This is my favourite meme on the topic up to now:
https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@makram/116244201641088147 [External Link]

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Not just that but copyright becomes an issue. Who actually owns the generated code? And now it's being hidden, how can anyone tell?

For reference: https://zomglol.wtf/@jamie/116059523957674208 [External Link]

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I guess everyone knows this tweet [External Link] by now, but I still feel it needs to be quoted yet again:

Quoting: jatinThe reason why RAM has become four times more expensive is that a huge amount of RAM that has not yet been produced was purchased with non-existent money to be installed in GPUs that also have not yet been produced, in order to place them in data centers that have not yet been built, powered by infrastructure that may never appear, to satisfy demand that does not actually exist and to obtain profit that is mathematically impossible.

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Quoting: pb

Quoting: soulsourceTell that to my boss... We have to usesuffer Discord at work...

Just out of curiosity, how old is your boss?

I don't know exactly (and if I knew, I wouldn't share, since it's personal info). All I can say is that he is slightly younger than I am, and that we both are somewhere between 35 and 45.

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Quoting: t3rr0rh4wkAnyone still willing to remain deserves any and all of the dystopian b.s. that Discord is pulling here. Please, please make the jump to something else. We have the power here. They barely support us on Linux anyway. We're clearly not very worth their time, so let's treat them in kind.

Tell that to my boss... We have to usesuffer Discord at work...

Quoting: PixelDropWhen all the Unreal devs and..etc stop using Discord as their main source of priority suppor

Funny that you mention Unreal, because it is luckily not using Discord, but rather this forum: https://epicprosupport.epicgames.com [External Link]

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The big question is: How consistent are those interactive worlds, and for how long?

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Red flag: The I.MX8M Plus is painfully slow...

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Quoting: Mountain ManHow broad do we expect this law to be?

The original introduction video to the campaign talked about this. They also mentioned that in an ideal world, all of what you mentioned would be regulated in a way that allows people to keep accessing the content they bought a license for. However, the initiators were aware that it would never happen if it was that broad, so they picked games as a smaller target. That's not perfect, but it's a start.

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@soulsource how much difference is there between a cloud platform and, say, a Linux PC? Besides the scale of the cloud. Is it possible to reuse the software designed for a cloud and run it on a conventional x86_64 Linux device with perhaps minimal changes to the game client so it can locate the custom server? Same for Arm64 Linux, I don't know which one is more popular on cloud

The big difference is the software. Which is owned by the cloud platform providers and not available to the game developers. Of course it can be mocked (as TheShEEEP pointed out), but that's work too, that needs to be paid for.

I, as a player, would rather prefer that games will never be designed around an ingame store anymore.

As a gamedev: I wished so too. However, often the options a publisher gives are "live support title with in-game store", or "the project won't happen". Since it isn't easy to find game project funding at the moment, the second option might very well mean having to fire people, or even closing the studio, so it's about as much a choice as the Patrician's offer of "freedom" in Going Postal.

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As a gamedev: I think you got it perfectly right.

Nowadays online multiplayer games with dedicated servers and in-game store are usually designed around a cloud platform. Not because it couldn't be done otherwise, but because it's cheaper to develop around a ready-made cloud API than developing the server-side software yourself. Those cloud-APIs tend to end up everywhere in the game though, simply because once one has them as a dependency, it's just too convenient to use them whenever they are suitable.For instance, if you have an in-game-store run by a cloud platform, it is just natural to also have the player inventory managed by the cloud platform, because then the server can just modify the inventory when the player uses the store. When the publisher stops paying for the cloud platform though, the players' inventory management becomes unavailable, and has to be coded again, from scratch. The same is true for all other features handled by the cloud provider (matchmaking, score-tracking, etc.).

Implementing all those things so the game works without the cloud provider is probably doable within a couple of man-weeks, but it's not nothing, and publishers need an incentive to pay for it.

(That's why I, as a gamedev, support Stop Killing Games - it offers us developers leverage that we can use to convince publishers to pay for features like an offline-mode or direct-IP support.)

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