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Rainbow Six Vegas, SWAT 4 unplayable due to disabled ad server
- marcodiego 5y agoThanks for increasing my list of examples why this is so bad.
- falcolas 5y agoAds in full priced videogames. Lawful evil in its simplest form.
- noasaservice 5y agoYou are the product. Just because you paid is no consolation.
- falcolas 5y agoI'm not even sure we're something as well defined as the product - we're closer to an ATM that they keep making withdrawls from in exchange for some digital code.
- sk2020 5y agoIf memory serves, the nominal price of most video games has not changed in about 30 years. US dollars are, at least officially, worth 2.5x less now than when Mario came with Duck Hunt. I’m not that shocked that alternative monetization strategies are employed (micropayments are a big one). Seems like there could be a demand for an independent standards committee that certifies games as shenanigan-free. My children are starting to play games themselves, so I’d like a service like that. I would pay a premium to know my kids aren’t going to be prompted to put in my credit card information and won’t be assailed with toxic marketing ploys.
- nightski 5y agoThe user base has grown exponentially since then and it is far easier to impulse buy games than ever before (30 years ago I had to drive to a store to buy a boxed copy). There are far more gamers than before. Steam has also shown that by giving deep discounts even though per-unit profit goes down they are able to make tons more money. The monetization schemes are mostly just a way to squeeze every drop out of the customer possible. They use them because they work, not because they aren't profitable already.
- google234123 5y agoExponentially is definitely the wrong word here
- wincy 5y agoMy real estate agent said home prices were increasing exponentially and I said I really hoped my house wasn’t going to be worth billions next year.
- p_j_w 5y agoI'd rather see prices on games get raised than this sort of shit. The problem is every time prices go up everyone brings out the pitchforks, so we get this shit instead. It's largely turned me off of video games, especially big budget multiplayer focused games.
- mrguyorama 5y agoIt's not an either/or situation. If publishers can raise the price of video games, they will NOT stop with ads and battlepasses and microtransactions etc. Why would they ever do that when those things make them more money than people actually purchasing the games in the first place?
- zerocrates 5y agoI'm not hugely opposed to price increases: these things happen. But the reality is you'll just get both. Now that it's determined that players will accept ads, microtransactions, gacha, etc., why not raise prices and also get those revenue streams. FIFA costing $70 will not stop the all-encompassing focus on Ultimate Team. (For perpective, just the Ultimate Team modes in their sports games supply about a third of EA's total revenue.) It's like when people say "if you're not paying for a service, then you're the product" to describe when user data is sold, when in actuality many services you do pay for happily sell your data all over the place.
- skymt 5y agoThis clip from the latest (full-priced) entry in the NBA 2K series has been going around the last few days. Truly pushing boundaries in in-game advertising. You can visit a State Farm retail outlet and talk to an employee who says what a big fan he is and gives you a State Farm employee uniform you can wear in the off-court parts of the game. https://twitter.com/capybaroness/status/1436475796357582876 https://twitter.com/capybaroness/status/1436475796357582876
- beeboop 5y agoThis is borderline Onion material
- mywittyname 5y agoI picked up 2k18 a while back. I'm not really a sports fan, but I do remember sports games being pretty fun when I was younger. Holy hell, I'm not even sure I'd call that a game. I swear it took 20 minutes to actually start a match because of all the explicit ads, then ads disguised as ceremony. And 30 seconds into play, it crashes. I can't imagine why people actually pay for these games year after year.
- Akronymus 5y ago> the explicit ads as in "THIS IS AN AD" or as in "this is a porn ad"?
- void_mint 5y agoFull priced non-IAP games do not make as much as F2P, corporate overlords demand games make up the difference somehow.
- officeplant 5y agoAds in full priced Operating Systems as well. I hate modern times.
- falcolas 5y agoA-frickin-men It's absurd, really, how ads have become such an invasive part of our lives. To the point where you're looked down upon as abnormal for not appreciating ads.
- dharmab 5y agoTangent: SWAT 4 still has an active community including actively developed mods. It's arguably the peak of the tactical shooter genre (at the very least for indoor urban combat). It's also still for sale on GOG.com.
- mzs 5y agoMS fixed this. Also in the meantime the community created a DLL that changed the server to localhost.
- ddek 5y agoWhich I’m sure many players will forget to remove.
- nivenkos 5y agoI played through Elite Force a few months ago, it was great.
- dharmab 5y agoI'm actually glad this came up into my feed, because I see Elite Force had a new release this summer. My tactical gaming group would love to do another playthrough.
- smoldesu 5y agoUbisoft has been really, really bad about game preservation. They're up there with Activision/Blizzard with complete indifference to their core audience. The 'right' thing to do would be to open-source this game like iD did with the Quake series: nobody is actually buying this game anymore, and if you really wanted to be a frugal bastard you could make the asset/map files proprietary while releasing the engine to the community. The current state is that nobody can really play this though, so nobody wins. Side note: is it possible to fix this by routing through a custom DNS and spoofing the ad server? This seems like a pretty rudimentary issue, and could probably be solved with the technological equivalent of Krazy Glue and duct tape.
- falcolas 5y agoI read elsewhere that they have fixed it: blocking connections succeeds where blackholing connections failed.
- aequitas 5y ago> nobody is actually buying this game anymore I think there are more than enough people who would pay a few euro for the convenience of installing an old game on their phone, console or modern OS straight from an App store or website instead of going through instruction on Github for free.
- smoldesu 5y agoThat's why I suggested they go the Quake route, forcing you to own a copy of the game legally for you to dissect the map/asset files, but also not blocking you from performing rudimentary research on the engine if you so desire. They didn't release the source so that other people could compile their own versions (although ostensibly you could), but moreso to encourage people to read the code and learn how such a large, interconnected system functions. You can still buy Quake 1 and 2 on Steam, and they'll probably run just fine (Windows support is shaky these days). They're the same as they were 20 years ago, so nobody is really getting gypped when they pay for it. I personally think it's the best way to distribute game source.
- sleibrock 5y agoI find this funny when just a short while ago, Microsoft was having issues loading ads into Windows 11[1]. [1] https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/windows11-empty-taskbar.html https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/windows11-empty-taskbar.html
- dmix 5y agoNote: the last tweet in the thread said they emailed Microsoft and they fixed it. So the games work again.
- daveevad 5y ago> In September of 2021, the content server for Massive Ads (http://madserver.net http://madserver.net) started delivering blank content to anyone that requested it. Presumably, Microsoft shut down the service. Of course, this had the effect of knocking a few games offline that couldn’t understand the responses they were getting. I sent a few emails to Microsoft and they were helpful enough to refuse connections to the address. So as of now, you should be able to play SWAT 4 again. Neat fix - presumably an empty response blew up the XML parser but ECONNREFUSED escapes to safer code?
- kevingadd 5y agoIt would have to handle ECONNREFUSED etc to work in offline scenarios or on firewalled networks, I suppose?
- pc86 5y agoThis makes sense since "rendered unplayable while connected to the internet" sort of implies if you disabled your internet, everything started working again.
- dncornholio 5y agoNeat fix for a solution that was flawed to begin with. Sending blank 200 response is a bad idea. If your service stops, stop sending 200 status responses to any client.
- dharmab 5y agoAs I understand it, the blank 200s were needed for other games which didn't handle the connect refusal as gracefully .
- throwaway59553 5y agoShouldn't there be some fallback in place when the game can't fetch the add from the server? I mean, it's one basic test scenario they should have thought of.
- wayoutthere 5y agoThis is something they want to explicitly stop when they can show ads to a user base, so why make a fallback that allows users to pihole the ads?
- ziml77 5y agoYou're assuming their motivations. As stated in the Twitter posts, the issue only occurred when a connection to the server was established, but the server returned an empty response. Microsoft fixed the issue after being contacted about it by making the servers completely refuse connections.
- moviuro 5y agoCan't connect != Receives junk from the legitimate server. In that case, "junk" was an empty response. They did test the game with an unavailable ad server, but it was still brittle (as in: not tested with badly formatted ads)
- bserge 5y agoImagine not being able to rewatch movies from the 50s-80s because "the servers were shutdown". This is what's gonna happen to a whole lot of modern games. What a waste. Only pirates can help them.
- dharmab 5y agoPirates, modders and reverse engineering tools.
- ajsnigrutin 5y agoWhen piracy is more user friendly than a paid service, the service owners should take a step back and rethink what they're doing.
- alvah 5y agoPiracy is almost always more user friendly than a paid service, and has been for as long as I can remember - at least as far back as when DVDs had unskippable "don't pirate this" messages which didn't appear on the pirated version
- ajsnigrutin 5y agoI mean.. netflix had a point... install an app, pay some low fee, choose a show, and watch. Compared to this.. installing a torrent client, finding the torrent file, choosing a right "download" button on non-adblocked browsers, waiting,... it's a pain in the ass. But now... 5 different subscriptions, and still unable to get the show you want,... yeah, not anymore.
- nitwit005 5y agoAt least the games didn't blame the customer. I've hit several websites that instructed me to disable my ad blocker, because the ads they tried to serve failed to load.
- bjoli 5y agoLouis Rossmann talked about a similar thing in a recent video: https://youtu.be/DEP_7_gx6M8 https://youtu.be/DEP_7_gx6M8