If I modify GPL software for my own internal use, the GPL doesn't have anything that applies to me. If I change my mind and distribute my code, then everyone who I give it to has a right to ask me for a copy of my modifications. Software with a EULA could ABSOLUTELY apply to me, even if I use the software: it could state that I can't use the product to analyze a certain thing, or prevent me from using the results of the program output to make a profit. The GPL is not a EULA.
Whenever I'm near an Apple store, I inquire about Airpods. Each time, I'm told they don't have any, and I can order some something something 3 months out. If I cared deeply, I would order some. But, I don't. There's no casual buyers of this product- everyone who has one has waited in line, preordered, or something else. They are, every one of them, all-in on the product.
If Apple made enough for demand, their sales would be substantially higher, but their satisfaction numbers would probably not be so amazing. Perhaps airpods are totally awesome- but you'll never know to ask super motivated fans only, which is all they have. All this study tells you is that the things are not garbage- and I don't think anyone was claiming that.
> That unless you have at a bare minimum, power user cred, you deserve every bad thing that happens to you on line.
This is a semi-valid argument. Power users are a lot more familiar with what kinda goes on behind the scenes, and safely locking down something like the internet is either very hard or impossible, depending on the scope of your need. With this as an apparent physical reality, expecting a safe computer ecosystem is a lot like expecting safety on a mountainous region with numerous cliffs. "Why, you'd need to install a thousand miles of guard rails, and that would make it really inconvenient for those of us who carry parachutes around and often take the fast way down!"
But when someone proposes to do exactly that, and does it, and gets wild cheers, we look more like trailblazers and less like pioneers, more interested in adapting to the wild than in making the wild safe for everyone.
Basically, the online security model of Windows was a running joke until Vista, and still a serious issue for a few years after that, and still AN issue today. Meanwhile, running OS X or any type of Linux is almost an immunity to most of that drama, and has been for years. But Linux as a group has a pretty steep learning curve- there's a reason it is a top pick among professionals and hobbyists and not many others.
> the higher price isn't all that high when you deal with the whole package
Some people figure out how to keep their box pretty clean after a few run-ins with danger. Others will ultimately have to deal with those costs- either externalize them because the neighbor's son can fix stuff up for nothing (or for cookies), or drag them to some dumb shop that charges a hundred bucks to run hours of cleaning tools and crap, or just decide that after a couple years a PC is done, and you have to buy a new one. When a solution like an iPad, chromebook, or just Macbook presents itself, you are a lot more likely to take into account that total cost of ownership.
And right now on TCO, Windows 10 looks pretty reasonable- though I'd argue that this is mostly because people don't put an appropriate cost on what advertisements do to them, and don't put an appropriate cost on what their user telemetry is worth to keep private. At the very least, it's not as ludicrous as having javascript 0 days writing your drive as root, as Windows universally was up until Vista.
> This example of obtaining a Macbook was nothing more than pressing the "easy" button, which essentially defined the motivational level.
Her switching to Mac was only easy from a *security* perspective. It was more expensive, and she just walked away from any software she used to have that needed Windows. Granted, there wasn't a lot, but still. Swapping ecosystems at (comparatively) high cost made it easier for her to do everything she really needed, without the malware that she knew she would always be tricked into installing (and back then, drive-by malware that didn't require any user mistakes, was a lot more common).
> Increased security my ass. People don't give a shit about security. Ordinary users are fucking lazy
I disagree.
Personal anecdote: My mom started using the internet in the late 90s / early 2000s. Every time I visited her, I'd have to clean up all kinds of stuff for her. It was a constant nest of toolbars and other random shit she clicked on. She would sometimes install security updates, sometimes not, but there was always a nest of vipers under the hood of her laptop. She had no idea how to fix that, but she was aware it was an issue.
Eventually, she got a Macbook. She LOVED that Macbook, and used it for over ten years. She never had that malware issue with the Macbook, obviously. Mostly, now she uses ios devices.
She was motivated to keep crap off her machine, but she wasn't motivated enough to jump through the hoops needed to achieve enough mastery of her system that she could tell the difference between good and bad choices. When presented an option that offered her more security at a higher price, she took it. The ability to be her own sysadmin was not that amazing compared to her apparent ability to be tricked into installing crap.
Nowadays, she would be safer with a Windows box than she was back then. But that ship has sailed, and she's still much safer with her ios stuff than she ever was on an open platform.
I don't know how representative her case is, but I imagine, reasonably. There's definitely users who wish their machine was more secure, and of the set that don't have a need for advanced features, and can afford a proprietary solution, walled gardens are viewed as a boon.
> so the mining activity benefits a Bitcoin address different from the one configured by the owner of the unit
I'm sure someone would benefit from a sudden, unexpected, and precipitous drop in mining capacity and some manner of hit on transactions as well. It isn't like the price of bitcoin is exactly stable.
> It's a Bitcoin article on Slashdot, but as of yet nobody has complained that this is some sort of guerilla BUY BTC marketing
It doesn't look like a pump, so why would anyone call it that? It's a vulnerability with apparently a lot of mining rigs. I imagine most of them will be guarded by the end of the week, if they aren't already, now that this vulnerability is exposed. Almost everything about bitcoin is some kind of sketchy, I'd be surprised if miners trusted their hardware anyway.
I mean, no, it's not simpler for the player to run the game locally. It's merely vastly better. In theory, you could play on ANY device with a good connection, as long as it supported a controller you liked enough. You could play on an old iPad, some pre-Core x86s, anything that was able to drive a video stream and read your inputs.
The problem is that latency. Everything else is a problem on the remote side, which, presumably, they would be highly motivated to run efficiently.
> First of all I see this as a platform that can host everything and is cloud based so they are only transmitting what you view to you.
Latency. So much lag. There's actually services that offer this right now, and they all tooootally suck. A modern client uses a lot of power on your side, but as a result, it is displaying the server state, and also making predictions based on that. This cuts dramatically down on the amount of latency you personally have to deal with. But if your input device and your output device both have serious latency, you will be in for a WORLD of hurt.
> You would no longer have to buy any additional hardware or worry about DRM/which platform you are on.
I mean, do you think we don't all do this today for some bad reason? Your hypothetical is already something that people try to do, for single and multiplayer games alike.
> As you can see each publisher/developer would receive their equivalent funds and we start voting with our money as an extension of our time.
Right, that it itself the problem. In your hypothetical, the guy making Madden 2018 realizes that he needs to get his Xbitch subscribers to play his game more than the others. So the first thing he does is offer a passive reward, maybe even for being just logged in. Tell your team to go practice. The practice plays itself on loop, but you can interact for slightly greater rewards per time. Now he's getting 8 hours a night while you leave your team practicing. Since the game is now rebuilt around the idea that teams practice while their owners are asleep, this isn't really an advantage to the player in any way (except for the players that aren't doing this yet), but it totally dicks up the accounting system.
So Microsoft walks in and says, none of that. But once the incentive is established, everyone will walk up to that line and do what they can. Now EA offers a bonus in game A for playing a bunch of game B. Or any game simply offers rewards for heavy playtime.
You get more of what you pay for. And this system absolutely encourages it to be gamed.
> this might incentivize developers to build and support games for longer
It might incentivize developers to try to drag out playtimes, even when they aren't fun. Which is more likely?
Also, there's a cap to how much game can be paid for this way. If I need to pay 15/month to play, say, WoW, why would I expect a game of that quality to be delivered to me as part of another 15/month subscription? If I was EA, would I launch my title on this system, or wait 6 months and offer a gimped, or maybe very grindy version?
It's a bad idea. I very much hope it fails for this reason. It pays people to make shitty game, and it chokes out good games. Very probably.
> that there is one, singular, successful subscription MMO: World of Warcraft
I mean, that's not quite true. It's close to true, though. Final Fantasy XIV is subscription based (they have a free-to-play trial up to level 35, similar to WoW's free-to-play trial up to level 20 or 30 or I forget). They use the EXACT same model as WoW, with a real-money store for a few cosmetics (they don't offer a level boost, or the ability to buy in-game currency, but they may eventually- both of those things are things that WoW has added in the last few years). While FFXIV doesn't enjoy the same success that WoW does, they are absolutely a profitable game.
Other games might be profitable as subscription, but use a hybrid model where all their serious players are on subscriptions, and their free trial is level capped or otherwise similar. Star Wars: The Old Republic uses this model. I think Wildstar has something like that, but I doubt Wildstar is profitable yet.
Profitable subscription based MMOs that are not WoW exist. What took so long to get through the heads of various investors is that a given subscription MMO is extraordinarily unlikely to get to WoW's level of success or profitability, so this should definitely inform your development costs, and model- it should not need to get to "at least half of WoW" in order to turn a profit, because it almost assuredly will not.
> Of course, what Microsoft wants to do is eliminate the discs entirely, to try and kill the resale market. Which is what this is really about.
That's actually a really good point, and I'm sorry I missed it.
> Wrong. If you break Steam TOS, you lose access to those games. You don't own the game, you lease it.
You lease it, but it is often a one-time lease cost that lasts indefinitely. Sometimes the one-time lease cost is literally zero.
I get your desire to jump on anyone making the mistake between Steam offering you a game, and you actually going and buying the game. But it's still a reasonable analogy to make, especially given that your Steam library will last for years, and probably eventually decades. Given that the same type of shenanigans needed to free a Steam-installed game from Steam are also needed to free most modern games from their licensing servers, it's reasonable to talk about it like that. It takes serious effort to exert your ownership over your purchased products, be they on Steam or in physical disk form.
> but that there are a lot of studios you can't buy through Steam
I mean, he could be saying that, but if he is, he's an asshole.
> . Origin, Blizzard, Microsoft Studios
"Origin" is just "EA". If Spencer wants Microsoft on Steam, he should put ALL his games on Steam, right?
To ask "why aren't all of these guys available in one place" is a stupid question, because he's looking out at a landscape with Microsoft, Valve, Blizzard, and EA each having some kind of proprietary distribution platform, all of the non-Steam ones created to try to eat Valve's lunch. It is lucrative to control the platform so much, and obviously Microsoft would like to be in on that. But why would Blizzard choose to sell through a subscription service? What games would sell well that way? The only game that could even be adapted to that model is really Overwatch, with Starcraft and Diablo arguably getting there maybe. Why would EA opt to serve games through them? EA presses really hard to make Origin mandatory for all of its games. Why would Steam choose that? Just to put a subset of its Windows-only games through there?
Notice also that Netflix is by NO MEANS a one-stop shop for shows. Individual networks have been pulling their titles to try to get people to come onto just THEIR platforms, but with a subscription. Netflix has their own titles, which they won't share with competitors. Amazon and Hulu are doing the same thing. By this definition, someone would need to make a Netflix for movies and shows before you'd expect Microsoft to make a Netflix for video games.
Oh, also note that Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and others, all try very hard to make their shit work on all platforms. Even Linux is reasonably well supported. Microsoft, meanwhile, is brutally ludicrous about tying everyone to Windows. Would a Microsoft store work on Mac? What about Linux? What about Nintendo's Switch, or Sony's PS4 Pro? Steam at least tries to support all major x86 platforms. Microsoft would never. Never ever.
The business models are completely different. Every mode of distributing games for cash has FULLY influenced how games are designed. If you make a game that sells at a store, it has to fit on whatever media you are selling it on (pretty easy these days), and it has to be complete. If everyone has internet connections, you can ship a halfassed game with a fraction of content instead, and we see that. If you can do in-app purchases, then a science will spring up about how best to trick and exploit your customers- start with a free, fair and fun game, then gradually ramp up the difficulty until it is either an expensive, fair, and fun game, or a free, unfair, and unfun game. And we see this too, and not to a small degree- there's huge expensive studies done about how best to rip people off.
So, what does a subscription based service incentivize? First of all, shitty games that look good enough to justify a subscription, games with artificially long end-points such as MMOs, and of course, the same in-app purchases. Basically, it has the worst commonalities of all the existing models. But wait, there's more! If the subscription is, say, 15 a month, then that's not enough to pay for free access to like 5 good MMOs and two dozen good first person shooters. How do you divide the 15 a month anyway? By the games played by each person? It ends up having the same compensation issues that Spotify does, except unlike performers, you don't go on tour with your game- your distribution is your entire model, full stop.
There's almost no way that, even if highly supported and well liked, this is sustainable. This is just middle-men engaging in huge rent-seeking, and they will be the only ones to possibly make any kind of cash out of this, which will be entirely on the backs of any developers.
A more optimistic view is to offer temporary access to older games, for people who like them but don't want to go through the drama of maintaining their ability to play them separately for long periods of time. That's the best case scenario, and not the one they are talking about. I suspect even that would fail too.
And I'm sure this would be just more Windows-specific garbage (Xbone also runs Windows, AFAIK), as if the world needs more of that.
> Canada population 36 million > Korea Population: 50.6 million
That's impressive. But I actually mistyped. Japan has 127 million people, and I said it had 36 million (about the same as Canada). What I meant to type was, specifically, Tokyo has nearly 38 million people, about the population of Canada.
> the cities I've been to in South Korea don't seem all that crowded
I think the issue is that Canada is fucking huge, and most of it is vast areas you aren't really allowed to live in, or couldn't live in. South Korea is wealthy enough to not have their dense cities feel super packed. I mostly brought up the Canada / Tokyo comparison (complete with typo) to show that areas that the issue Hawaii has is ultimately a combination of distance from other population centers, combined with not being big enough to fully fulfill the needs of multiplayer gaming. Hawaii has less than 2 million people, and areas like Japan wouldn't even need good communications with ROK in order to be fully fulfilled with multiplayer gaming, as even Tokyo alone has a population equaling entire countries.
Energy Star was around 20 years old in 2011 when they finally launched a pilot program to actually test the manufacturer's claims. Unsurprisingly, they found that some were lying. Since there was third party testing involved, we run into an odd issue: the federal government has essentially said "some set of third party testers get to verify energy star, and, if they are ok with it, we will take their word on it and let you use the energy star branding".
Inevitably, this means that the manufacturers will find some way, in some cases, to scam the results. After all, if word gets out that YOU actually test the products but *I* provide the advertising star, I get to eat your lunch. The system incentivizes cheating, and it wasn't until the Obama administration that anyone had the balls to go look for said cheating.
You could make the case that the system really does make stuff more efficient, even when some participants cheat. After all, they aren't ALL cheating, and removing the system would probably replace it with nothing, or a possibly more corrupt private industry rubber-stamper. You could also make the case that the incentivization to cheat or not cheat shouldn't be coming from the federal government anyway, and that encouraging a small side industry in testing drama is wasteful and unethical.
What we will probably see is this: the mainstream media will jump all over it, as it is something to smear Trump with. Internet Trump Team will respond by claiming it is wasteful swampy garbage. No one will be convinced of anything, the facts won't matter in the slightest, and nothing will change in a meaningful way for anyone, except maybe the divisiveness in the country will grow a bit.
> But this is realistically a problem without a good solution?
Correct.
OP was asking about all the other players in the world, maybe with an angle like we only care about Hawaiians because they are Americans. I pointed out that the reason that players in most other populated and industrialized regions aren't affected is because they already have regional servers with adequate players, just as the northern portion of north America does, and as such, the fact that trying to play against someone from Tokyo when you are in London is total garbage is not a big deal, because you have closer people to play with, but the Hawaiian sorta doesn't.
The issue isn't that Hawaii is reasonably isolated, it is also that it is small. Plenty of games I play have servers specific to regions, or even countries. Ex: Games with Japanese servers. Japan has the population of Canada, and it's in a very small area. It's a terrible ping to try to play on those servers, but I have ones not that far from me instead, etc.
Switching is pretty fast compared to routing, and I suspect you'd need to route several times. You also have quite a few more machines than just the two you are talking about. More importantly, if Honolulu to LA is drama for some people, and New York to LA is not, and both distances are similar... why complain about the distance?
> What about gamers who live in Europe, Australia, Asia, South America, Africa and have to contact US based servers? They also have latency.
They also have servers in Europe, Asia, and South America to connect to. If there were enough gamers, they would have servers in Africa too. Rarely, Aussies have local servers, but usually they have to make do with Asia (acceptable) or Europe or US (much rougher). Hawaii isn't just pretty far and/or served by higher latency connections, it is also too small to make do with just its own players, as, say, Canada / US is able to do.
This already happens for the serious events, and it will continue to happen. In addition to ping junk, you also want to thoroughly cheat-proof stuff if you are handing out prizes, etc. But for other things, basically, Hawaii is poop for online gaming in the same manner that plenty of other places are poop for surfing.
Well, if you check a map, you see that the distance from Hawaii to LA is similar to the distance from LA to New York (and mostly maps to the fiber cables that they already have). A quarter around the earth is like 6300 miles, and Hawaii isn't even close to that far from its direct connects on the west coast (like 2400ish). Even a surface link to New York is less than 5000 miles.
LA to NY is kind of a crappy ping too, but not as rough as Hawaii has it. So I suspect their issues aren't just distance, but infrastructural to some degree.
> And this is one reason why we should not go around Earth, but through it.
Your max distance savings is about 40%, and that's from two opposite points on the equator.
New York to LA is considered a bit undesirable for ping times, and it is 2,451 miles flying over the surface of the earth. That's approximately, but less than, the surface distance from LA to Honolulu, which we'll call 2500 miles. We'll round the Earth's radius to 4000 miles. With that I get an angle of about 36 degrees, and something like 2470 miles as a 3D line between Honolulu and LA. That's barely less than the surface distance, which makes sense, given that the angle is so little.
I don't think going through the earth would help much. Going more on intuition, I don't think that the ping times are just a function of physical distance. Hawaii has to shuffle your packet to one of the long fiber links, and the other guys have to shuffle it out. I'd suspect that there's more gain to resolve over those pieces of infrastructure than you would save by tightening a mostly flat cable through the crust or whatever.
> If I'm living in Hawaii the absolute last thing I'm doing is playing video games. I'd be more concerned about rising ocean levels thanks to global climate change
Slashdot Mirror
> GPL absolutely covers the use.
If I modify GPL software for my own internal use, the GPL doesn't have anything that applies to me. If I change my mind and distribute my code, then everyone who I give it to has a right to ask me for a copy of my modifications. Software with a EULA could ABSOLUTELY apply to me, even if I use the software: it could state that I can't use the product to analyze a certain thing, or prevent me from using the results of the program output to make a profit. The GPL is not a EULA.
It's a copypasta, Lester. Smaller type'a troll.
https://www.reddit.com/r/copyp...
Whenever I'm near an Apple store, I inquire about Airpods. Each time, I'm told they don't have any, and I can order some something something 3 months out. If I cared deeply, I would order some. But, I don't. There's no casual buyers of this product- everyone who has one has waited in line, preordered, or something else. They are, every one of them, all-in on the product.
If Apple made enough for demand, their sales would be substantially higher, but their satisfaction numbers would probably not be so amazing. Perhaps airpods are totally awesome- but you'll never know to ask super motivated fans only, which is all they have. All this study tells you is that the things are not garbage- and I don't think anyone was claiming that.
> That unless you have at a bare minimum, power user cred, you deserve every bad thing that happens to you on line.
This is a semi-valid argument. Power users are a lot more familiar with what kinda goes on behind the scenes, and safely locking down something like the internet is either very hard or impossible, depending on the scope of your need. With this as an apparent physical reality, expecting a safe computer ecosystem is a lot like expecting safety on a mountainous region with numerous cliffs. "Why, you'd need to install a thousand miles of guard rails, and that would make it really inconvenient for those of us who carry parachutes around and often take the fast way down!"
But when someone proposes to do exactly that, and does it, and gets wild cheers, we look more like trailblazers and less like pioneers, more interested in adapting to the wild than in making the wild safe for everyone.
Basically, the online security model of Windows was a running joke until Vista, and still a serious issue for a few years after that, and still AN issue today. Meanwhile, running OS X or any type of Linux is almost an immunity to most of that drama, and has been for years. But Linux as a group has a pretty steep learning curve- there's a reason it is a top pick among professionals and hobbyists and not many others.
> the higher price isn't all that high when you deal with the whole package
Some people figure out how to keep their box pretty clean after a few run-ins with danger. Others will ultimately have to deal with those costs- either externalize them because the neighbor's son can fix stuff up for nothing (or for cookies), or drag them to some dumb shop that charges a hundred bucks to run hours of cleaning tools and crap, or just decide that after a couple years a PC is done, and you have to buy a new one. When a solution like an iPad, chromebook, or just Macbook presents itself, you are a lot more likely to take into account that total cost of ownership.
And right now on TCO, Windows 10 looks pretty reasonable- though I'd argue that this is mostly because people don't put an appropriate cost on what advertisements do to them, and don't put an appropriate cost on what their user telemetry is worth to keep private. At the very least, it's not as ludicrous as having javascript 0 days writing your drive as root, as Windows universally was up until Vista.
> This example of obtaining a Macbook was nothing more than pressing the "easy" button, which essentially defined the motivational level.
Her switching to Mac was only easy from a *security* perspective. It was more expensive, and she just walked away from any software she used to have that needed Windows. Granted, there wasn't a lot, but still. Swapping ecosystems at (comparatively) high cost made it easier for her to do everything she really needed, without the malware that she knew she would always be tricked into installing (and back then, drive-by malware that didn't require any user mistakes, was a lot more common).
> Two years ago she'd have been safer with the windows box, but now the windows box itself is the attacker.
She doesn't care about any of that. She knows I do though, lol.
> Increased security my ass. People don't give a shit about security. Ordinary users are fucking lazy
I disagree.
Personal anecdote: My mom started using the internet in the late 90s / early 2000s. Every time I visited her, I'd have to clean up all kinds of stuff for her. It was a constant nest of toolbars and other random shit she clicked on. She would sometimes install security updates, sometimes not, but there was always a nest of vipers under the hood of her laptop. She had no idea how to fix that, but she was aware it was an issue.
Eventually, she got a Macbook. She LOVED that Macbook, and used it for over ten years. She never had that malware issue with the Macbook, obviously. Mostly, now she uses ios devices.
She was motivated to keep crap off her machine, but she wasn't motivated enough to jump through the hoops needed to achieve enough mastery of her system that she could tell the difference between good and bad choices. When presented an option that offered her more security at a higher price, she took it. The ability to be her own sysadmin was not that amazing compared to her apparent ability to be tricked into installing crap.
Nowadays, she would be safer with a Windows box than she was back then. But that ship has sailed, and she's still much safer with her ios stuff than she ever was on an open platform.
I don't know how representative her case is, but I imagine, reasonably. There's definitely users who wish their machine was more secure, and of the set that don't have a need for advanced features, and can afford a proprietary solution, walled gardens are viewed as a boon.
> so the mining activity benefits a Bitcoin address different from the one configured by the owner of the unit
I'm sure someone would benefit from a sudden, unexpected, and precipitous drop in mining capacity and some manner of hit on transactions as well. It isn't like the price of bitcoin is exactly stable.
> It's a Bitcoin article on Slashdot, but as of yet nobody has complained that this is some sort of guerilla BUY BTC marketing
It doesn't look like a pump, so why would anyone call it that? It's a vulnerability with apparently a lot of mining rigs. I imagine most of them will be guarded by the end of the week, if they aren't already, now that this vulnerability is exposed. Almost everything about bitcoin is some kind of sketchy, I'd be surprised if miners trusted their hardware anyway.
> it was actually quite a bit better than you'd expect in terms of image quality and lag
It was clear that eliminating lag was their #1 priority, but they still were off by over a factor 2 on their promised lag.
I mean, no, it's not simpler for the player to run the game locally. It's merely vastly better. In theory, you could play on ANY device with a good connection, as long as it supported a controller you liked enough. You could play on an old iPad, some pre-Core x86s, anything that was able to drive a video stream and read your inputs.
The problem is that latency. Everything else is a problem on the remote side, which, presumably, they would be highly motivated to run efficiently.
> First of all I see this as a platform that can host everything and is cloud based so they are only transmitting what you view to you.
Latency. So much lag. There's actually services that offer this right now, and they all tooootally suck. A modern client uses a lot of power on your side, but as a result, it is displaying the server state, and also making predictions based on that. This cuts dramatically down on the amount of latency you personally have to deal with. But if your input device and your output device both have serious latency, you will be in for a WORLD of hurt.
> You would no longer have to buy any additional hardware or worry about DRM/which platform you are on.
I mean, do you think we don't all do this today for some bad reason? Your hypothetical is already something that people try to do, for single and multiplayer games alike.
> As you can see each publisher/developer would receive their equivalent funds and we start voting with our money as an extension of our time.
Right, that it itself the problem. In your hypothetical, the guy making Madden 2018 realizes that he needs to get his Xbitch subscribers to play his game more than the others. So the first thing he does is offer a passive reward, maybe even for being just logged in. Tell your team to go practice. The practice plays itself on loop, but you can interact for slightly greater rewards per time. Now he's getting 8 hours a night while you leave your team practicing. Since the game is now rebuilt around the idea that teams practice while their owners are asleep, this isn't really an advantage to the player in any way (except for the players that aren't doing this yet), but it totally dicks up the accounting system.
So Microsoft walks in and says, none of that. But once the incentive is established, everyone will walk up to that line and do what they can. Now EA offers a bonus in game A for playing a bunch of game B. Or any game simply offers rewards for heavy playtime.
You get more of what you pay for. And this system absolutely encourages it to be gamed.
> this might incentivize developers to build and support games for longer
It might incentivize developers to try to drag out playtimes, even when they aren't fun. Which is more likely?
Also, there's a cap to how much game can be paid for this way. If I need to pay 15/month to play, say, WoW, why would I expect a game of that quality to be delivered to me as part of another 15/month subscription? If I was EA, would I launch my title on this system, or wait 6 months and offer a gimped, or maybe very grindy version?
It's a bad idea. I very much hope it fails for this reason. It pays people to make shitty game, and it chokes out good games. Very probably.
> that there is one, singular, successful subscription MMO: World of Warcraft
I mean, that's not quite true. It's close to true, though. Final Fantasy XIV is subscription based (they have a free-to-play trial up to level 35, similar to WoW's free-to-play trial up to level 20 or 30 or I forget). They use the EXACT same model as WoW, with a real-money store for a few cosmetics (they don't offer a level boost, or the ability to buy in-game currency, but they may eventually- both of those things are things that WoW has added in the last few years). While FFXIV doesn't enjoy the same success that WoW does, they are absolutely a profitable game.
Other games might be profitable as subscription, but use a hybrid model where all their serious players are on subscriptions, and their free trial is level capped or otherwise similar. Star Wars: The Old Republic uses this model. I think Wildstar has something like that, but I doubt Wildstar is profitable yet.
Profitable subscription based MMOs that are not WoW exist. What took so long to get through the heads of various investors is that a given subscription MMO is extraordinarily unlikely to get to WoW's level of success or profitability, so this should definitely inform your development costs, and model- it should not need to get to "at least half of WoW" in order to turn a profit, because it almost assuredly will not.
> Of course, what Microsoft wants to do is eliminate the discs entirely, to try and kill the resale market. Which is what this is really about.
That's actually a really good point, and I'm sorry I missed it.
> Wrong. If you break Steam TOS, you lose access to those games. You don't own the game, you lease it.
You lease it, but it is often a one-time lease cost that lasts indefinitely. Sometimes the one-time lease cost is literally zero.
I get your desire to jump on anyone making the mistake between Steam offering you a game, and you actually going and buying the game. But it's still a reasonable analogy to make, especially given that your Steam library will last for years, and probably eventually decades. Given that the same type of shenanigans needed to free a Steam-installed game from Steam are also needed to free most modern games from their licensing servers, it's reasonable to talk about it like that. It takes serious effort to exert your ownership over your purchased products, be they on Steam or in physical disk form.
> but that there are a lot of studios you can't buy through Steam
I mean, he could be saying that, but if he is, he's an asshole.
> . Origin, Blizzard, Microsoft Studios
"Origin" is just "EA". If Spencer wants Microsoft on Steam, he should put ALL his games on Steam, right?
To ask "why aren't all of these guys available in one place" is a stupid question, because he's looking out at a landscape with Microsoft, Valve, Blizzard, and EA each having some kind of proprietary distribution platform, all of the non-Steam ones created to try to eat Valve's lunch. It is lucrative to control the platform so much, and obviously Microsoft would like to be in on that. But why would Blizzard choose to sell through a subscription service? What games would sell well that way? The only game that could even be adapted to that model is really Overwatch, with Starcraft and Diablo arguably getting there maybe. Why would EA opt to serve games through them? EA presses really hard to make Origin mandatory for all of its games. Why would Steam choose that? Just to put a subset of its Windows-only games through there?
Notice also that Netflix is by NO MEANS a one-stop shop for shows. Individual networks have been pulling their titles to try to get people to come onto just THEIR platforms, but with a subscription. Netflix has their own titles, which they won't share with competitors. Amazon and Hulu are doing the same thing. By this definition, someone would need to make a Netflix for movies and shows before you'd expect Microsoft to make a Netflix for video games.
Oh, also note that Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, and others, all try very hard to make their shit work on all platforms. Even Linux is reasonably well supported. Microsoft, meanwhile, is brutally ludicrous about tying everyone to Windows. Would a Microsoft store work on Mac? What about Linux? What about Nintendo's Switch, or Sony's PS4 Pro? Steam at least tries to support all major x86 platforms. Microsoft would never. Never ever.
I very much hope this fucking fails.
The business models are completely different. Every mode of distributing games for cash has FULLY influenced how games are designed. If you make a game that sells at a store, it has to fit on whatever media you are selling it on (pretty easy these days), and it has to be complete. If everyone has internet connections, you can ship a halfassed game with a fraction of content instead, and we see that. If you can do in-app purchases, then a science will spring up about how best to trick and exploit your customers- start with a free, fair and fun game, then gradually ramp up the difficulty until it is either an expensive, fair, and fun game, or a free, unfair, and unfun game. And we see this too, and not to a small degree- there's huge expensive studies done about how best to rip people off.
So, what does a subscription based service incentivize? First of all, shitty games that look good enough to justify a subscription, games with artificially long end-points such as MMOs, and of course, the same in-app purchases. Basically, it has the worst commonalities of all the existing models. But wait, there's more! If the subscription is, say, 15 a month, then that's not enough to pay for free access to like 5 good MMOs and two dozen good first person shooters. How do you divide the 15 a month anyway? By the games played by each person? It ends up having the same compensation issues that Spotify does, except unlike performers, you don't go on tour with your game- your distribution is your entire model, full stop.
There's almost no way that, even if highly supported and well liked, this is sustainable. This is just middle-men engaging in huge rent-seeking, and they will be the only ones to possibly make any kind of cash out of this, which will be entirely on the backs of any developers.
A more optimistic view is to offer temporary access to older games, for people who like them but don't want to go through the drama of maintaining their ability to play them separately for long periods of time. That's the best case scenario, and not the one they are talking about. I suspect even that would fail too.
And I'm sure this would be just more Windows-specific garbage (Xbone also runs Windows, AFAIK), as if the world needs more of that.
> Canada population 36 million
> Korea Population: 50.6 million
That's impressive. But I actually mistyped. Japan has 127 million people, and I said it had 36 million (about the same as Canada). What I meant to type was, specifically, Tokyo has nearly 38 million people, about the population of Canada.
> the cities I've been to in South Korea don't seem all that crowded
I think the issue is that Canada is fucking huge, and most of it is vast areas you aren't really allowed to live in, or couldn't live in. South Korea is wealthy enough to not have their dense cities feel super packed. I mostly brought up the Canada / Tokyo comparison (complete with typo) to show that areas that the issue Hawaii has is ultimately a combination of distance from other population centers, combined with not being big enough to fully fulfill the needs of multiplayer gaming. Hawaii has less than 2 million people, and areas like Japan wouldn't even need good communications with ROK in order to be fully fulfilled with multiplayer gaming, as even Tokyo alone has a population equaling entire countries.
I mean, I can sorta show you what I think the problem is, but I think people will come to different conclusions on it.
https://energy.gov/gc/articles...
Energy Star was around 20 years old in 2011 when they finally launched a pilot program to actually test the manufacturer's claims. Unsurprisingly, they found that some were lying. Since there was third party testing involved, we run into an odd issue: the federal government has essentially said "some set of third party testers get to verify energy star, and, if they are ok with it, we will take their word on it and let you use the energy star branding".
Inevitably, this means that the manufacturers will find some way, in some cases, to scam the results. After all, if word gets out that YOU actually test the products but *I* provide the advertising star, I get to eat your lunch. The system incentivizes cheating, and it wasn't until the Obama administration that anyone had the balls to go look for said cheating.
You could make the case that the system really does make stuff more efficient, even when some participants cheat. After all, they aren't ALL cheating, and removing the system would probably replace it with nothing, or a possibly more corrupt private industry rubber-stamper. You could also make the case that the incentivization to cheat or not cheat shouldn't be coming from the federal government anyway, and that encouraging a small side industry in testing drama is wasteful and unethical.
What we will probably see is this: the mainstream media will jump all over it, as it is something to smear Trump with. Internet Trump Team will respond by claiming it is wasteful swampy garbage. No one will be convinced of anything, the facts won't matter in the slightest, and nothing will change in a meaningful way for anyone, except maybe the divisiveness in the country will grow a bit.
> But this is realistically a problem without a good solution?
Correct.
OP was asking about all the other players in the world, maybe with an angle like we only care about Hawaiians because they are Americans. I pointed out that the reason that players in most other populated and industrialized regions aren't affected is because they already have regional servers with adequate players, just as the northern portion of north America does, and as such, the fact that trying to play against someone from Tokyo when you are in London is total garbage is not a big deal, because you have closer people to play with, but the Hawaiian sorta doesn't.
The issue isn't that Hawaii is reasonably isolated, it is also that it is small. Plenty of games I play have servers specific to regions, or even countries. Ex: Games with Japanese servers. Japan has the population of Canada, and it's in a very small area. It's a terrible ping to try to play on those servers, but I have ones not that far from me instead, etc.
Switching is pretty fast compared to routing, and I suspect you'd need to route several times. You also have quite a few more machines than just the two you are talking about. More importantly, if Honolulu to LA is drama for some people, and New York to LA is not, and both distances are similar... why complain about the distance?
> What about gamers who live in Europe, Australia, Asia, South America, Africa and have to contact US based servers? They also have latency.
They also have servers in Europe, Asia, and South America to connect to. If there were enough gamers, they would have servers in Africa too. Rarely, Aussies have local servers, but usually they have to make do with Asia (acceptable) or Europe or US (much rougher). Hawaii isn't just pretty far and/or served by higher latency connections, it is also too small to make do with just its own players, as, say, Canada / US is able to do.
(1)- eSports teams will travel for competitions.
This already happens for the serious events, and it will continue to happen. In addition to ping junk, you also want to thoroughly cheat-proof stuff if you are handing out prizes, etc. But for other things, basically, Hawaii is poop for online gaming in the same manner that plenty of other places are poop for surfing.
> (check a map!)
Well, if you check a map, you see that the distance from Hawaii to LA is similar to the distance from LA to New York (and mostly maps to the fiber cables that they already have). A quarter around the earth is like 6300 miles, and Hawaii isn't even close to that far from its direct connects on the west coast (like 2400ish). Even a surface link to New York is less than 5000 miles.
LA to NY is kind of a crappy ping too, but not as rough as Hawaii has it. So I suspect their issues aren't just distance, but infrastructural to some degree.
> And this is one reason why we should not go around Earth, but through it.
Your max distance savings is about 40%, and that's from two opposite points on the equator.
New York to LA is considered a bit undesirable for ping times, and it is 2,451 miles flying over the surface of the earth. That's approximately, but less than, the surface distance from LA to Honolulu, which we'll call 2500 miles. We'll round the Earth's radius to 4000 miles. With that I get an angle of about 36 degrees, and something like 2470 miles as a 3D line between Honolulu and LA. That's barely less than the surface distance, which makes sense, given that the angle is so little.
I don't think going through the earth would help much. Going more on intuition, I don't think that the ping times are just a function of physical distance. Hawaii has to shuffle your packet to one of the long fiber links, and the other guys have to shuffle it out. I'd suspect that there's more gain to resolve over those pieces of infrastructure than you would save by tightening a mostly flat cable through the crust or whatever.
> If I'm living in Hawaii the absolute last thing I'm doing is playing video games. I'd be more concerned about rising ocean levels thanks to global climate change
You must be a delight on vacations :/