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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.
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?
In that if the game code/content changes and the game exists only on the publisher's servers, it's difficult (maybe even impossible) to discover/document that change. Like a revision to a book, only no one has a copy of the previous version to compare the current one to.
Yea, that philosophy of voting with your wallet... it doesn't work. It assumes consumers make informed decisions when the fact is, for any given market, the largest distribution of purchases are made by uninformed consumers. Make those happy and you can shift the market to any direction you want.
This isn't limited to the gaming industry, this is typical rent seeking strategy used in every market, technology or not. Consumers trade initial convenience and let reliance on that convenience creep over time until you're locked in and too committed.
These aren't shampoo bottles in a rack where there's healthy competition and the barrier to change is incredibly low. Vendor lockin is very real.
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.
That first part, that greed, is why this whole thing does not concern me in the least. Look at the end of the day, the people coming up with this stuff, will be the people who run it. So greedy control freak psychopaths and they will simply drive their customers away and collapse their businesses, it is inevitable it is their individual personal nature, their eyes light up with delusions of infinite greed and power and the incorporate practices that turn off customers and drive them away.
They will be competing with cheaper and cheaper hardware and better and better software, making easier to develop independent games and low cost hardware. People will always choose the solution that provides them the greatest control and the least interference, they want to rent a solution that takes away control and maximise interference.
They can crap on all they want, they are doomed to lose. They are trying to provide the equivalent of cable TV as a gaming service and people are turning off cable because they a sick of paying for what they do not use. It is like the delusion of, why sell soccer balls, where is the profit, they play with them for a long time and lot of people all at once, you need to rent soccer balls and each player that touches it needs to pay as well, why would that not sell, ask yourself. Why would it work with computer games, it wont but they are greedy scammy fuckers and they will try to rip off anyone they can, including and especially their own investors.
So Google exec, shit our reputation is really bad, invading everyone's privacy, baking search results, treating their private mail like postcards, it will really start to affect our share price, what will we do come bonus time. I know we will come up with some bullshit game streaming stuff tell the investors it will make billions and pump up our share price and yeah bonuses.
Tech industry, the bigger the presentation the less likely the product is to succeed, hence the need for a big flashy presentation to sell it to investors. Game streaming is doomed to fail, it just is, all the flash and glam is to sell it to investors and pump up the share price, it's a big show. You think, but why waste all that money, on prototypes and presentations, probably all cost a few million dollars, well, because all that bullshit can have an impact on share price worth billions. This is why modern corporations share price nowadays routinely tank because all the bullshit the spread around to inflate share price, inevitably fails. So they make big announcements just prior to quarterly bonus review, get that share price bump, fill their pockets with bonuses money and watch it all collapse after wasting millions on bullshit presentations. They are playing computer games, just not the one most people expect, they are gaming their companies share price, wasting their companies money to do it, so they can fill their pockets with cool, cool, bonus money, even though they know it will fail, they KNOW.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen