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Comment by ashleyn | Hacker News Reader

Does this not encourage proprietary vendors to just make everything cloud only with subscription? Including games? In the CFO's office, that's a win-win: increased revenue and security of the code.

At some point, boycott will be consumers' only viable move. Legislation is urgently needed here imo.

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I would bet most PlayStation owners play online games and subscribe to PlayStation+ so I don't think you're describing a future state here so much as the current one.

Are those online purchases or streamed games "Geforce Now" style? My comment refers to the latter.

Online purchases in some fashion are delivered to you and put on your hard disk. You can in theory preserve the game or reverse engineer it when its constituent parts have to be delivered to you.

Thankfully AI is killing that business in another manner - by raising GPU (and end user subscription) prices absurdly high

Why are you thankful that AI is killing that business?

Subscriptions to play are cancer, if that business becomes the norm, it will kill games as they exist today

Well, yes and no. Consider the upcoming Grand Theft Auto, it will require a Rockstar login and have some amount of online only multiplayer content, so sure AI could likely get around the login and reverse engineer the multiplayer servers, maybe, but for the majority of games that's not going to happen.

I'm wondering about a reverse engineering of the whole game with peer-to-peer and self-hosted server options. Grand theft Grand theft auto

GTA 6 won’t support multiplayer until next year.

You mean the RockStar's version of GTA6 won't. Unofficial versions, however...

That's not what "cloud only" typically means though.

Online-only DRM is bad yeah, but with sufficient effort it can be sidestepped : see the unofficial WoW servers.

Meanwhile game streaming is extremely resource heavy, needs rock solid Internet connections, and runs into laws of physics for latency issues. But more games will probably go this route, yeah, especially those targeting players of specific (high) wealth brackets. (Boycott them, just like other online-only DRM.)

It won’t matter. If they stream rendered frames from the cloud it will burn their resources chasing gorgeous graphics and AI will still see enough to make it. If they send data to be rendered locally, the data will be decompiled.

Multiplayer will still have a moat, but even that is in trouble as cheats will be created by hundreds of thousands of players using AI

Cheating is only a big issue for a subset of online MP games. GTA6 might or might not be one of them.

Yes and no: if cheating makes it so non-cheating players can't have a good time, then multiplayer dies out and the perceived value of the game goes down

Yes, I mean what games we see where it becomes really problematic.

The incentive was there before and this latest development serves confirmation bias.

The latency is crap for anything that requires real time input, the increased revenue will be taken by the cloud vendors, more developers will shift to indie development. Win win win.

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