If, as you said, as the game is EOL it doesn’t make profits, then it can’t cause losses either. Otherwise it’d have to be kept alive.

I mixed up words, what I meant was that the company could be harassed before it’d go bankrupt and EOL the game

Uh… If they’re 3rd-party servers then hosting isn’t paid for by the publisher. Additionally, game publishers don’t pay for hosting of Discord/Reddit/ Lemmy communities. And even if they did if the game is EOL they’d axe that too if it induces any COst.

Now you misunderstood the statement. When the game is still hosted by the original devs/publishers, in-game bots would 1) tank the user experience (imagine tf2 but like half a year after launch) 2) put strain on the servers, the ones that still belong to the devs/publisher While that is going on, bots spamming media related to the game would tank engagement (who would want to play a game filled with bots that also has like no public community around it that isn’t ruined by other bots). All that would make the revenue crash, and turn the game into a huge financial burden, causing the eventual drop of support/bankruptcy

I won’t pick the rest of the comment apart, since you didn’t quite get how this extortion scheme works (partly due to my poor explanation, but still)

Lan patches cost money to make, big money if the game was originally massive multiplayer. Since the game is at EOL it cannot generate any profits, meaning any money spent on development of such lan patches is going to just burn a hole in the company’s budget.

Releasing server side source code opens up a route for abusing the game studio making the game. Since if some 3rd part wants to profit off of running private servers of that game, all they have to do is make a flood of bots in-game and on the game’s communication platforms (eg discord servers, communities on Reddit or even Lemmy), which is not that hard to do nowadays, especially if you’re a corporation. This coupled with finding as many in-game exploits as possible can drive up costs enough to bankrupt the studio, forcing them to release server side source code, which the corpos can then grab and monetize the crap out of. Since the bot flood can be made nigh untraceable by having them operate out of an unfriendly state (say, Russia or China), and there’s no studio acquisition necessary to get server side code, this would be a perfect extortion method that’d fly under the radar of antitrust legislation

“Stop calling it buying” now that’s a good start. Clearly showing the player at the time of buying that the license will expire at EOL is a great way to set expectations properly

As for the exact time the license may expire: that would vary greatly based on the amount of concurrent players and the revenue the game generates, so the best estimate we can really have is whether or not the game generates enough money to continue supporting it (running servers costs money after all)

Overall, clearly setting expectations is the goal that this initiative should have been gunning for, but unfortunately that wouldn’t make as much of a sensation in the news

Also, about the car: when you’re paying to play a live service game, you are not purchasing a copy of the game, you are either leasing or purchasing a license to that game, and that licence can be revoked under the terms described in the ToS

“No, it’s not about this thing, it’s about the same thing but worded differently” “Providing the offline patch” is precisely what I meant when I was talking about bleeding money, since, again, for online only live service games, the offline patch would take a LOT of work to implement, with no return on investment since this is an EOL game. Who’s gonna be paying for that? The underpaid game devs?

And as for tools for hosting private servers, that will allow someone else to come in and harass the game with bots (both in-game and in the community) and exploits to drive up maintenance costs, forcing the studio to shut down and allowing the offender to take the tools, open and monetize the private servers.

As perfect as this initiative may seem in theory, in practice it creates a lot of dangerous scenarios for developers

Ow

I forgot lube

Why does he look like malnourished Father Elijah

uBO Lite works on Manifest v3 and it works quite well in my experience, so I kinda don’t get the whole manifest whining

It’s an expression that’s optimized to maximize the click through rate of a video. Unfortunately it also looks hideous

Ah, yes, the “force companies to either bleed money supporting dead games or make them give up the rights to the source code” initiative

Would be great if I could read this, but the dickheads just region-blocked me somehow

Edit: thanks to everyone who made copies of the article and pointed me to open archives where everyone can read it

… gotta admit this is quite a bit more sound than I anticipated

As for LLMs, people don’t really like when others say they can’t explore the applications of tech, even if it’s unsustainable, so there’f bacaklash ofc

holy hell

Testicular torsion quickly becomes boring when you figure out that you can just teleport away the air out of their lungs, turning the lungs to mush

If cdawgva and ironmouse we gonna rob a bank this is what they’d use

And it doesn’t even make sense

99% of a modern office’s correspondence already goes on online, and only the most important stuff gets backed up on paper copies, often because of regulations that are there for a reason

And how do you intend to “reduce consumption”, may I inquire?

How do you even get two bonds out of potassium, doesn’t it only have 1 electron on the outer ring?

Thanks, now it’s stuck in my head

Guess I’m taking 2d4 psychic damage today