This is actually the perfect comparison. I can still watch movies from the 1950s on various media. Good luck playing a Stadia exclusive in 2090 in any format. Treating games like a disposable commodity is short-sighted and undermines any claim the medium might have to being an art form.
I still need to have a big ass corp to maintain the film library. Movies don't just remain watchable automatically. Without fairly large capital investment to storage they would rot away. Actually the analogue to movies is pretty good in this sense - if we had a 'universal game binary' that would 'just work' on the generic 'cloud based game platform' of the future.
But anyway, our future entertainment might be completely hallucinated by AI in an on demand fashion before we get the 'general storage game binary' thingy.
Even if we imagine some 'universal game binary', games are never going to be portable the way other media is. A movie is basically just a rectangle with some moving pictures accompanying some audio -- it's really easy to create a standard format that any movie can be shoved into. Video games, however, are much more dynamic. Video games require all sorts of complicated input devices – gamepads, joysticks, touchscreens, mice, keyboards, microphones, cameras, accelerometers, infrared sensors, etc etc etc.
You can still play old video games in emulators, but you are usually using an approximation of the original input device. This isn't such a big deal with older, simpler games – playing a SNES game with an Xbox controller is a good enough approximation of the original experience. But newer innovations like the Wiimote, Kinect, VR headsets, etc will make it a lot harder to play games made for them in the future. In 50 years, you'll still be able to boot up Wii Sports in an emulator, sure, but will you be able to find a good proxy for a Wiimote?
This seems like a good argument against buying Stadia exclusives, but also against playing any MMO.
It's a matter of degree, depending on the whims of the market and dedication of the emulator scene. Not all old movies or games are available. Not all art has survived. And apparently the old World of Warcraft is back?
MMOs are a case where the game itself inherently requires a serious server in order to work. I don't play MMOs myself, but if I did, I would not be bothered by their server-based nature as there's an obviously inescapable reason for it.
What do you mean by a serious server? Most MMO stuff could easily pick a player to handle the processing of their immediate area on a background thread. And the bandwidth requirements aren't that big either. Figuring out how to trust the processing is the biggest problem to solve, but that can be solved on a tiny simple server just as easily as on a serious server.
> Most MMO stuff could easily pick a player to handle the processing of their immediate area on a background thread.
This is how you get cheating. Decentralized hosting can work (look at CoD for an example of a highly successful game that used end user systems as servers), but an MMO is probably one of the least trusting environments you can have.
It's not about immediate processing or anything, it's about having a trusted copy of the game state.
Keep in mind MMOs have a persistent world. In CoD, meeting a cheater can ruin a 20min (? haven't played in a while) game session. In an MMO, it might screw up the entire economy. Thus off-loading authoritative work to clients is pretty much a no go.
To prevent clients from cheating, you have to run pretty much the entire game engine on the server. Sure, you can strip graphics, but not physics, cooldowns or inventory management. As an example: it sucks being killed by an enemy obviously behind a wall or in another room, so fired bullet should be checked against world geometry.
Pretending all this to be no big deal might be right for some specific (kind of) games, but generalizing it that much is... unrealistic at best.
Btw, dev time is valuable as well, so an overly engineered solution probably isn't a realistic option for many online games either.
Having a persistent world does not need a 'serious' server.
And I mentioned trust in my first post. It's a reason to use a server, but it's not a reason to use a 'serious' server.
None of these are reasons you couldn't use 40 tiny weak throwaway servers in place of 5 big serious servers.
> As an example: it sucks being killed by an enemy obviously behind a wall or in another room, so fired bullet should be checked against world geometry.
That sounds more like a shooter than an MMO. And a shooter instance definitely fits into a tiny 2-4 core server.
> dev time is valuable as well
Which is why so much software is single-threaded. And single-threaded software only needs one core.
(And the dev time for what I was talking about would be tiny, and it would save money overall. There are good reasons not to do it, but I don't think dev time is one of those good reasons.)
Either you’re not making your point correctly or you’re just wrong.
I made two AAA games with online components, the game servers are “serious” (40cores, 256GiB ram, 10G network) because they have to be to emulate physics, to run AI and to do raycasting of bullets (to detect shooting through walls which the clients tell us they can do if you’re cheating) etc. And /even our/ game worlds offloaded too much in the first game leading to huge issues with cheaters.[0]
And our gameserver is written in C++ with a lot of optimisation work.
Maybe I'm wrong, but keep in mind that something like "an MMO" managed to work on the hardware that existed 15+ years ago and the underlying computational details have barely changed for many of them.
I mean a server that can handle clients at scale. Certainly, it's possible to do this sort of thing in a more decentralized fashion, but the games that I'm aware of don't do this.
Plenty of MMO code is single threaded. And almost none of it needs much RAM. They may happen to put it on big servers because it's slightly cheaper to use big servers, but that could easily be configured to use tiny servers.
Handling a thousand people in the same spot can be done on any size of server, and most of the time you're looking at under a hundred.
It is indeed sad to see MMOs go though they are a bit special in that they are inherently about their communities. Meridian 59 - the first MMO, at least over the Internet - was opensourced a while ago yet if you connect to it now, it is a shell of its former 90s shelf since most people have moved on.
quite a number of 'dead' mmos still have active and dedicated communities on private servers, smt imagine comes to mind. no stadia exclusive will have that longevity.
Plenty of platform exclusive games from decades ago are readily available on new platforms today. I'm not sure your argument makes sense, unless you're saying you bought a movie IN the 1950s and are still watching it today.
