I don't necessarily disagree with the premise here, but the other makes the claim that people love to work hard based on their experience founding startups. People who gravitate towards that undoubtedly like to work hard, seems like sample bias.
Counter argument to that is that startups are the few (sole?) Type of modern corporation that set up the environment and incentives properly to foster hard, rewarding work.
Perhaps everyone would work just as hard but normal companies just dont foster that by, as the author says, "spending more time strategizing against their employees than their competitors".
Maybe your thinking is subject to a survivor bias, where you think only the people you see working hard are capable of hard work, when the rest were too but had it crushed by their employers
In Utah it's atypical to not have just as much if not more snow in March than in April. The snow pack in the mountains should last all the way until August. This year will likely be very bad for wildfires.
These tools actually make me more interested in CS fundamentals. Having strong conceptual understanding is as relevant as ever for making good judgement calls and staying connected with your work.
The real problem with Spotify's DJ is that, if you use it a lot, it gets into a feedback loop where it keeps playing the same songs that it serves you up because it thinks you like them. It's pretty bad at finding new music which is ironic because I find Spotify's Discover Weekly algorithm to be quite good (sometimes)
Yes! This is very obviously AI. Even in the last week there have been several submissions that have this exact same style. Also, the text on the site is obviously AI, em-dashes and all. I don't have a problem with people using the tools to make stuff, but man...at least say it's generated somewhere.
The sales are definitely a huge draw. I don't know of any other product that can get marked down over 50% semi-regularly like video games can. It makes it feel like an incredible value, in comparison to everything else we spend money on. Not to mention, there are many games that will get marked down to less than 5 dollars that you could easily spend hundreds of hours in. Terraria is a good example.
As others have noted, the problem is often with keeping servers running. It's impossible to predict how successful a game will be in the long term, so the publisher can't make any claims to it's longevity. And, it doesn't make any sense to keep servers running if there's not enough income flow. Where this is really an issue is MMOs. Games like Forza already have some solutions: online features are eventually disabled, but you can still play the core game.
Don't keep the server running. Let others put up servers.
Either release the server binary or code or publish the bare minimum API spec so others can build a server from scratch. Strip away any proprietary stuff. And don't sue when other people have server up and playing your game.
This won’t require companies to keep servers running, just that they have an end of life plan, eg: releasing a version of the server that can be self hosted for multiplayer games
It is a valid concern as to why companies don't do this already. In the face of the legal requirements the initiative is attempting to establish, however, the IP problem would be pretty easily resolved, as companies that sold their server libraries/services with a prohibition on redistribution would either need to change those licenses, or lose customers who want to be able to sell in Europe.
How so? Or, more specifically, what method of action are you predicting will produce those outcomes?
From my observation, smaller studios are vastly more likely than larger ones to already be in compliance with this initiative's requests: It's not the giant, AAA games that are having community servers or peer-to-peer networking. Companies that are doing that already have to change nothing to be in compliance.
Studios that have private, monopolized backends merely need to release their server binaries at the end of life. That's not a significant expense, either (you already have access to file distribution in order to distribute your client in the first place). Assuming that the studio is paying directly for file distribution (not the case for most), and that the server binaries are 100 GB (an obscene over-estimate), and that every single user downloads the server files, you're looking at a couple of cents or so a user. Which again, smaller studios don't pay for file distribution, that's coming out of the platform fees that you're already paying.
The only hard and fast, "this might cost us money" position I can point to is the large studios that release franchises lose the ability to use cutting off people's access to previous games in a series as a motivator to purchase newer ones in the series. And that's an ability exclusively available to massive studios that put out entire franchises of games.
That does happen a lot. They get licenses to use but not distribute software for example. Servers are hard so it makes sense they'd want to buy rather than build.
It's the same reason most games aren't open sourced when their commercial viability ends: lots of third party software with no public source.
MMOs don't often have a profitability problem, they even tend to overstay their welcome compared to any other game. While it would be nice to get a server binary to self host after they're EoL it's gonna be unfeasible to run it anyway.
The issue is really more with lazy implementations where a server check is required to play something that's fully single player as you say, which has become standard for major publishers now and is far too common for indie games too. It's not too much to ask to do the bare minimum and keep that single instance auth server online or just remove the requirement entirely by commenting out a few lines.
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