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s/web/networked computers/g

What I'm saying is you have programs running on user machines, and programs running on your machines. There's an interface between those two over a network. There's a problem that consumers face today where they pay to play games that are not functional without data flowing over that interface.

There's a claim that implementing the backend side of that interface is so complex and impossible or too difficult/time consuming/etc to design in a way without 3rd party dependencies.

I'm asking: what are those 3rd party libraries doing? And why can't you design server APIs and client code in a way to provide a different backend if consumers need to do it themselves when you stop supporting the game?

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idk, lets use things you know.

Why do you use Ruby on Rails, why not rewrite it so you can release it without relyig on that?

I'm not interested in hypotheticals. In AAA games that you have worked on, concretely what 3rd party code did your servers rely on that would prevent you from distributing either the server itself or sufficient description of the servers' behavior to allow a reimplementation?

And even if we're talking hypotheticals: stupid example. I haven't worked on a backend where the actual server infrastructure wasn't open source, trivial to open source because it was first party, or irrelevant because the only thing that matters would be the API and protocols, which again, trivial to make open.

I don’t care.

Get a job in industry and see for yourself.

I’m not going to break confidentially to sate your ignorance.

I'm actively trying to remove my own ignorance of the domain which is why I posed the question! You're not breaking confidentiality by saying "I need X to solve Y problem which is offered by Z and we can't expose even the application layer interfaces." Right now it sounds like you don't have an answer, or even understand the question.

Getting all defensive and not answering it doesn't really help your industry's case here.

So when you told me that games use web tech on the backend, that was you getting rid of your ignorance?

Ok, lets talk about the kinds of things we need.

Networks have latency, so we need to smooth/correct for that.

Our connections need to be authenticated, so we need middleware to handle tokens, because we don’t hand-roll that. On a binary protocol.

Our physics engines are complicated: we don’t usually write our own from scratch; and the server needs physics to simulate the world.

Shall I continue?

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