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It's really a matter of them not doing _anything_ that could help. Asking for additional development work on a game that is being shutdown obviously won't work

It's really a matter of them not doing _anything_ that could help. Asking for additional development work on a game that is being shutdown obviously won't work, as that that amount of time spent on a dead product is just a waste of money for the business. For example, asking the company to dockerizing the server software, or split their code from the licensed third party tools like speedtree, RAD Game tools, etc and release it open open-source just wont work. However, I do think most companies could justify asking one of their developers to spend just a single hour to document/copy+paste the _bare basics_ of the network logic for the good PR alone. They could literally copy+paste their network serialization logic (whether it's something high level like protobuf, or just a raw C++ enum for associating the packet ID's with descriptive names). That's it. Just that one thing alone would immediately raise my opinion of any company that has to shut down an online game service. Just that single thing alone would save their fanbase hours of time spent on reverse engineering the networking for server emulator development.

grogenaut 4y ago
Good documentation publicly exposed and reviewed by legal takes a hell of a lot more time than 1 hour with just a dev. Doing this right is likely at least a week of full-time effort by an engineer and probably a month or two shepherding stuff through legal review and all the other crap. I think you're greatly underestimating the efforts and the value that what you're talking about would actually provide. And as I pointed out that still won't work without hacking the actual console game because the console game has pined ca certificates and dependencies on the game network authorization that relies on crypto that just cannot be released. So to make the actual game work you'd actually have to make a change to and recompile the game. Note this is running on a console so there are limited ways to hack/alter the game.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
  We aren't talking about a cash strapped startup who penny pinches their way around their devs time. Grow a fucking brain and consider the implications of this little "stunt" where a user who has been playing an old game suddenly cannot play anymore. Why do you think that user will spend their hard earned money to pay you for a new game when they know the company will shut down their servers after a few years? There are limited ways to fuck this up and the company is looking like doing the absolutely worst in terms of looking bad to their "target audience". Cool I guess if that saves them a week or a month of a full time Devs time. That's worth more than the clusterfuck of PR nightmare it is going to cause. Nice. I don't know man. The technical limitations you mentioned should not be difficult for the company that built the darn thing in the first place. Again, I'd say its a matter of priorities.
  - dang 4y ago
    Can you please not fulminate on HN? and especially not do name-calling or personal attacks? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- sD82niNNdp6pYTA 4y ago
  Which is why we need legislative change to force them not to sell a designed-for-obsolescence product in the first place.
  - SllX 4y ago
    My favorite feature of Internet forums is definitely the one where someone gives a detailed explanation as to why something is expensive or at least a lot more work than one might think, probably not worth the engineering effort and a legal review will take a bit, but it was good while it lasted and someone else pops in at the end by saying we can fix this with words on a page because that just automatically negates the expense of time, effort and money borne by actual people. Software isn’t a bunch of prepackaged recordings cut together and copied over and over again. You need the binary, the assets, and the environment it can be hosted in. Server software needs maintenance because it lives on a network and networks attract people who will screw around with it if vulnerabilities are known to exist (and there will always be vulnerabilities); and if the entity maintaining it decides that it is no longer worth the expense, they stop maintaining it. That’s their goddamn right so the onus is on you to know what you’re buying and who you’re buying it from and what kind of commitment you can expect from them because more often than not it is not if they will shut it down, but when and what you can expect afterwards. A $60 game you bought once probably doesn’t entitle you to full service for the rest of your natural life. Even a subscription has a time limited term of service.
    - jpambrun 4y ago
      If I buy something, I expect to own it. The implementation details and challenge incurred to the vendor are not my problem. They took part in this transaction fully knowing this, while I had no way to know how "durable" my dlc are.. I understand how the cost-benifit analysis today favours shutting down servers and retroactively taking away recently sold products. This is probably why the previous comment suggested the need for legislation.
      - SllX 4y ago
        You do. You own the disc. Or you own a copy of the virtual equivalent on a disk that you have. You also own the equipment serving as the runtime environment. What you don’t own are the servers running the server side features or the software not on the disc you bought.
- safety1st 4y ago
  Four of the games on that list are Assassin's Creed games. AC is one of the best selling game franchises of all time. Ubisoft has sold something like 200 million copies of the various installments of AC. We are talking about games that do like $150M+ in their first week of sales. They have the money to put a dev on this for a week and shepherd it through legal or whatever. They could put a dev on it for a month. There is no excuse, they're just being cheap and seeing if they can get away with it.
  - Zerverus 4y ago
    ACs engines are an absolute proprietary convoluted nightmare. You have no idea
throwawyer10101 4y ago
> Just that one thing alone would immediately raise my opinion of any company that has to shut down an online game service. Why don't you go write your own open source game?

grogenaut 4y ago

Good documentation publicly exposed and reviewed by legal takes a hell of a lot more time than 1 hour with just a dev. Doing this right is likely at least a week of full-time effort by an engineer and probably a month or two shepherding stuff through legal review and all the other crap. I think you're greatly underestimating the efforts and the value that what you're talking about would actually provide. And as I pointed out that still won't work without hacking the actual console game because the console game has pined ca certificates and dependencies on the game network authorization that relies on crypto that just cannot be released. So to make the actual game work you'd actually have to make a change to and recompile the game. Note this is running on a console so there are limited ways to hack/alter the game.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
2Gkashmiri 4y ago
We aren't talking about a cash strapped startup who penny pinches their way around their devs time. Grow a fucking brain and consider the implications of this little "stunt" where a user who has been playing an old game suddenly cannot play anymore. Why do you think that user will spend their hard earned money to pay you for a new game when they know the company will shut down their servers after a few years? There are limited ways to fuck this up and the company is looking like doing the absolutely worst in terms of looking bad to their "target audience". Cool I guess if that saves them a week or a month of a full time Devs time. That's worth more than the clusterfuck of PR nightmare it is going to cause. Nice. I don't know man. The technical limitations you mentioned should not be difficult for the company that built the darn thing in the first place. Again, I'd say its a matter of priorities.
- dang 4y ago
  Can you please not fulminate on HN? and especially not do name-calling or personal attacks? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
sD82niNNdp6pYTA 4y ago
Which is why we need legislative change to force them not to sell a designed-for-obsolescence product in the first place.
- SllX 4y ago
  My favorite feature of Internet forums is definitely the one where someone gives a detailed explanation as to why something is expensive or at least a lot more work than one might think, probably not worth the engineering effort and a legal review will take a bit, but it was good while it lasted and someone else pops in at the end by saying we can fix this with words on a page because that just automatically negates the expense of time, effort and money borne by actual people. Software isn’t a bunch of prepackaged recordings cut together and copied over and over again. You need the binary, the assets, and the environment it can be hosted in. Server software needs maintenance because it lives on a network and networks attract people who will screw around with it if vulnerabilities are known to exist (and there will always be vulnerabilities); and if the entity maintaining it decides that it is no longer worth the expense, they stop maintaining it. That’s their goddamn right so the onus is on you to know what you’re buying and who you’re buying it from and what kind of commitment you can expect from them because more often than not it is not if they will shut it down, but when and what you can expect afterwards. A $60 game you bought once probably doesn’t entitle you to full service for the rest of your natural life. Even a subscription has a time limited term of service.
  - jpambrun 4y ago
    If I buy something, I expect to own it. The implementation details and challenge incurred to the vendor are not my problem. They took part in this transaction fully knowing this, while I had no way to know how "durable" my dlc are.. I understand how the cost-benifit analysis today favours shutting down servers and retroactively taking away recently sold products. This is probably why the previous comment suggested the need for legislation.
    - SllX 4y ago
      You do. You own the disc. Or you own a copy of the virtual equivalent on a disk that you have. You also own the equipment serving as the runtime environment. What you don’t own are the servers running the server side features or the software not on the disc you bought.
safety1st 4y ago
Four of the games on that list are Assassin's Creed games. AC is one of the best selling game franchises of all time. Ubisoft has sold something like 200 million copies of the various installments of AC. We are talking about games that do like $150M+ in their first week of sales. They have the money to put a dev on this for a week and shepherd it through legal or whatever. They could put a dev on it for a month. There is no excuse, they're just being cheap and seeing if they can get away with it.
- Zerverus 4y ago
  ACs engines are an absolute proprietary convoluted nightmare. You have no idea

throwawyer10101 4y ago

> Just that one thing alone would immediately raise my opinion of any company that has to shut down an online game service. Why don't you go write your own open source game?