Comment by brobdingnagians
10 hours ago
And makes it more expensive. There is the seen benefit and then the unseen cost. Every game released will have to account for the possibility of it, and will create issues for people who really didn't want those issues. After awhile people will forget there are associated issues and costs, but they will still be there.
Every game released whose developers have chosen to complicate its design with a client-server architecture. It's not like this is going to hurt the little three-man teams making games on shoe-string budgets. Yeah, it's going to make big budget games a little more expensive, just like how cars with seatbelts are a little more expensive to build, and like how it's a little more expensive to do proper waste management instead of dumping sludge into a river.
> Every game released whose developers have chosen to complicate its design with a client-server architecture.
Huh? Client-server architecture does make things more complicated to implement but it's not THAT bad. And you (usually[1]) do it in service of multiplayer, not because you're big budget or just want to complicate things.
Among Us was literally a three-person team.
[1] I find there are some major benefits to it, especially in post-LLM-world, and have been strongly considering it for some of my solo-dev single-player projects.
Remember back in the old days when you could just run your own game server, even though it wasn't open source? That would work too. Or peer to peer LAN gaming, why is that not popular any more?
Designing a game to use developer hosted servers is a choice they made. Probably to squeeze money from microtransactions.
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Agreed, I'm pretty much doing the same thing for my indie game
It's now a lot more tractable to build a multiplayer game, on the other hand balancing it is a whole other kettle of fish
Among Us is also incredibly simple compared to the services required to support some AAA games and even then, their networking code was riddled with exploits that no professional would have written, including RCEs.
Didn't stop it from being a fun, successful game but there's no comparison to the work and complexity involved in larger games.
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A lot of games have tacked-on online features to excuse the existence of the server to enable DRM, and a lot of multiplayer games arbitrarily don't offer a way for clients to double as local servers like in the heyday of arena shooters.
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What? This a mandate in law that requires a company to do work in order to comply. Studios will spin out LLCs for a game so that if it fails it doesn't end up as a liability. Unintended consequence: more dead games.
It's impossible for the law to cause more games to die, because already the default fate of online games is for them to die. If, with the law, a studio chooses to use an LLC to create the game to conditionally release sources once it shuts down, that was a game that without the law would have died anyway because the studio wouldn't have chosen of its own volition to release sources.
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Really the parent company should be held accountable for that. But that is a more general problem with LLCs that is already causing significant harm.
Putting on my Pollyanna hat...
Or it could make it a lot cheaper, if the server were developed entirely on open-source infrastructure from the start. Hopefully the actual game logic would be developed entirely in-house, making it easier to audit before releasing.
Most likely the engine providers would spin off their server components as OSS for this express purpose so their customers can easily comply. This regulation could be a huge win for making the game industry adopt more OSS.
If you plan for it from the start, it's a small cost. And the simpler the game development process the cheaper it gets.
It is not. Most of the full online game stacks are not open source and most of the open source ones are poor and under featured
That could change once a law comes out requiring all new developments to be designed differently. Besides, no one is talking about open sourcing the server code. Releasing binaries and patching the client to talk to a local instance is perfectly acceptable. A developer would then just need the ability to redistribute compiled builds.
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Middle ground could be completely open API from the start, so community could build alternative server from the ground up.
Not everything that makes a product more expensive to release is the end of the world.