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Streaming and Cloud Computing Endanger Modding and Game Preservation (vice.com)
Services like Google's Stadia seem convenient, but they could completely change the past and future of video games, writes Rich Whitehouse, a video game preservationist and veteran programmer in the video game industry. From the story: For most of today's games, modding isn't an especially friendly process. There are some exceptions, but for the most part, people like me are digging into these games and reverse engineering data formats in order to create tools which allow users to mod the games. Once that data starts only existing on a server somewhere, we can no longer see it, and we can no longer change it. I expect some publishers/developers to respond to this by explicitly supporting modifications in their games, but ultimately, this will come with limitations and, most likely, censorship. As such, this represents an end of an era, where we're free to dig into these games and make whatever we want out of them. As someone who got their start in game development through modding, I think this sucks. It is also arguably not a healthy direction for the video game industry to head in. Dota 2, Counter-Strike, and other massively popular games that generate millions of dollars annually, all got their start as user-modifications of existing video games from big publishers. Will we still get the new Counter-Strike if users can't mod their games?
[...] The bigger problem here, as I see it, is analysis and preservation. There is so much more history to a video game than the playable end result conveys. When the data and code driving a game exists only on a remote server, we can't look at it, and we can't learn from it. Reverse engineering a game gives us tons of insight into its development, from lost and hidden features to actual development decisions. Indeed, even with optimizing compilers and well-defined dependency trees which help to cull unused data out of retail builds, many of the popular major releases of today have plenty waiting to be discovered and documented. We're already living in a world where the story of a game's development remains largely hidden from the public, and the bits that trickle out through presentations and conferences are well-filtered, and often omit important information merely because it might not be well-received, might make the developer look bad, etc. This ultimately offers up a deeply flawed, relatively sparse historical record.
[...] The bigger problem here, as I see it, is analysis and preservation. There is so much more history to a video game than the playable end result conveys. When the data and code driving a game exists only on a remote server, we can't look at it, and we can't learn from it. Reverse engineering a game gives us tons of insight into its development, from lost and hidden features to actual development decisions. Indeed, even with optimizing compilers and well-defined dependency trees which help to cull unused data out of retail builds, many of the popular major releases of today have plenty waiting to be discovered and documented. We're already living in a world where the story of a game's development remains largely hidden from the public, and the bits that trickle out through presentations and conferences are well-filtered, and often omit important information merely because it might not be well-received, might make the developer look bad, etc. This ultimately offers up a deeply flawed, relatively sparse historical record.
That's if anyone uses that dog shit stadia
Wow, we already have time machines?
The same rant applies to every new game streaming service because they all face the same horrible problems and have the same ulterior motive:
Imagine if the old Ubisoft always-on DRM were an inherent, unremoveable aspect of the game system rather than just something tacked on to a few individual games after the fact, such that Ubisoft couldn't even begrudgingly neuter it in a patch. Well, a streamed game is even worse than that would be.
The game doesn't even run locally. All you get is streaming video/audio and all the lag you'd expect (including controller lag), which is a recipe for disaster in North America. And any interruption in the connection that lasts more than a few tenths of a second is going to behave like the equivalent of a "freeze" or "hang" that you'd NEVER tolerate in a properly local-hosted game. Not even the most twitchy DRM existing today has that problem.
Some people consider IPS monitors unsuitable for games requiring fast reflexes (i.e. FPSes) due to their double-digit response times. Internet latency is often worse and certainly more unpredictable than LCD monitor response time, and with streamed games it applies to audio and keyboard/controller/etc input too.
Then there are the bandwidth requirements.
Let's say you're lucky enough to have a 100mb/s connection. Why would you want to use it to transfer your game's video instead of, uh, a DVI cable, which is capable of 4 Gb/s? The people who developed DVI apparently understood that that 1920 x 1200 pixels w/ 24 bits/pixels @ 60Hz results in bandwidth well over 3 Gb/s. The people who developed streamed games seem very, very confused (at best).
Those of us who know anything about bandwidth and compression and (especially) latency can see the enormous technical obstacles facing a service like this, and startups like Onlive never did anything to explain how they intended to solve them. Instead, they did everything they could to lock out independent reviewers with NDAs and closed demonstrations. A friend of mine described it as the gaming equivalent of the perpetual motion scam, and IMO that's spot on (except that a streamed game service would still have the draconian DRM issues even if it worked perfectly).
Streamed games appear designed from the ground up to benefit the game publishers and fuck the customers, exactly what you'd expect from any DRM system.
P.S. Remember when Microsoft intended 24-hour XBox One check-ins, and gamers rejected that? How the fuck are mandatory check ins going to fly when measured in milliseconds?
Bethesda ran into this once already, when the reaction to Skyrim Special Edition was "we have mods that do all that already."
Boohoo, the no more nude/porn mods or wall hack mods.
Letâ(TM)s get real, very little benefit comes from modding or data mining or n the first place, but the disparity between a high end device and a low end one now is so wide that you canâ(TM)t play a multiplayer game fairly unless the game is programmed for the worst device, instead of the best one.
... the internet is a threat as it's an uncontrolled knowledge repository.
until information can be centralised the internet will be a threat to the elites and their criminal activities.
Just another byproduct of this new direction from tech giants.
Get back in your cage, you peasant.
Cloud Computing... I feel like eventually having your own computer will be illegal. All that will be permissible will be some version of a "smart" dummy terminal. Look to China to move on this first, and watch as microsoft and google compete to own "computing" itself.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
BTW, why post a link to a site (vice.com) asking for registration/subscription? Some users like me haven't the habit of subscribing/registering in random sites.
I agree with you 100%. This stream my game bullshit is going to cause latency that no serious gamer is going to tollerate. This is bullshit at best until everyone has a 10gb/sec fiber link. It makes for great news and a good dog/pony show, but its never going to be real world for the masses until we are all on optical networks without any congestion.
1. Don't Play.
2. Don't Buy.
Nothing speaks louder than drops in sales and players.
100Mbps? Must be nice. I recently had my download rate boosted to 3Mbps (of course, that's best case, downhill on ice with a tailwind) and I thought I was lucky to get that.
This trash gonna fail hard bc their target market won't have access to real internet without a civil war
It's all about the clicks, the eyeballs, the "engagement". It's conceited.
Just like "cloud gaming": No more hobbyists fiddling with stuff at home, the control remains with the company. And pesky players playing old games are a thing of the past, too. New games, so more sales! (Think the executives. But they're wrong.)
We're talking about gaming, right?
Everything you say is true. Nothing you say matters. For a long time already, everything related to the internet is moving in the same direction: centralized absolute control.
Both governments and corporations want this, each for their own reasons. You are not going to stop this. You will not be able to opt-out. Living will simply become impossible without surrendering your freedoms.
Enjoy the bits of freedom you think you still have.
it's about charging you by the minute. I remember an interview with Activision's CEO where he was livid over how much time folks had spent playing Modern Warfare with only a single $60 purchase. He considered it theft.
Here's hoping the Indies and Gog don't go anywhere, though I've heard Gog is kinda hurting right now. That Witcher card game bombed and sales at the store have been slowing. They really need a hit with Cyberpunk 2077.
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The same rant applies to every new game streaming service because they all face the same horrible problems and have the same ulterior motive:
Fortunately, this doesn't apply to every new game. This is about "AAA" games, which are largely garbage anyway. "AAA" games are the boy bands, or Transformers movies, or light beer of the game industry. They sell well, are consumed mindlessly topass the time, and instantly forgotten when the next one comes along.
There are certainly still new single player, deep, moddable, games being made. I like the fact that I now get "cloud saves" in parallel to my local saves, so I can choose how I play across multiple machines. I like the fact that all my game purchases are downloads, not physical media I have to have shipped to me. None of this technology inherently makes games worse. Massive game corporations focused only on shareholder returns are what makes games worse.
tl;dr: old man fails to yell at cloud, welcomes kids on his yard.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
You are here to consume, not create. You are here to be tracked, predicted and financially projected forward. You are not here to do anything spontaneous, anything that we can't control, anything that we can't monetize.
Dead link
Many newer games have an online portion to them, where you play with or against other people. In what you call Modding is what we call cheating. So that skin you use on your game, which happens to make my character appear as bright orange, in a dark area, just makes it easier for you to target and shoot me. Or custom functions that makes a complex action in the game a simple action to you. Say when you are out of Ammo on one gun, it will find you next powerful and fastest gun with Ammo and switch to that.
These are things you can do to cheat, that the server wouldn't be able to figure out, like with some other cheats in the past, where characters were invulnerable, or run faster then normal. Where server analytics can find them.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Don't discriminate. Some Trump Traitors are heterosexuals.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Why buy a game when you have no way of knowing if their service will be there tomorrow. Or you drop hundreds on games and then hey they ban you because you say you like a certain Pokemon that they don't approve of or your favorite color happens to be not one of the three primaries. Or hey, someone steals your account and poof all your assets are gone. There's a reason people like physical disks and cartridges and consoles. Remember all of those cloud services that just up and disappeared and all of those users were just out of luck? Goodbye Ultraviolet. This is google, people, the same ones that will just dump google plus (ok, maybe a bad example) and thousands of users will lose their data, etc. (well, if they were living under a rock at least). Google loves to start projects and then cancel them at the drop of a hat. Ah the Google graveyard of past projects. How long until Stadia is the next one. Yeah, maybe enjoy it while it lasts, but don't become too invested in Google products.
I seriously appreciate the efforts of people to archive the entire web, and video games.
But at some point, I think you have to accept the fact it's up to the people making some things to preserve them also - and if you can't you just have to let them go.
Basically I'm against forcing people to limit in what ways they can do things, just to accommodate some third party edge cases.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
We can opt out but it requires an educated consumer market that understands trade-offs and rejects these services en masse.
If everyone votes for their personal interests and not big government/corporation and spends their money on competitors that reject IP protection and rent seeking, as a society, we can shift the direction of these sorts of things.
This isn't easy but it also isn't that hard. It takes a little bit more effort to read, research, and think about things you do like voting and making purchases, we can change things. The problem is it requires a small bit of extra work but the work is for your own interests... when you discard this work you start acting for others' interests and lose more and more as time progresses, dragging everyone else who isn't wealthy and or politically powerful own with you.
These new fangled cars mean the end to hiring a stable boy to manage our stable of horses for transport. Won't someone please think of the stable boys?!
Even with 10GBps fiber this still adds unnecessary hops that will add up to extra latency.
Not really the reality.
The internet is no more centralized than it was in the 90's.
The fact that everyone hangs out on the same few domains does nothing to our ability to make a new domain with it's own independant, maybe even distributed, servers.
Now, when we are required to log into FB or Google and tunnel all our traffic thru that....then you have an argument.
In 20 years we'll still be playing Doom 2, Quake 1, and Skyrim. Why mess with things you can't make content for?
we can see cable tv like fee fights, forced bundleding come to online gaming as well as well ISP like Comcast trying to pull a new CSN Philly excursive like setup.
Do you want to say lose all EA games as your Streaming does not want pay the new rates?
Do you want to be forced to pay for mickey mouse adventures, Madden NFL, spongebob adventures as part of the basic package?
Have to pay for a mid tear or higher plan to be able to pay the add on fees to be able to play WOW?
Have to buy an mid tear or higher plan to be able to PPV / on off buy games from 3rd party's and that you can lose even after paying full price for the game if you stop paying for your basic plan?
But of course companies don't want you to own anything. They want you to pay monthly to rent temporary remote access to the things they decide you can have.
How many big budget game titles have 10% local play and 90% online play?
How many big budget game titles shut down the servers for online play after 3 years?
How many of those games are now unplayable?
Makes me wonder if the FIFA futbol titles will be playable up to 2010 and then not playable at all?
Secondly, makes me wonder if GameStop will stop buying used sports games 1 year after they have been released? Or buying used sports games for $1.00 or less.
While game preservation is admirable, there is not enough volunteers worldwide to even make 2 to 5 titles a year playable for longer than the original servers are running.
Imagine being a kid right now. Some game releases in the next few years, via cloud only, that you play and absolutely love. It becomes part of your childhood. Fast forward 20+ years, and you start thinking about that game. You can't have it. It's gone. There is no digging it out of your mom's attic. It will just be completely gone. There may be videos of it, but those are just videos. You can never play it again, ever.
...it has been made into a decision for the game creator whether to support it or not - which is exactly as it should be. Just as a musician is free to release stems or multitracks if they want DJs to do remixes, so will a game developer be free to release a binary package which will allow users to run the game locally, with or without mods. If someone doesn't want mods to be made of their game, they are free to prevent that (just as they can today if they implement code signing and resource fingerprinting). You don't have some god-given right to modify every game. If the game is provided via media that is accessible and modifiable, then you're fine. If not, play the game they intended to deliver and be happy about it. If you don't like their version of the game, feel free to write your own game which is better. No one is obligated to provide you with a ready-made game to serve as the foundation of your mod. It's nice that many game companies do so (and plenty go out of their way to provide that kind of access. God knows I lost an awful lot of time to messing around in quakeC, building entirely new games via that engine, when I was in my 20s). It's fun. I learned a lot. But I never thought unreal and id software had some kind of obligation to provide me with a development platform.
Personally, I'm a little tired of listening to younger generations complain that things that were never actually free (as in speech) are an entitlement that is somehow being 'revoked' just because their abuse of someone else's intellectual property is somehow being diminished. I'll worry about game mods going away just as soon as kids start paying for the music CDs I produce.
You seem pretty gay for Trump.
Key piece left out of article I would like to tie into the conversation is the fact that cloud computing will take away freedom to play games after publishers stop saleing the game. I might still want to play a game five or ten years from now and letting the publisher determine if I should be allowed to play is a big red flag nobody is talking enough about.
I'm much more worried about 3D card stagnation. A central super-center, while needing millions, might only need a fraction of what PC land consumes, leading to less profit and therefore slower development. This is the forefront of computer chip advancement, with old Pentium's great grandchildren able to be tucked into a tiny corner.
On the other hand, game services will update rapidly or be left behind on the latest games.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
One of the guy's point is that with streaming only games you are limiting what people can do with games. Mods and making tools for games is 100% the reason I became a programmer.
You can easily support mods with streamed games, by allowing users to upload content for their own accounts, or of course allowing community generated content to be distributed to all players (probably more practical).
The system will have to have some way to at least save some custom things like controller configuration related to your account, so they will have some storage space per user already, that could easily hold mods as well.
So if you want to see that kind of thing, make a game for the Google streaming platform that supports it (thereby pushing Google into supporting the concept).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
are writing about the ills of it.
PS Now has not displaced people buying video games. Video game subscriptions suck and gamers will stop playing when this stuff tries to get onto AAA gaming.
Gamers are one of the most demanding customer segments and it won't be easy pacifying them with streaming services.
I haven't bought an EA game since they started Origin.
I haven't bought an Ubisoft game since their Uplay bullshit.
I kind of regret not getting to play star wars battlefront or assassins creed odyssey, but I have hundreds, literally, of Steam games I haven't even played yet, so it is their loss, not mine.
UT3 still has servers running. Pancake! MONSTER KILL!
There are still mad updates for that. And Neverwinter. You can reskin that stuff and make whatever you want.
The cloud component is only one side of the evolving game market, the other side of it is the access that everybody has to a dozen or so AAA game engines for free! The bar for entry to game development has never been lower, even hobbyists have the choice of Source, Unreal, Unity, CryEngine with one of the pioneers of PC game modding, idTech, being the exception.
Look at PUBG, that came along thanks to accessibility to the Unreal engine.
> startups like Onlive never did anything to explain how they intended to solve them. Instead, they did everything they could to lock out independent reviewers with NDAs and closed demonstrations.
The secrecy NDAs etc. were because after being ripped off in big ways, the CEO Steve Perlman was overly paranoid. One of the most tight lipped places I've ever worked.
However, the technology worked just fine thank you. My son and his expoert hypertwitch gamer friends did not perceive any lag compared to the same games live and local. Ask any former employee, we all thought it was great!
OnLive system had quite a few tricks to reduce "lag", many of which are trade secrets, not patented, for obvious reasons. Sorry you never got to try it.
The larger point is: don't comment on things you have no direct experience with.
You don't have access to throwaway mail addresses, throwaway names and throwaway addresses?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Can't give it as a present (at least, not as a physical present). You have to pay all the time while you use it - i.e. subscribe.
With a real, physical DVD, CD or cartridge game, you pay once, play as often as you want for no extra charge, and can resell it after you get bored with it. You can give it to somebody as a present. Nobody can take it away from you.
This just shows how stupid 'young people' are nowadays, that they think streaming a game is a good idea.
Pros:
1. Absolute flexibility in hardware and software stacks selection
2. Dynamically expanding worlds creation
3. True massively multiplayer. Such service can allow to render thousands of people in one scene. Imagine battlefields full of people
4. Charge players per minute.
5. No game ownership - to title stickiness. The whole players audience can move to another title within one day.
Cons:
1. No Indy games anymore. No money - no title. Pure investors market.
2. No hardware sales anymore. No PC enthusiasts. PC based gaming and hardware market is dead. Chrome books rule the world 'eh?
3. No free games. No open source or community games projects.
Worked for much of daily use software and did not result in loss of revenue - on the contrary Sillicon Valley is doing extremely well. It's not so important that game data is freely distributable so long as the engine can be modified and people can make custom levels. Doom would not have gotten as far as it did without such capabilities.
The game doesn't even run locally. All you get is streaming video/audio and all the lag you'd expect (including controller lag), which is a recipe for disaster in North America.
It would be a recipe for disaster here in Southern England where you're not going to be far from the datacentre and network connections are pretty good... a 40 ms input lag will see controllers launched with the force required to cross the channel. We'd have declared war on Ireland, Norway and France (again) within a week.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
If it was such the bees knees, what happen to it? Why did gamers not jump on the wagon? You didn't answer any of these. You just said "I worked for them, it was a great service that worked great, I can't tell you how great because trade secrets and patents.
That website thrives on people taking games apart and publishing what they find.
This is just another step into a crapsack future where everything is controlled, locked down, and turned into undecipherable black box. And the peasants are just mindless cash-cows. No thanks.
Wait until people start streaming games over cellular connections. Remember Pokemon Go? Not a video streaming game, but at the hight of it's popularity, it bogged down cell data in many areas to the point of people not even being able to get a basic HTML web page to load.
This will trash mobile connections.
Itz a gr8teservice nd u r a f4g 4 questining such gr3atne5 Lololoolllroflcoptor111111one1123411!!~!1
- sorry. But yeah, it's obvious somebody had a heaping helping of the company Kool-aid.
I am tired of this push for dumb terminals, thin clients, streaming games, all now meant to take as much control away from the user as possible.
This isn't the 1960s where this kind of shit not only made sense, but was often the only way to allow multiple users to use mainframe that cost hundereds of thousands or millions of dollars, and you actually had to be a near genius just to boot the machine.
No, I don't want "streaming games" and the ass performance that goes with it, I don't want a fucking dumb terminal, I want the software ON MY DEVICE UNDER MY CONTROL, AND BE ABLE TO TAKE IT APART AND ANALYSE IT AS I PLEASE!
It's time to squash this shit once and for all, and make sure it never returns!
"...it has been made into a decision for the game creator whether to support it or not - which is exactly as it should be. Just as a musician is free to release stems or multitracks if they want DJs to do remixes, so will a game developer be free to release a binary package which will allow users to run the game locally, with or without mods. If someone doesn't want mods to be made of their game, they"
Oh yay, you can be all giddy and excited at the prospect of an author who made and released a streaming game 20 years ago, for a game company called "Podunk Game Co" located in Buttfuck, Arkanas. *maybe* releasing the binary of that game you loved. Except the author died 10 years ago, Podunk Game Co changed hands a million times, and no one even knows for sure who owns the rights to it's games, let alone which landfill the box of backup copies of the code/assets went to. Oh well, let's go to the abando--OOPS, there was never a binary released to the public! Too bad, so sad, you're fucked.
You can have your shitty glorious future, I refuse to even play a game that is stream only. Tell game companies who insist on stream only to stick their game where the sun don't shine.
Have to pay for a mid tear or higher plan to be able to pay the add on fees to be able to play WOW?**ZONK
Then the whole gaming industry can get bent. If even looks like it will get to that point, then it's time to download everything you can from abandonware sites, or go to a used game shop or thrift store, and buy every game you can, and start stockpiling. Make sure to stockpile PC components because they will no doubt make sure no machine that uses this cable tv model will ever be able to run game code natively.
It would help if we can get some talented ham radio enthusists and others to build a new internet, completly unreliant on the corporate controlled infrastructure that's in place now, because the 'old' internet will be locked down and fully controlled at that point.