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.
"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."
Why is a post by some rando on Reddit considered quality news, worthy of reaching the front page of HN? This is just comment bait. The discussion is fine, but all I see is anecdotal conjecturing.
I get confused when I see stances like this, because it gives me the sense that maybe people just aren't using coding tools efficiently.
90% of my usage of Copilot is just fancy autocomplete: I know exactly what I want, and as I'm typing out the line of code it finishes it off for me. Or, I have a rough idea of the syntax I need to use a specific package that I use once every few months, and it helps remind me what the syntax is, because once I see it I know it's right. This usage isn't really glamorous, but it does save me tiny bits of time in terms of literal typing, or a simple search I might need to do. Articles like this make me wonder if people who don't like coding tools are trying to copy and paste huge blocks of code; of course it's slower.
My experience is that the "fancy autocomplete" is a focus destroyer.
I know what function I want to write, start writing it, and then bam! The screen fills with ghost text that may partly be what I want but probably not quit.
Focus shifts from writing to code review. I wrest my attention back to the task at hand, type some more, and bam! New ghost text to distract me.
Ever had the misfortune of having a conversation with a sentence-finisher? Feels like that.
Perhaps I need to bind to a hot key instead of using the default always-on setting.
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I suspect people using the agentic approaches skip this entirely and therefore have a more pleasant experience overall.
It's fascinating how differently people's brains work.
Autocomplete is a total focus destroyer for me when it comes to text, e.g. when writing a design document. When I'm editing code, it sometimes trips me up (hitting tab to indent but end up accepting a suggestion instead), but without destroying my focus.
I believe your reported experience, but mine (and presumably many others') is different.
That usage is the most disruptive for me. With normal intellisense and a library you're familiar with, you can predict the completion and just type normally with minimal interruption. With no completion, I can just touch type and fix the errors after the short burst. But having whole lines pop up break that flow state.
With unfamiliar syntax, I only needs a few minutes and a cheatsheet to get back in the groove. Then typing go back to that flow state.
Typing code is always semi-unconscious. Just like you don't pay that much attention to every character when you're writing notes on paper.
Editing code is where I focus on it, but I'm also reading docs, running tests,...
The small fuzzy spherical things are just what's inside the large oblong things, once the husk has been removed. People who have never really interacted with coconuts may be surprised to learn this.
