Digital media is protected by copyright law, yeah. I’m not arguing it isn’t protected at all, I’m just saying the “piracy is theft” argument often used to claim that piracy is a crime is complete garbage that doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

The “it’s a copyright violation” argument is actually applicable, though. When creating a digital copy without the rightsholder’s permission, an individual is creating an unauthorized copy and violating the creator’s copyrights.

How that’s applied legally and who bears the responsibility is where it gets interesting. It depends a lot on each country’s own copyright laws, but generally, making something available for others to download is unambiguously illegal as unauthorized distribution of a copyrighted work.

Downloading that copy is more of a gray area. Is the downloader making a copy by downloading it? What if they don’t save it, and instead just consume it like with streaming. Or is it a copy just by the mere act of saving data capable of creating a like-for-like representation of the original? What if that copy isn’t a perfect copy, but degraded through multiple lossy re-compressions and only resembles the original?

In my original comment, I added the “(downloading)” as a bit of a nod to this whole argument. Uploading is unambiguously a violation in some form, but piracy in the form of streaming is a gray area that isn’t actually illegal in a lot of places.

Digital piracy (downloading) shouldn’t even be a crime to begin with. The idea that it’s the same as theft is fundamentally flawed.

Theft requires the original owner to be deprived of their property. Creating a copy of digital media does not deprive them of their media.

The counterargument to that is digital piracy deprives them of revenue, which itself is a flawed argument. Revenue is money, and they never owned the would-be consumer’s money in the first place.

In addition to that, there’s no guarantee that someone who pirated their media would have even been willing to pay for it if piracy wasn’t an available option.

the company is real

Given the state of LLMs, their security (or lack thereof), hallucinations, and sociopathic responses, I don’t suspect that company is going to last long.

All it takes is one of their “AI employees” to cause a colossal fuck-up for a client company, like losing a large sum of money or introducing legal liabilities.

… Black?

I mean, hey: it worked to make Apple finally drop their proprietary charging connector. As long as the cost of losing business in the EU is higher than designing an EOL transition for games and hiring developers to actually do it, it’s in their best interests.

what I just outlined as what would have to happen.

The backend server stack hosts a set of tightly intertwined services that conform to an Application Programming Interface. You quite literally do not need to provide the entire stack designed for multi-hundred-thousand concurrent players just to satisfy that interface the game clients are expecting. It costs time and money, but they could damn well just create an implementation designed for simpler, small-scale hosting.

Oh yeah, just do that, as if that’s a super duper easy task to do.

If you designed it for that eventuality, yeah, it’s easy to do. Trying to retrofit that into an existing system designed solely to run at cloud scale is a bloody nightmare, and that’s not at all what SKG is asking for.

because “direct connection” means no concept of an account anymore, and if everything is tied to your account, the whole damn game doesn’t work now.

Counterexample: private World of Warcraft servers. They implemented their own, and it’s worked fine for them.

The account system is just another API. The client uses it to authenticate, and the dedicated server uses it to verify the client authentication. Fuck, even Minecraft and it’s poorly-designed multiplayer can do that. As long as the client and server use the same auth provider, you can still have “accounts” without relying on Mojang’s insanely censorship-happy official login system.

It’s possible, sure, but by this point you’ve effectively remade a very large amount of the game from scratch so who cares now.

I’ve made this exact same argument you’re giving here, and yeah, I know it’s not easy. I sympathize with indie developers who are over-designing their server architecture and might not have the resources to do this, but a AAA game studio can afford to hire more developers for their next game instead of C-suite bonuses.

what if parts of that executable have still in use proprietary pieces that are used in other games they own?

I also made this argument before, and it is valid criticism. It’s worth pointing out that the valuable and reusable proprietary parts are the infrastructure and design, not the game logic.

I’m not an entitled twat. I understand that there are legal challenges and big, open-ended questions on how developers could actually pull this off. Making large, consumer-exploitative developers like Epic, Bungie, or Blizzard have to hire more developers isn’t a good enough reason to make me discount an entire consumer-rights movement.

People with planet-sized egos really need to stick to DPS roles.

Modern game servers for major games are simply just not designed to be run locally bare metal. They’re often in the form of complex stacks of multiple moving parts, shit like entire k8s deployment stacks with like 12 distinct resources, many of which might be tightly coupled to implementation details.

They wouldn’t need to release the whole stack to satisfy the requirements. Release the dedicated server executable and patch the game to allow direct connections to servers.

For an MMO it would be more complicated, but the movement also isn’t asking to be applied retroactively. Existing MMOs built for scale are free to keep their current architecture. The only requirement would be that future MMOs are designed with an EOL transition plan.

They release, say, v2.4 of their game server program in 2025, it’s tightly coupled to the auth server v1.7 api.

It’s an API. Unless they hardcode the IP address it or use certificate pinning, it can just be reimplemented.

[Citation Needed]

I think the printer ran out of ink before it finished 8 * 0.75

Another application of those things are virtualization. Throw in 3 x4 TB NVMe SSDs, 384 GB of memory, and a 25G NIC.

Off a single unit, you would be able to sell 12 VPS instances with 16 cores, 32 GB of memory, 1 TB of storage, and a guaranteed 1.5Gbps link.

That’s an EPYC. It’s a datacenter CPU, and it’s priced accordingly. Nobody uses these at home outside of hardcore homelab enthusiasts with actual rack setups.

Anon needs to reject technology and embrace luddism. Only then may he be free of oxymoron job roles.

If you’ve ever seen an idiot actually rip surface-mounted components off a PCB, you’ll know. They tend to take pads and traces with them, and it’s not pretty.

Now, the OOP anon could have ripped those off and scraped off the remnants, but it’s unlikely they would do that for the sake of the photo if they were genuinely stupid enough to pull out the connector.