Russia legalizes piracy to offset sanctions
(media.kotakuinaction2.win)
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (93)
sorted by:
However with games there is the problem of "always-online" which completely kills the games when the company decides to shut it down. Perhaps with state sponsorship we can do a better job of emulating those servers.
That requires a lot of money spend on something that may not work at all. Companies will cheapskate it and as a result it will be cracked within the week of release most of the time.
I think that is really optimistic. I don't mean games that just "phone-in" to make sure you're allowed to play them. With games that legitimately need server emulation, cracking that and getting something close to the original can take years of development. Of course this doesn't apply to scams like SimCity that have a few things done by the server to make you think it needs one. Those are easier.
Ross Scott (Freeman's Mind) talks about the danger of "dead games" more than anyone else I know. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUAX0gnZ3Nw
The only way games will ever fully avoid being cracked is if every title is streamed. You would need all the assets and functionality to be hosted on an unhackable server, and NO LEAKS. Always on-line can easily be fixed by spoofing a server. Even if the code isn't released, you can monitor traffic to reverse engineer the proper responses like they did with some MMOs (I think WoW might be an example- hosting legacy servers).
Yes Ultima Online was another early example with private shards.
Corporations are literally too lazy or greedy to do this. Imagine Rockstar making dedicated servers for Grand Theft Auto Online for example, they won't.