" But it truly is fascinating to watch as a moderately tech savvy person - not sure I can remember anything like this where a tech company in a position where i

" But it truly is fascinating to watch as a moderately tech savvy person - not sure I can remember anything like this where a tech company in a position where it has a lot of industry/programmer goodwill has inexplicably fucked over its developer-base so often in an 18-24 month period." Then you haven't been paying attention to the last 23+ years of PC gaming, Microsoft and the game industry have been at war with the PC as an open platform once they discovered the average PC user was a moron and didn't understand that buy a client-server application for your PC (mmo's) is literally stealing software from yourself. When richard garriot launched UO in 1997, the entire silicon valley business community was overjoyed. Garriot had done what other software companies failed to do, they literally got gamers to pay for the privilege of robbing themselves. For those who don't know "MMO's" are a fake genre invented by the game industry to confuse the tech illiterate so they could monopolize their own products and prevent piracy (aka you can't really copy a game during its window if you don't have the server back end required for it to function). They wanted to back end all the big budget games (aka steal them). So they needed a cover story to go along with it. Valve got the idea for steam from the success of Ultima online in 1997 and Everquest in 1999. Everyone saw the sick money being made from stupid. If you think "MMO's" are some special type of software, you're lacking basic computer literacy. We've restored the networking code that was pulled out of need for speed world. Here's an "MMO'" we've restored the networking code of, so no your whole post shows you don't grasp anything about how computers work. Any client server C++ application can be converted back to a local application (aka singleplayer+multiplayer PC game, no login accounts or user names /w server browser). https://sites.google.com/site/djnfswo/ https://sites.google.com/site/djnfswo/ There are a few other "MMO's" which we've restored the networking code. Up until the mid to late 90's EVERY PC GAME came with the ability to host your own multiplayer inside the game and quake 2 was already an "MMO" had limitless multiplayer. John carmack (slightly paraphrasing) "No limit to the # of players..." https://youtu.be/TfeSMaztDVc?t=100 https://youtu.be/TfeSMaztDVc?t=100 For those of you who are shaking their heads, you can go view johns carmacks comment here saying quake 2 has limitless ("MMO") multiplayer, notice it didn't require giving up the game or carving back some of its code to lock the game down behind user accounts. They just wanted to get rid of the infinitely copyable binaries that most PC games were with Descent, doom, duke 3d, Unreal tournament, UT2003, UT2004.