this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2025
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[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

With all due respect to Chet...

Dude is a writer.

He writes plots, and character dialogue, and storylines.

Not code.

Certainly not server or networking code.

He's waaay out of his element on this.

Also, he is misrepresenting and strawmanning the fuck out of Ross!

Ross did not at any point say that 'All server code needs to be able to run on PS5s'.

Ross did not at any point say that 'the server and client should be the same thing'.

He instead gives a very technical and detailed breakdown of what he is proposing, which either flew right over Chris's head, or Chris is just intentionally strawmanning him, taking a picture that has a PS5 in it and cherry picking and decontextualizing what Ross actually said, such that it might make sense to a twitter brained idiot that believes whatever their favorite person says without even looking at the other side of the argument.

All of the complex legal and usage rights that Chet just implies Ross greatly misunderstands or didn't mention at all, and isn't considering?

Yeah, Ross gave a detailed explanation about how the whole fucking point of this is to redefine the legal and financial landscape and rules around this currently existing paradigm/framework regarding how servers and liscensing work, so that future games are still capable of being produced, still capable of being quite profitable...

...but in a way that game studios/publishers that want to make a fully online only game have to make just a teensy weensy bit less profit off of their MTX money printing machines, and spend a bit of it on making it possible to EoL release some server code that other people could theoretically run, if they wanted to foot the server hosting costs on their own.

...

Here's the goddamned timestamp Chet didn't even link to:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=HIfRLujXtUo&t=2231

Watch this and tell me if Ross even approaches the same universe as saying 'PS5s need to be able to run servers' or 'the client and server should be the same thing'.

He throws out 'maybe we should make a regulation that says an EOL online game needs to be mandated to be runnable on consumer hardware'.

And then temporarily includes a PC and a PS5 in his diagram.

And then immediately says, 'but hey, if thats not doable because of hardware limitations, then maybe another option could be to still mandate release of server code, but with specific hardware requirements.'

As in, you know, a PC or Server Rack or rented VPS server with X amount of total processing power, memory and storage, minimum specs.

Which is what every dedicated server or more complex system for any game on the goddamned planet is currently and/or has ever run on.

...

Also, you literally can run a server on a PlayStation!!!

https://hackaday.com/2022/02/10/turning-the-ps4-into-a-useful-linux-machine/

Tada! Linux Distro for a PS4, supports NGINX, and with modern Proton and WINE, you could run a whole lot of dedicated servers that only even have Windows binaries for at least older games on one.

I'm sure we all remember the clusters of PS3s being used to create a sort of poor man's supercomputer.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster

In case this is news to anyone... those PS3s... they're networked, together, to be able to distribute compute loads intelligently and efficiently.

You know, like servers.

...

For the love of god, people need to stop having 'technical' opinions on this issue if you're not even going to bother to actually listen to both sides of the argument, especially if you don't actually know anything about the tech that's involved.

Watch the entire video.

This is a very complex and detailed topic, and if you are only getting your info on it from fucking tweets and youtube shorts, you are misinformed by definition.

Some things are actually so complicated that they cannot be easily explained or understood in under 1000 words.

Its very, very clear to me that every single prominent 'reputable' critic of Ross has absolutely no experience with actually running and maintaining server clusters, nor developing and implementing any actual code that makes any of that shit work... and then they expand out of their domain of expertise and give 'expert commentary', like a fucking new nurse with an associates degree deciding they actually know how to perform a brain surgery.

Nothing Ross is proposing is fundamentally impossible, it is in fact quite reasonable, and he freely admits when he is venturing beyond his own expertise, unlike everyone else criticizing him.

I repeat, there is nothing technically impossible or unduly financially onerous to game publishers to what Ross is proposing.

The proposed reforms are a very complex legal issue, and Ross is totally open to varying degrees of specific, exact details of what game publishers would have options to do.

Its not going to be some retroactive thing that applies to every game that has ever existed, it would be new guidelines going forward that make the playing field just a bit more tipped in the direction of not totally fucking end users, by forcing new server architectures to adhere to be a bit more modular in design... which again, is completely doable and possible, there are already all kinds of different server stack configurations for all kinds of other large scale networks.

...

Nobody is demanding 'release all your proprietary source code!'

Nobody is demanding 'keep paying liscensing fees for some server component of a game you don't support anymore, forever!'

They're saying:

Build new games in such a way that, when they EoL sunset, you can withdraw those modules and release a closed source, proprietary server hosting solution, such that if a group of enthusiast players wanted to host their own standup, funding it out of their own pockets, not legally allowed any rights to the IP, not allowed to substantially modify that released server code, not to expect any ongoing support whatsoever... to just be able to run the damn server.

...

I can, right now if I wanted to, find the server exe for Battlefield 1942, and standup and host a server for it, and people would be able to use it.

https://community.pcgamingwiki.com/files/file/1000-battlefield-1942-windows-standalone-server-1619/

There it is, right there.

This used to be the norm.

I could make my own mod for BF42 that is capable of overriding a specific player's specific kit, to give them a different primary weapon, and I could hook that into my server, and also a mysql or postgres database that keeps track of which players actually have access to the fancy gun, going by the same system a server admin has to ban or unban players.

heck, i think i could also password protect the server, and basically use an id system of all players having their own unique password to id them, intercept the inputted password when it hits the server, have a script that checks that against the list of player passwords, send the actual game server password back to the server to let the player in, and then also now my game mod and sql db know what this player has for weapon upgrades.

While it would be more complex to achieve this with a more modern game... nothing makes this fundamentally impossible with a more complex modern game, other than lazy, in reality, almost certainly contracted out, server architecture.

Studios used to actually... you know, be largely defined by their engine, their netcode, their inhouse shit. Now everything is contracted middlemen, and people can no longer conceive of doing it any other way.

...

You just have to offer companies, companies that are all absurdly wealthy, some kind of incentive trade off structure:

  1. Adhere to new design and legal guidelines such that when you go EoL, your game gets its last patch, and a black boxxed, 3rd party, unmaintainable deoendencies stripped out server binary is released, such that it is at least even theoretically possible for some other group that is footing their own server hosting costs can at least run a mostly fully featured, but much smaller in total simultaneously supported player count version of the server...

or, 2) If you don't put what would be a tiny, tiny financial amount of effort into doing this, well, now you have to refund some defined set of MTX purchases to players that have now just poofed out of fucking existence.

You can get more complicated with all the various technicalities of this, but something approximating that would work.

...

And yes, this means Free to Play games that are entirely funded by MTX stop being a viable business model if they can't figure out a way to release a usable server model alongside either a sanitized and properly encrypted/obsfuscated and PII/financial data stipped out version of their entire player database so that people can actually keep their digital items...

Or, just develop a kind of giant passkey, UID-like constructor/deconstructor system that encapsulates every possibly variable item or level or ability or attribute they have, and is then encrypted and decrypted by client and server, and provide these keys to every player ... like a CD Key, or ... any moderately complex website with a bunch of possibly varying input request parameters for filling out some kind of multi field form input.

But more to the point, if this is somehow too harmful to the F2P business model?

(which it shouldn't be unless your dev team has no actually competent coders

GOOD.

They are a fucking evil scourge that massively exploit and cause psychological harm to almost entirely children, and they are basically always trash tier games anyway with disgustingly toxic plauerbases.

Switch over to an MMO style recurring subscription model of whatever $$$s a month, have an upfront cost if you want to, and maybe start making more of your in-game new content actually reasonably obtainable by actually playing the game.

...

Thank you for attending my TED~~Talk~~Rant.