Streaming and Cloud Computing Endanger Modding and Game Preservation (vice.com) 109
Services like Google's Stadia seem convenient, but they could completely change the past and future of video games, writes Rich Whitehouse, a video game preservationist and veteran programmer in the video game industry. From the story: For most of today's games, modding isn't an especially friendly process. There are some exceptions, but for the most part, people like me are digging into these games and reverse engineering data formats in order to create tools which allow users to mod the games. Once that data starts only existing on a server somewhere, we can no longer see it, and we can no longer change it. I expect some publishers/developers to respond to this by explicitly supporting modifications in their games, but ultimately, this will come with limitations and, most likely, censorship. As such, this represents an end of an era, where we're free to dig into these games and make whatever we want out of them. As someone who got their start in game development through modding, I think this sucks. It is also arguably not a healthy direction for the video game industry to head in. Dota 2, Counter-Strike, and other massively popular games that generate millions of dollars annually, all got their start as user-modifications of existing video games from big publishers. Will we still get the new Counter-Strike if users can't mod their games?
[...] The bigger problem here, as I see it, is analysis and preservation. There is so much more history to a video game than the playable end result conveys. When the data and code driving a game exists only on a remote server, we can't look at it, and we can't learn from it. Reverse engineering a game gives us tons of insight into its development, from lost and hidden features to actual development decisions. Indeed, even with optimizing compilers and well-defined dependency trees which help to cull unused data out of retail builds, many of the popular major releases of today have plenty waiting to be discovered and documented. We're already living in a world where the story of a game's development remains largely hidden from the public, and the bits that trickle out through presentations and conferences are well-filtered, and often omit important information merely because it might not be well-received, might make the developer look bad, etc. This ultimately offers up a deeply flawed, relatively sparse historical record.
[...] The bigger problem here, as I see it, is analysis and preservation. There is so much more history to a video game than the playable end result conveys. When the data and code driving a game exists only on a remote server, we can't look at it, and we can't learn from it. Reverse engineering a game gives us tons of insight into its development, from lost and hidden features to actual development decisions. Indeed, even with optimizing compilers and well-defined dependency trees which help to cull unused data out of retail builds, many of the popular major releases of today have plenty waiting to be discovered and documented. We're already living in a world where the story of a game's development remains largely hidden from the public, and the bits that trickle out through presentations and conferences are well-filtered, and often omit important information merely because it might not be well-received, might make the developer look bad, etc. This ultimately offers up a deeply flawed, relatively sparse historical record.
Big Fucking Deal (Score:1)
2. Don't Buy.
Nothing speaks louder than drops in sales and players.
Re: Big Fucking Deal (Score:2, Insightful)
Yea, that philosophy of voting with your wallet... it doesn't work. It assumes consumers make informed decisions when the fact is, for any given market, the largest distribution of purchases are made by uninformed consumers. Make those happy and you can shift the market to any direction you want.
This isn't limited to the gaming industry, this is typical rent seeking strategy used in every market, technology or not. Consumers trade initial convenience and let reliance on that convenience creep over time unti
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Is there a company other than Blizzard where I can buy Overwatch?
The vendor lock-in already starts with the fact that you can buy certain games only from certain companies and only at their conditions. You wanna play, you gonna swallow it.
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Really? They have Overwatch from a different company than Blizzard? Where I don't have to shell out ridiculous amounts of money for every other gun skin and different way the character farts?
but they could completely change the past (Score:2)
Wow, we already have time machines?
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In that if the game code/content changes and the game exists only on the publisher's servers, it's difficult (maybe even impossible) to discover/document that change. Like a revision to a book, only no one has a copy of the previous version to compare the current one to.
100% DRM. Always Was. (Score:5, Insightful)
Imagine if the old Ubisoft always-on DRM were an inherent, unremoveable aspect of the game system rather than just something tacked on to a few individual games after the fact, such that Ubisoft couldn't even begrudgingly neuter it in a patch. Well, a streamed game is even worse than that would be.
The game doesn't even run locally. All you get is streaming video/audio and all the lag you'd expect (including controller lag), which is a recipe for disaster in North America. And any interruption in the connection that lasts more than a few tenths of a second is going to behave like the equivalent of a "freeze" or "hang" that you'd NEVER tolerate in a properly local-hosted game. Not even the most twitchy DRM existing today has that problem.
Some people consider IPS monitors unsuitable for games requiring fast reflexes (i.e. FPSes) due to their double-digit response times. Internet latency is often worse and certainly more unpredictable than LCD monitor response time, and with streamed games it applies to audio and keyboard/controller/etc input too.
Then there are the bandwidth requirements.
Let's say you're lucky enough to have a 100mb/s connection. Why would you want to use it to transfer your game's video instead of, uh, a DVI cable, which is capable of 4 Gb/s? The people who developed DVI apparently understood that that 1920 x 1200 pixels w/ 24 bits/pixels @ 60Hz results in bandwidth well over 3 Gb/s. The people who developed streamed games seem very, very confused (at best).
Those of us who know anything about bandwidth and compression and (especially) latency can see the enormous technical obstacles facing a service like this, and startups like Onlive never did anything to explain how they intended to solve them. Instead, they did everything they could to lock out independent reviewers with NDAs and closed demonstrations. A friend of mine described it as the gaming equivalent of the perpetual motion scam, and IMO that's spot on (except that a streamed game service would still have the draconian DRM issues even if it worked perfectly).
Streamed games appear designed from the ground up to benefit the game publishers and fuck the customers, exactly what you'd expect from any DRM system.
P.S. Remember when Microsoft intended 24-hour XBox One check-ins, and gamers rejected that? How the fuck are mandatory check ins going to fly when measured in milliseconds?
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100Mbps? Must be nice. I recently had my download rate boosted to 3Mbps (of course, that's best case, downhill on ice with a tailwind) and I thought I was lucky to get that.
It's not about DRM (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's hoping the Indies and Gog don't go anywhere, though I've heard Gog is kinda hurting right now. That Witcher card game bombed and sales at the store have been slowing. They really need a hit with Cyberpunk 2077.
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This should never fly in the gaming world, where the best games IMO are the ones that require millisecond response times. Despite the greed from the companies making these things, the end users aren't going to enjoy it and it should die off.
Slightly different is the corporate cloud computing situation. Living in the corporate world, I see two reasons why "Cloud" computing actually became a thing, as much as I truly hate it in every way.
One, greedy companies selling it pushed it harder than anything. Why? Mo
Re:It's not about DRM (Score:4, Insightful)
That first part, that greed, is why this whole thing does not concern me in the least. Look at the end of the day, the people coming up with this stuff, will be the people who run it. So greedy control freak psychopaths and they will simply drive their customers away and collapse their businesses, it is inevitable it is their individual personal nature, their eyes light up with delusions of infinite greed and power and the incorporate practices that turn off customers and drive them away.
They will be competing with cheaper and cheaper hardware and better and better software, making easier to develop independent games and low cost hardware. People will always choose the solution that provides them the greatest control and the least interference, they want to rent a solution that takes away control and maximise interference.
They can crap on all they want, they are doomed to lose. They are trying to provide the equivalent of cable TV as a gaming service and people are turning off cable because they a sick of paying for what they do not use. It is like the delusion of, why sell soccer balls, where is the profit, they play with them for a long time and lot of people all at once, you need to rent soccer balls and each player that touches it needs to pay as well, why would that not sell, ask yourself. Why would it work with computer games, it wont but they are greedy scammy fuckers and they will try to rip off anyone they can, including and especially their own investors.
So Google exec, shit our reputation is really bad, invading everyone's privacy, baking search results, treating their private mail like postcards, it will really start to affect our share price, what will we do come bonus time. I know we will come up with some bullshit game streaming stuff tell the investors it will make billions and pump up our share price and yeah bonuses.
Tech industry, the bigger the presentation the less likely the product is to succeed, hence the need for a big flashy presentation to sell it to investors. Game streaming is doomed to fail, it just is, all the flash and glam is to sell it to investors and pump up the share price, it's a big show. You think, but why waste all that money, on prototypes and presentations, probably all cost a few million dollars, well, because all that bullshit can have an impact on share price worth billions. This is why modern corporations share price nowadays routinely tank because all the bullshit the spread around to inflate share price, inevitably fails. So they make big announcements just prior to quarterly bonus review, get that share price bump, fill their pockets with bonuses money and watch it all collapse after wasting millions on bullshit presentations. They are playing computer games, just not the one most people expect, they are gaming their companies share price, wasting their companies money to do it, so they can fill their pockets with cool, cool, bonus money, even though they know it will fail, they KNOW.
Re:100% DRM. Always Was. (Score:5, Insightful)
The same rant applies to every new game streaming service because they all face the same horrible problems and have the same ulterior motive:
Fortunately, this doesn't apply to every new game. This is about "AAA" games, which are largely garbage anyway. "AAA" games are the boy bands, or Transformers movies, or light beer of the game industry. They sell well, are consumed mindlessly topass the time, and instantly forgotten when the next one comes along.
There are certainly still new single player, deep, moddable, games being made. I like the fact that I now get "cloud saves" in parallel to my local saves, so I can choose how I play across multiple machines. I like the fact that all my game purchases are downloads, not physical media I have to have shipped to me. None of this technology inherently makes games worse. Massive game corporations focused only on shareholder returns are what makes games worse.
tl;dr: old man fails to yell at cloud, welcomes kids on his yard.
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The cloud component is only one side of the evolving game market, the other side of it is the access that everybody has to a dozen or so AAA game engines for free! The bar for entry to game development has never been lower, even hobbyists have the choice of Source, Unreal, Unity, CryEngine with one of the pioneers of PC game modding, idTech, being the exception.
Look at PUBG, that came along thanks to accessibility to the Unreal engine.
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The game doesn't even run locally. All you get is streaming video/audio and all the lag you'd expect (including controller lag), which is a recipe for disaster in North America.
It would be a recipe for disaster here in Southern England where you're not going to be far from the datacentre and network connections are pretty good... a 40 ms input lag will see controllers launched with the force required to cross the channel. We'd have declared war on Ireland, Norway and France (again) within a week.
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Nice try derailing the discussion.
Modding is an important part of gaming because it allows the player to enhance and expand the game's limitations without shelling out additional money for what is essentially no additional work for the creator. If anything, modding disallows milking a game forever by selling skins, maps or new game modes because these things get offered by the community for free.
That game studios are not happy about this is a given. But in the end, disabling modding means only that players
Not Your Game, Leaseholder! (Score:1)
Get back in your cage, you peasant.
Cloud Computing (Score:2)
Cloud Computing... I feel like eventually having your own computer will be illegal. All that will be permissible will be some version of a "smart" dummy terminal. Look to China to move on this first, and watch as microsoft and google compete to own "computing" itself.
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As long as most of the global computing power doesn't physically belong to corporations
I feel like this is already happening. Microsoft is working hard in this direction with their Azure environment. Google already has the chrome box.
...average internet isn't accessible everywhere and its speed isn't high enough
All we'll be doing is basically remote desktop [microsoft.com].
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But can it serve to billions of people simultaneously?
I don't see why not. Think of what google has been capable of since the late 90s, and what they're capable of now. Forget about what they do with their search engine and think about all of the 'apps' that they 'run' for the user. Microsoft is moving, quickly, to an all-online-based 'apps' system. They're battling the current zeitgeist that goes against any notion that reflects: 'it has to be connected to the internet to work', but eventually I feel like they'll get around it in the name of security and/
Why post links to sites asking register/subscribe? (Score:2)
kickbacks (Score:1)
It's all about the clicks, the eyeballs, the "engagement". It's conceited.
Just like "cloud gaming": No more hobbyists fiddling with stuff at home, the control remains with the company. And pesky players playing old games are a thing of the past, too. New games, so more sales! (Think the executives. But they're wrong.)
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You don't have access to throwaway mail addresses, throwaway names and throwaway addresses?
They don't seem convenient either by the way (Score:2)
Endanger? Is someone dying? (Score:1)
Most games you play online. (Score:2)
Many newer games have an online portion to them, where you play with or against other people. In what you call Modding is what we call cheating. So that skin you use on your game, which happens to make my character appear as bright orange, in a dark area, just makes it easier for you to target and shoot me. Or custom functions that makes a complex action in the game a simple action to you. Say when you are out of Ammo on one gun, it will find you next powerful and fastest gun with Ammo and switch to that.
T
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Cheating happens, but that's a small negative that is easily burried in a big pile of positive.
Mods are the reason games like DOOM and Quake took off. Each had hundreds of custom maps that increased playability beyond what one company could ever hope to make. Quake had dozens of popular mods, many of them total conversions, that entirely changed the gameplay. Team Fortress and Capture the Flag both spawned communities that quickly rivaled and eventually exceeded the base game's popularity.
Several of Valve's
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But if you look at games like Doom nowadays the modding is not so easy, in fact it's nigh impossible to go through the task of building a new megatexture.
The big draw of mods was access to the game engine which previously, even if you could license it, cost a *lot* of money. Nowadays you can access a multitude of AAA game engines like CryEngine, Unreal, Unity and Source for free.
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You can mod without letting cheating take a hold, it's very doable. And, let's face it, the only thing that's actually going to be different is that the game studio will sell that faster reloading gun as a DLC instead that you must buy so you can stay competitive.
With mods, and with user-hosted servers, you can at least escape that arms race.
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Many newer games have an online portion to them, where you play with or against other people. In what you call Modding is what we call cheating.
Thanks for sharing your situation. I, on the other hand, have over 800 games in my Steam account. Guess how many of those I play online? Yeah, none of them. I like to game on PC because of mods. From my perspective, Google Stadia can get bent.
You can't save everything... (Score:2)
I seriously appreciate the efforts of people to archive the entire web, and video games.
But at some point, I think you have to accept the fact it's up to the people making some things to preserve them also - and if you can't you just have to let them go.
Basically I'm against forcing people to limit in what ways they can do things, just to accommodate some third party edge cases.
Doesn't have to be that way at all (Score:3)
One of the guy's point is that with streaming only games you are limiting what people can do with games. Mods and making tools for games is 100% the reason I became a programmer.
You can easily support mods with streamed games, by allowing users to upload content for their own accounts, or of course allowing community generated content to be distributed to all players (probably more practical).
The system will have to have some way to at least save some custom things like controller configuration related to y
Oh noes! (Score:2)
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The difference is that you won't own that car. You can lease them, and there will never be oldtimers because GM and Ford get to decide which cars run, and for how long they do.
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You think they'll still be running on the OS you have to use by then?
we can see cable tv like fee fights, forced bundle (Score:3)
we can see cable tv like fee fights, forced bundleding come to online gaming as well as well ISP like Comcast trying to pull a new CSN Philly excursive like setup.
Do you want to say lose all EA games as your Streaming does not want pay the new rates?
Do you want to be forced to pay for mickey mouse adventures, Madden NFL, spongebob adventures as part of the basic package?
Have to pay for a mid tear or higher plan to be able to pay the add on fees to be able to play WOW?
Have to buy an mid tear or higher plan to be able to PPV / on off buy games from 3rd party's and that you can lose even after paying full price for the game if you stop paying for your basic plan?
Nostalgia is over (Score:2)
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Cool (Score:3)
I'm much more worried about 3D card stagnation. A central super-center, while needing millions, might only need a fraction of what PC land consumes, leading to less profit and therefore slower development. This is the forefront of computer chip advancement, with old Pentium's great grandchildren able to be tucked into a tiny corner.
On the other hand, game services will update rapidly or be left behind on the latest games.
Demand open source (Score:2)
Worked for much of daily use software and did not result in loss of revenue - on the contrary Sillicon Valley is doing extremely well. It's not so important that game data is freely distributable so long as the engine can be modified and people can make custom levels. Doom would not have gotten as far as it did without such capabilities.
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