroes 2 team had no idea where to take CoH after the success of the first one.

Often times game developers stumble into success. Then have no idea what to do once they have that success. Like they just hit a brick wall creatively.

You're not just getting old.

The rise of the internet fucked up gaming because it allowed game companies to control the software and insert all sorts of abusive monetization inside it.

The internet allowed game theft by EA, activision and Valve. It began with mmo's in the late 90's to take control of software out of the publics hand.

That is why gaming is such a clusterfuck, and why AAA gaming went to shit. High speed internet allowed game companies to take game functionality hostage, dedicated servers and level editors had to be massively scaled back to sell lootboxes and microtransactions.

Go loadup any popular mobile game like Final fantasy brave exvious or Fate grand order.

Single player games under the mainframe dumb client model. AKA they can now force kids to play games as publishers want because they control the values from their servers.

That was their wet dream since the late 90's. The fact that drm, world of warcaft, uo, and Team fortress 2 and League of legends even exist means the average gamer is retarded.

To watch so called "hackers" on hackernews fall all overthemselves to give up software ownership and eat drm in windows 10 was a far cry from the nerds of the 90's. We who remember palladium and wanted to keep control over our PC games because we knew the evil empire was coming to steal our PC games to get rid of dedicated servers, level editors, etc.

But the masses got internet and their stupid consumer behavior fucked up gaming.

All major franchises from the 90's got turned into mainframe - dumb client models.

Diablo 2 vs Diablo 3 Tribes vs Tribes ascend Mechwarrior 1-4 vs Mech warrior online

The game industry gloats about it's great victory to server lock every new big budget game going forward on businss sites.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2019-04-01-making-pir...

So no mass invasion's of privacy, stealing PC games via splitting the local application into two and selling it to the gullible masses as mmo' and "software as a service" / always online drm. Meant that the money men could now control the game from end to end.

Which is why gaming went to shit.

The internet radically altered the power between game buyer and game producer. When game companies can literally steal software by merely holding onto part of the software they produce in an internet enabled society, you know you are no longer in kansas anymore toto.

The shit the nerds of the 90's feared game true as the dumb masses ate up all the corporate PR to take over PC's and turn them into dumb terminals through slowly boiling the frog over decades and raising a new generation of gamers that don't are or don't know about the golden age of the 90's.

It was a golden age for a reason - the incentives were to produce good games, it was a "by gamers, for gamers" era, aka nerds producing games for other nerds.

When gaming went mainstream in the 2000's, everything got dumbed down to chimp level. We went from 8 or so weapons in quake to two in Halo 1 as bungie got bought out by microsoft.

Most PC developers entered the MMO space or jumped ship to make console games and there was a dry decade in PC gaming until it started back up in early 2008-2009 as a new generation of kids got internet and came online, leauge of legends hit and the most exploitive model became the most successful - take control of the game via mainframe-server, and sell flags to display skins to technology illiterate gamers.

To go from something like warcraft 3 to lol and dota is pretty much dystopian. There's no incentive not to make gmaes like the 90's where you got singleplaer campaign+multiplayr + level editors in the AAA space.

The microtransactions in the latest Ubisofts games are abhorrent and the non moddability of games like The Crew or For honor speak volumes about the locked down nature of modern AAA space.

So yeah gaming did go downhill - the internet allowed game companies to take control of the game software which means they can no infect it with all sorts of anti-fun game design.

That was the difference between pre mass internet penetration and after the internet hit the gaming masses.

Night and day.

That's kind of the point, the upper class is at war with the masses, hear it in their own words:

Zbigniew Brezinski, former national security advisor of the United states:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7ZyJw_cHJY

"The technetronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities."

https://www.amazon.com/Between-Two-Ages-Americas-Technetroni...

Book - governments not to work for the people:

http://trilateral.org/download/doc/crisis_of_democracy.pdf

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.

It is because the internet collectivizes the ignorant public and you can use them as the army of the ignorant to defraud me of my basic rights to general computing.

The game industry and microsoft are well ware of the publics lack of understanding of how computers and computer networking work. Two pre-requisites you would need to have a functioning market. The information asymmetry between game buyer and game maker is off the charts.

I who do not want DRM and spyware in windows 10 are now forced along because ignorant parents buying computers don't understand or don't care about such an issue. Meaning I lose control of my rights to own my own files and not be spied on because the worlds global public is computer stupid.

Uhh, lets remove the progaganda shall we

MMO = marketing term for computer program instructions

Is there any reason as a gamer for any program to be split between two computers when companies goals are to maximize profit, not produce the best games?

So no I understand perfectly well. The fact that private servers exist for world of warcraft and ultima online demonstrates your comment as a farce.

It is fraud because I have no power to modify your bad behavior, when you code a game fraudulently. You can sit in the middle of the continent and get the lay public to buy software infected with privacy and consumer rights violating program code. That is how DRM and non ownership occured, not because PC gamers wanted it, but because you could force it using internet infrastructure because your customers are 100's of miles away. You no longer have to press CD's/DVD's and give them the complete software. You can just hold parts of the game files back on a computer in your office. AKA selling incomplete software or fraud.

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

It is because that means you control my PC from your server in your office and force me to use software in a particular way, that's what I call fraud buddy. You can shut off a piece of software or deny me access to the files I paid good money for. It's all because of corrupt IP law regarding software that was bribed away by silicon valley tech money, they made sure the public had no ownership rights regarding software.

So we might ask - dude where are the publics property rights regarding game software? But that might be too sticky an argument, the world is run by a lawless corporate oligarchy that rubber stamps the laws it wants passed. Given infinite IP law extension.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act#/...

MMO's were the propaganda to sell you the same RPG's without having to give you ownership, if you can't see that when Guild wars had 8 player multiplayer but jury rigged a login/drm system on their PC RPG, you're clueless.

That is why PC RPG's were rebadged mmo's, so that they could use it as a battering ram to change game culture. It's all about profits for these game companies, they wanted control of the software to put microtransactions in them. Notice after Valve, EA and activision got control of the software, they immediately shoved microtransactions into games.

You don't have to deal with lootboxes or MTX if you own the game outright. MMO's were part of the long term war on software ownership on the PC. To not see that and think they are special because you have very powerful feelings for these games, means you're ignoring the overwhelming evidence that the game industry was successful in changing public opinion regarding game ownership. AKA got you to see software as a service as "OK" and that's all they needed to get their foot in the door to take control of the software, once they got a generation of kids that's ok buying software they don't control - the skies the limit at abusive microtransactions, lootboxes and in game stores.

That also means level editing, free maps and mods need to be scaled back because it interferes with profits.

No it isn't, there is no reason for any piece of software to be split between your computer and another company.

If you buy the argument, you obviously never gamed during the 90's during the heyday of level editors, free maps and mods over IPX emulators like Kali and kahn.

It's not utter nonsense, DRM is literally taking files of the game hostage. Go load up overwatch and disable the network card, Go load up quake 3 or Unreal tournament 2004.

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.

Go get never winter nights released in 2002, compared against the "f2p" (aka stolen rpg rebadged an f2p mmo during develpment).

https://store.steampowered.com/app/704450/Neverwinter_Nights...

The original neverwinters had game tools and you could run your own server, vs neverwinter the "f2p mmo" version (aka moniker for the game moving to server locked game).

https://store.steampowered.com/app/109600/Neverwinter/

Any gamer in the 90's was expecting more dedicated servers, level editing tools with PC games.

Leauge of legends and DOTA 2 would have been fully single player RTS games with multiplayer.

So no you and anyone who believes like you is willfully ignorant that we now live in a PC game dystopia. Whereas before League of legends and DOTA 2 would have been coded like Quake 3, Unreal tournament 2004, and warcraft 3, you own the game and can play it multiplayer if necessary without a third party.

Diablo 2 we owned it --> Diablo 3 blizzard owns it and can now shut it down

Quake 3 we owned it --> Quake champions bethesda owns it and can shut it down.

So no, we've gone backwards in time to mainframe and dumb client model of computing because of the average gamer being computer illiterate and not seeing the writing on the wall.

So no they were not fundamentally a new "genre" that was what marketing and PR flackeys hoped people like you would buy. Note that private servers prove you incorrect, aka that there exist private servers for Ultima online and World of warcraft, demonstrate tehy would have just been Role playing games with shards players controlled, there was no need for companies to conrol them or the monthly fee.

Overwatch is a case in point that you are incorrect, since it's just a multiplayer fps, why is there no level editors, tools, open file specs and GTKRadiant? OH yeah thats right they wanted to lock down the code from a server in their office to resell skins that are sitting on encrypted files already on your machine setting a programming flag to display, when you've "earned" them via the stupid leveling system or gambled for them using their lootbox system.

Steam was essentially a small company in 2004, in fact they grew too fast for their own good. Let us remember until the steam patch nobody wanted in 2004, valve had only released half-life and a few other odds and ends, until half-life 2 in 2004. Where steam began the long process of stealing game files from PC gamers and calling it drm.

The whole process which began back in the late 90's with Ultima online in a bid to get people to pay monthly for the same computer role playing games by rebadging PC RPG's mmo's.

So everyone with a clue about gaming history should know valve only seems "big" because the internet enabled gave them first mover advantage when they wrapped the steam store around half-life 2 in the mid 2000's, over the next 5-6 years that would make valve a tonne of money as AAA games released on steam until uplay and origin showed up later.

Let us remember the reason we have storefronts for every company is because the internet enabled companies to steal PC games out from gamers via server locking games to their companies PC's. Now we're even seeing basic game functions held back and sold for microtransaction money.

You should all check out overload by the original descent developers.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/448850/Overload/