3 ms·

A lot of “yes, but…” in this comment section. Hard to tell if it’s HN playing contrarian as it usually loves to do, or just people so brainwashed they default t

by sph 5mo ago

A lot of “yes, but…” in this comment section. Hard to tell if it’s HN playing contrarian as it usually loves to do, or just people so brainwashed they default to defending corporate interests. Nothing makes me as hopeless for the future as reading people trying to one up the negativity about any initiative at all, and if no one did anything, they’d hit you with the snarky ‘go vote to make your voice heard instead of complaining’ It takes big balls to fight publishers and even more massive to fight the internet and the pseudo-intellectual snark of internet commenters. The entire SKG initiative has my support and perhaps it’s the only thing that might convince me that ordinary citizens actually have any say at all in directing legislation.

junaru 5mo ago
You can't make a person see a problem if his livelihood depends on not seeing it. In my gaming circles, people who work on SaaS solutions are against SKG even though they are avid gamers and even open source contributors. They just recoil on a thought of an EOL plan. Same on HN. "Think of the indies" is just same old "Think of the children" astroturfing.
- knollimar 5mo ago
  Or they have an indie game theyre "making" and being forced to build an EOL plan for a game that will statistically be a flop is silly to them. I feel a carveout for total says, say $200k USD or less, would be reasonable. Otherwise you're just conscripting indie time. I was working on a game, but I'm not looking forward to releasing updates everytime steam changes their relay. Considering scrapping multiplayer completely.
  - sph 5mo ago
    Indie game devs don't care about EOL plans because they're not building a game as a service. If the indie game has multiplayer, it's much easier for everyone involved to ship a server binary like Valve has done for ages. No indie is setting up a proprietary autoscaling game server infrastructure on AWS that they will have to maintain for years and have an end-of-life plan for if the SKG initiative passes. The only companies that SKG would inconvenience are AAA/live service studios. They have enough money to find a workable solution, or more likely, spend billions in lobbying against this initiative.
    - dasyatidprime 5mo ago
      > it's much easier for everyone involved to ship a server binary like Valve has done for ages This is drifting some from the original specific topic toward the broader conflict, but, not for everyone involved, surely? Will the audience run your server binary, under normal circumstances? Or will they say “Wow, you couldn't even be bothered to put up some basic servers for free? Jeez, you're saying I have to set up a whole account somewhere else and pay them just so I can have a multiplayer game, or set up weird-looking technical shit on my computer that might expose me to hackers? Nobody else asks me to do this, what is this bullshit”? Of course there are intermediary options here (one of which I describe below), but those don't necessarily let you do the “we didn't want to be in the hosting business” plan straightforwardly, so you might still have to take on a lot of the fixed planning costs. The incentive gradient among consumers tilting so hard in the direction of indefinite active support becoming table stakes seems to be a core part of the vicious cycle here. “I shouldn't have to set stuff up” implicitly cedes control; if they're not doing the coordination, then someone is, and that someone gets hidden responsibility and power without compensation or effective voice, which is an unstable combination by default. This is a similar issue to what happens with convenient, centralized, subsidized social media and chat platforms. Minecraft is actually an interesting borderline case here: the player license authentication and name/appearance binding is all centralized, and that could suddenly go away and leave everyone in the dark, but individual world servers can be run independently and there are a number of third-party hosting businesses based on this. Microsoft later felt compelled to offer Realms as a first-party means of setup, but IIRC those do take a recurring fee so it's not in the same unstable zone. But then we have a separate issue where, as far as I can dimly tell, a lot of people started expecting “game companies do the work to keep us safe on Their Platform” as, again, table stakes, and so they implemented non-repudiable digital signatures in chat to allow people on non-centrally-hosted servers to still report each other's chat messages to central moderation, which I must assume is another ongoing cost. (In the modded world there are mods that strip this.)
Accacin 5mo ago
Yeah, I'm amazed that it's like that. The "hacker" part now is completely lost on people. They just don't see the big picture, it isn't just about getting your money's worth. Some people spend their free time playing with other people they've only ever met online. Some people escape into a game after work. Relationships are built in these games, and when a game gets suddenly taken away with no recourse, it's a horrible feeling. I can't find the best example, but this video is of a guy who plays these "dead" games and tries to find the people who are still playing, getting to know them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FEW7gxci2Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FEW7gxci2Q Some of these people are just lovely, taking the time to show him around, teaching him the ropes. They're just happy that someone is playing the game. This all exists because the developers are still supporting these games. Take a look at the section about Blockland in the video I linked!

by sph 5mo ago

junaru 5mo ago

You can't make a person see a problem if his livelihood depends on not seeing it. In my gaming circles, people who work on SaaS solutions are against SKG even though they are avid gamers and even open source contributors. They just recoil on a thought of an EOL plan. Same on HN. "Think of the indies" is just same old "Think of the children" astroturfing.

knollimar 5mo ago
Or they have an indie game theyre "making" and being forced to build an EOL plan for a game that will statistically be a flop is silly to them. I feel a carveout for total says, say $200k USD or less, would be reasonable. Otherwise you're just conscripting indie time. I was working on a game, but I'm not looking forward to releasing updates everytime steam changes their relay. Considering scrapping multiplayer completely.
- sph 5mo ago
  Indie game devs don't care about EOL plans because they're not building a game as a service. If the indie game has multiplayer, it's much easier for everyone involved to ship a server binary like Valve has done for ages. No indie is setting up a proprietary autoscaling game server infrastructure on AWS that they will have to maintain for years and have an end-of-life plan for if the SKG initiative passes. The only companies that SKG would inconvenience are AAA/live service studios. They have enough money to find a workable solution, or more likely, spend billions in lobbying against this initiative.
  - dasyatidprime 5mo ago
    > it's much easier for everyone involved to ship a server binary like Valve has done for ages This is drifting some from the original specific topic toward the broader conflict, but, not for everyone involved, surely? Will the audience run your server binary, under normal circumstances? Or will they say “Wow, you couldn't even be bothered to put up some basic servers for free? Jeez, you're saying I have to set up a whole account somewhere else and pay them just so I can have a multiplayer game, or set up weird-looking technical shit on my computer that might expose me to hackers? Nobody else asks me to do this, what is this bullshit”? Of course there are intermediary options here (one of which I describe below), but those don't necessarily let you do the “we didn't want to be in the hosting business” plan straightforwardly, so you might still have to take on a lot of the fixed planning costs. The incentive gradient among consumers tilting so hard in the direction of indefinite active support becoming table stakes seems to be a core part of the vicious cycle here. “I shouldn't have to set stuff up” implicitly cedes control; if they're not doing the coordination, then someone is, and that someone gets hidden responsibility and power without compensation or effective voice, which is an unstable combination by default. This is a similar issue to what happens with convenient, centralized, subsidized social media and chat platforms. Minecraft is actually an interesting borderline case here: the player license authentication and name/appearance binding is all centralized, and that could suddenly go away and leave everyone in the dark, but individual world servers can be run independently and there are a number of third-party hosting businesses based on this. Microsoft later felt compelled to offer Realms as a first-party means of setup, but IIRC those do take a recurring fee so it's not in the same unstable zone. But then we have a separate issue where, as far as I can dimly tell, a lot of people started expecting “game companies do the work to keep us safe on Their Platform” as, again, table stakes, and so they implemented non-repudiable digital signatures in chat to allow people on non-centrally-hosted servers to still report each other's chat messages to central moderation, which I must assume is another ongoing cost. (In the modded world there are mods that strip this.)

Accacin 5mo ago

Yeah, I'm amazed that it's like that. The "hacker" part now is completely lost on people. They just don't see the big picture, it isn't just about getting your money's worth. Some people spend their free time playing with other people they've only ever met online. Some people escape into a game after work. Relationships are built in these games, and when a game gets suddenly taken away with no recourse, it's a horrible feeling. I can't find the best example, but this video is of a guy who plays these "dead" games and tries to find the people who are still playing, getting to know them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FEW7gxci2Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FEW7gxci2Q Some of these people are just lovely, taking the time to show him around, teaching him the ropes. They're just happy that someone is playing the game. This all exists because the developers are still supporting these games. Take a look at the section about Blockland in the video I linked!