[HN Gopher] Rainbow Six Vegas, SWAT 4 unplayable due to disabled...
___________________________________________________________________
Rainbow Six Vegas, SWAT 4 unplayable due to disabled ad server
Author : danso
Score : 256 points
Date : 2021-09-14 14:56 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| marcodiego wrote:
| Thanks for increasing my list of examples why this is so bad.
| falcolas wrote:
| Ads in full priced videogames. Lawful evil in its simplest
| form.
| skymt wrote:
| This clip from the latest (full-priced) entry in the NBA 2K
| series has been going around the last few days. Truly pushing
| boundaries in in-game advertising. You can visit a State Farm
| retail outlet and talk to an employee who says what a big fan
| he is and gives you a State Farm employee uniform you can
| wear in the off-court parts of the game.
|
| https://twitter.com/capybaroness/status/1436475796357582876
| beeboop wrote:
| This is borderline Onion material
| noasaservice wrote:
| You are the product. Just because you paid is no consolation.
| falcolas wrote:
| I'm not even sure we're something as well defined as the
| product - we're closer to an ATM that they keep making
| withdrawls from in exchange for some digital code.
| void_mint wrote:
| Full priced non-IAP games do not make as much as F2P,
| corporate overlords demand games make up the difference
| somehow.
| sk2020 wrote:
| If memory serves, the nominal price of most video games has
| not changed in about 30 years. US dollars are, at least
| officially, worth 2.5x less now than when Mario came with
| Duck Hunt. I'm not that shocked that alternative monetization
| strategies are employed (micropayments are a big one).
|
| Seems like there could be a demand for an independent
| standards committee that certifies games as shenanigan-free.
| My children are starting to play games themselves, so I'd
| like a service like that. I would pay a premium to know my
| kids aren't going to be prompted to put in my credit card
| information and won't be assailed with toxic marketing ploys.
| nightski wrote:
| The user base has grown exponentially since then and it is
| far easier to impulse buy games than ever before (30 years
| ago I had to drive to a store to buy a boxed copy). There
| are far more gamers than before. Steam has also shown that
| by giving deep discounts even though per-unit profit goes
| down they are able to make tons more money.
|
| The monetization schemes are mostly just a way to squeeze
| every drop out of the customer possible. They use them
| because they work, not because they aren't profitable
| already.
| p_j_w wrote:
| I'd rather see prices on games get raised than this sort of
| shit. The problem is every time prices go up everyone
| brings out the pitchforks, so we get this shit instead.
| It's largely turned me off of video games, especially big
| budget multiplayer focused games.
| zerocrates wrote:
| I'm not hugely opposed to price increases: these things
| happen. But the reality is you'll just get both. Now that
| it's determined that players will accept ads,
| microtransactions, gacha, etc., why not raise prices and
| _also_ get those revenue streams. FIFA costing $70 will
| not stop the all-encompassing focus on Ultimate Team.
| (For perpective, _just_ the Ultimate Team modes in their
| sports games supply about a third of EA 's total
| revenue.)
|
| It's like when people say "if you're not paying for a
| service, then you're the product" to describe when user
| data is sold, when in actuality many services you do pay
| for happily sell your data all over the place.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| It's not an either/or situation. If publishers can raise
| the price of video games, they will NOT stop with ads and
| battlepasses and microtransactions etc. Why would they
| ever do that when those things make them more money than
| people actually purchasing the games in the first place?
| lovich wrote:
| I can't remember the internet exact year but I do remember
| the wailing and gnashing of teeth when they went from $50
| standard to $60 standard sometime after 2000. Other than
| that one exception though, I believe you're correct on
| prices.
| falcolas wrote:
| They're up to $70 now on consoles.
| falcolas wrote:
| A very old argument. The counter is: the audience for
| videogames has massively expanded. The secondary counter
| is: $70 is merely the entry point into games. Even before
| you look at microtransactions, you have battle passes,
| dozens of deluxe versions, and season passes.
|
| If this was really an issue - game prices not keeping up
| with inflation - publishers wouldn't be posting profits
| (not revenue, profits) in the billions of dollars.
|
| And on a more explicit point: God of War, a game with no
| microtransactions or any other BS, made their company over
| $500M in revenue in a year, for a game that cost them under
| $100M to make.
|
| So while I'm not surprised these multi-billion-dollars-of-
| profit companies are so ready to squeeze as much money as
| they can out of us, I don't attribute it to Tiny Tim
| begging for enough money to live, but to Ebenezer Scrooge
| hording as much money as he possibly can, no matter the
| societal cost (or cost to himself).
| Thaxll wrote:
| > And on a more explicit point: God of War
|
| You're taking the most succesful game on the most
| successful platform as an example, not sure it's very
| relevant for the thousands of games that get released
| every year...
| officeplant wrote:
| Not every game is going to find success. We could do with
| a lot less of the major publishers ideas of "pay us $80
| after the battle pass for the same shit you've been
| playing for 4 years with a new paint job".
|
| If an independent company like New Blood can find success
| simply by making good games and being a good company then
| major publishers can follow suit or die off.
| kbenson wrote:
| And yet it's not the thousands of games that are released
| each year that include extra advertising, but the the
| largest and often most successful ones, because they know
| they can get away with it, and they're the ones with a
| built in audience to sell to advertisers.
| [deleted]
| nkozyra wrote:
| > If memory serves, the nominal price of most video games
| has not changed in about 30 years.
|
| They have. Mario was $50, games generally run $60+.
|
| The big difference? You don't need to manufacture a
| cartridge anymore.
| vkou wrote:
| The other big difference is that the typical AAA title
| isn't made on a budget of < $200,000 anymore.
| falcolas wrote:
| And yet, somehow, they're still making billions in
| profits. That implies that sales are _still_ sufficient
| to pay back the development and marketing process, and
| still make profits.
|
| My example I've used elsewhere in this thread: God of
| War, a game without microtransactions, making $500M in
| the first year for under $100M in development costs.
| kbenson wrote:
| No, Mario was $25 MSRP. See here[1] for some old copy
| showing prices, the majority at $25, a few at $30 and
| $35.
|
| 1: https://www.quora.com/How-much-did-the-game-Super-
| Mario-Bros...
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| You have to correct for inflation. 1986 Mario would be
| $120 today.
| falcolas wrote:
| The generation-specific costs (cartridges) and margins
| (physical retailer cuts, boxes, licensing fees) would
| have also been corrected for inflation.
|
| A bit of research shows an approximate $7 for developer
| cut of each sale at the 1988 figures. Given the
| approximate inflation adjustment, that becomes $18.20.
| Given that cartridge, physical retailers, and boxes are
| mostly gone, and even even with the deep licensing fees
| of the platforms today (30%), a $50 game will make the
| developer almost twice as much revenue as it did in 1988.
| HideousKojima wrote:
| The barriers to entry for developing, publishing, and
| distributing a game have also plummeted, meaning there is
| far more competition in the gaming industry. This _should_
| lead to lower priced games.
| qweqwweqwe-90i wrote:
| Is this really true? Blockbuster games back in the day
| were universally made by tiny teams.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| A price drop is expected with an audience expanding from
| millions to billions, even if the cost of the average game
| has shot up.
| qweqwweqwe-90i wrote:
| The best video games back then sold millions... just like
| today/
| marcodiego wrote:
| You're ignoring how much bigger the market is today.
| qweqwweqwe-90i wrote:
| Cars have increased in price while the market has
| increased...
| officeplant wrote:
| Ads in full priced Operating Systems as well. I hate modern
| times.
| dharmab wrote:
| Tangent: SWAT 4 still has an active community including actively
| developed mods. It's arguably the peak of the tactical shooter
| genre (at the very least for indoor urban combat). It's also
| still for sale on GOG.com.
| mzs wrote:
| MS fixed this. Also in the meantime the community created a DLL
| that changed the server to localhost.
| ddek wrote:
| Which I'm sure many players will forget to remove.
| nivenkos wrote:
| I played through Elite Force a few months ago, it was great.
| dharmab wrote:
| I'm actually glad this came up into my feed, because I see
| Elite Force had a new release this summer. My tactical gaming
| group would love to do another playthrough.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Ubisoft has been really, _really_ bad about game preservation.
| They 're up there with Activision/Blizzard with complete
| indifference to their core audience. The 'right' thing to do
| would be to open-source this game like iD did with the Quake
| series: nobody is _actually_ buying this game anymore, and if you
| really wanted to be a frugal bastard you could make the asset
| /map files proprietary while releasing the engine to the
| community. The current state is that nobody can really play this
| though, so nobody wins.
|
| Side note: is it possible to fix this by routing through a custom
| DNS and spoofing the ad server? This seems like a pretty
| rudimentary issue, and could probably be solved with the
| technological equivalent of Krazy Glue and duct tape.
| addingnumbers wrote:
| > is it possible to fix this by routing through a custom DNS
| and spoofing the ad server?
|
| It says in the thread, they already fixed it by having the
| madserver.net server reject connections.
|
| Previously Microsoft parked it by having it handshake and send
| empty replies, which worked for other madserver-seeking games
| but choked these two.
|
| Since switching to TCP rejects cleared the issue, a custom DNS
| entry was probably a viable workaround before the upstream fix.
| dharmab wrote:
| I've been trying to replay Ghost Recon Future Soldier recently
| and strongly agree. The hoops you have to jump through to get
| co-op to work are ridiculous, including removing all but one
| network interface (virtual or physical).
| franknine wrote:
| Reminds me of the great video from Nick Robinson talking about
| Ubisoft pulled Driver: San Francisco from all digital
| storefronts:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTkxzQDo0ng
| falcolas wrote:
| I read elsewhere that they have fixed it: blocking connections
| succeeds where blackholing connections failed.
| aequitas wrote:
| > nobody is actually buying this game anymore
|
| I think there are more than enough people who would pay a few
| euro for the convenience of installing an old game on their
| phone, console or modern OS straight from an App store or
| website instead of going through instruction on Github for
| free.
| MaxBarraclough wrote:
| Haven't you just described GoG? They're taking preservation
| seriously, and as far as I know they're able to make a profit
| doing so.
|
| Would be great if they started pushing to release the source-
| code of more games, but they're still much better than
| nothing.
| smoldesu wrote:
| That's why I suggested they go the Quake route, forcing you
| to own a copy of the game legally for you to dissect the
| map/asset files, but also not blocking you from performing
| rudimentary research on the engine if you so desire. They
| didn't release the source so that other people could compile
| their own versions (although ostensibly you could), but
| moreso to encourage people to read the code and learn how
| such a large, interconnected system functions. You can still
| buy Quake 1 and 2 on Steam, and they'll probably run just
| fine (Windows support is shaky these days). They're the same
| as they were 20 years ago, so nobody is really getting gypped
| when they pay for it. I personally think it's the best way to
| distribute game source.
| lovich wrote:
| Even if no one is buying the game anymore, if they are playing
| it that means they are filling their gaming "need" already and
| are less likely to buy the new products being sold.
|
| I don't agree with it, but I can't think of a single game
| company that is not incentivized to obsolete their games much
| the same way phone manufacturers are incentivized to obsolete
| their phones
| jon-wood wrote:
| While I agree with you in principle, its often not as easy as
| just releasing the code. Modern games are built upon many
| different third party libraries handling anything from the user
| interface through to physics, and I can see it not being worth
| the legal wrangling to get licenses for those that allow
| republishing.
|
| Doom/Quake are a bit of an exception because iD have always
| implemented basically everything themselves, dramatically
| limiting how many third parties they'd have to negotiate
| licenses with.
| dharmab wrote:
| Replace "id" with "Carmack". This is discussed in Masters of
| Doom; Carmack's programming was so far ahead of their
| competition and he was willing to live at the office nearly
| 24/7.
| zerocrates wrote:
| And that exception doesn't really apply anymore: I'm pretty
| sure the new Dooms have commercial middleware like anything
| else, and they're no longer open-sourcing them. They haven't
| even commercially licensed out the engine to anybody in
| forever.
| dharmab wrote:
| To release Doom 3 as OSS, Carmack had to rewrite patent
| encumbered parts of the code.
|
| https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/136614459887202305
| post_break wrote:
| To this day I still can't play far cry 4 that I paid for on
| windows 10.
| nitwit005 wrote:
| At least the games didn't blame the customer. I've hit several
| websites that instructed me to disable my ad blocker, because the
| ads they tried to serve failed to load.
| sleibrock wrote:
| I find this funny when just a short while ago, Microsoft was
| having issues loading ads into Windows 11[1].
|
| [1] https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/windows11-empty-taskbar.html
| throwaway59553 wrote:
| Shouldn't there be some fallback in place when the game can't
| fetch the add from the server? I mean, it's one basic test
| scenario they should have thought of.
| wayoutthere wrote:
| This is something they want to explicitly stop when they _can_
| show ads to a user base, so why make a fallback that allows
| users to pihole the ads?
| ziml77 wrote:
| You're assuming their motivations. As stated in the Twitter
| posts, the issue only occurred when a connection to the
| server was established, but the server returned an empty
| response. Microsoft fixed the issue after being contacted
| about it by making the servers completely refuse connections.
| moviuro wrote:
| Can't connect != Receives junk from the legitimate server. In
| that case, "junk" was an empty response.
|
| They did test the game with an unavailable ad server, but it
| was still brittle (as in: not tested with badly formatted ads)
| bserge wrote:
| Imagine not being able to rewatch movies from the 50s-80s because
| "the servers were shutdown".
|
| This is what's gonna happen to a whole lot of modern games. What
| a waste.
|
| Only pirates can help them.
| javajosh wrote:
| OTOH these innovations in creating artificial scarcity is what
| enabled the games to be funded in the first place. At least
| this way they exist, and can (and will!) be rescued by the
| hackers of the world.
|
| EDIT: it's impossible to make money off of digital goods
| without artificial scarcity. This is because data is naturally
| not scarce. In the beginning, physical media allowed data goods
| to piggy-back on the retail structures already in place.
| Personal computing and the internet has mostly eliminated that
| form of scarcity. New forms of scarcity have been invented,
| some better than others (from the end-user perspective). Note
| that this truth applies to FAANG as well. Facebook and Google's
| fortunes have been built on the scarcity of ad space. Gaming
| companies have invented ways to create scarcity ranging from
| account-bound DRM (Steam, Battle.net), dongles, and always-on
| phone-home requirement for the runtime. And more. All of these
| technologies exist to extract money from something that is
| naturally not scarce. And rather than hate that fact, consider
| that without the ability to extract monetary value, these
| projects would not have been executed in the first place. So
| what's worse: a world in which we have excellent games hobbled
| by money extraction mechanisms, or a world in which we don't
| have excellent games? I know which one I prefer.
| moron4hire wrote:
| The games industry is more profitable than the movie
| industry. I think they can figure out how to make games that
| don't rot on people.
| smichel17 wrote:
| The production costs of digital goods are naturally scarce.
| We "just" haven't (yet) figured out a good way to compensate
| people for those, so we turn to artificial scarcity.
| philipov wrote:
| That view of things denies the possibility that people would
| have found alternative solutions to problems if the abusive
| solution didn't exist. In a word, it's short-sighted.
| Competition tends to drive otherwise viable strategies to
| extinction if a much easier one exists, and getting rid of
| that dominant strategy can allow alternative strategies to
| thrive.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| > _OTOH these innovations in creating artificial scarcity is
| what enabled the games to be funded in the first place._
|
| Maybe I haven't had enough coffee, but I don't think I
| understand.
| dharmab wrote:
| Speak to some gamedevs at various sizes of studios. You'll
| hear stories like "We can make this game with
| ads/microtransactions/DLC to fund part of the development,
| or we can not make this game at all due to lack of
| funding."
| jeltz wrote:
| And speak to the recotd labels during the Napster era to
| hear thar no music would be made without CD sales.
| Arainach wrote:
| Modern AAA games are incredibly expensive. This isn't a few
| devs doing late nights for a few months, it's hundreds of
| designers, artists, level designers, developers, testers,
| marketers, and more for long timelines. All of those people
| need plenty of hardware, and they all collect salaries and
| (hopefully) benefits.
|
| You can't just quit your day job, live off your savings for
| a bit, and make a game like this. You need a big team with
| funding set up ahead of time, and that finding won't be
| released - either by external investors or management at a
| studio - unless you expect to make a return on that
| investment.
| pavel_lishin wrote:
| I don't understand what artificial scarcity has to do
| with it.
|
| Are you saying that if old games didn't eventually break
| because people didn't maintain them, new games wouldn't
| be made?
| Arainach wrote:
| "Artificial scarcity" - which here is code for in-game
| ads and DRM - helps encourage people to purchase the game
| and guarantees revenue even in pirated copies. It doesn't
| mean guaranteeing the game will eventually break, but it
| does mean guaranteeing it will get a certain number of
| sales/revenue for a period of time.
|
| I was active in gaming in the early-mid CD-ROM era and
| saw this in practice. If something can be trivially
| pirated (copy the files on the disc to a new one) it will
| be copied like wildfire. If it takes a bit more effort
| (bad sectors that make naive copying fail, etc.) then
| piracy won't go away but will become rarer. As the effort
| to pirate becomes more intense, if buying it is easier
| people will. If ads let you drop the price to a point
| where it's more affordable, more people will choose to
| pay it. Etc.
| nerdponx wrote:
| Games are also in a weird position compared to other
| things that are expensive to develop, because a large
| fraction of their target market either doesn't have a lot
| of disposable income. Adult gamers with lots of money are
| probably not abundant enough to justify raising prices.
|
| That said, I'm not sure "artificial scarcity" is the
| right way to think about this. No company is making money
| off of five year old games. The fact that they connect to
| an ad server has nothing to do with creating artificial
| scarcity, it's just another revenue stream for the game
| company.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| > No company is making money off of five year old games
|
| GTA 5 came out in 2013 and sold 20 million copies last
| year. Several games sold better after 5 years than most
| others at release.
| nightski wrote:
| Yeah you'd need data to back that up. Game conglomerates are
| making bad decisions left and right and yet are swimming in
| profit.
| dharmab wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhWGQCzAtl8
| nightski wrote:
| That is a speculative argument, not data. While games
| haven't increased in price the addressable market is
| exponentially larger. In fact they have probably
| benefited from keeping the price low.
|
| The reason you see alternative monetization is because it
| is so damn profitable, not because it is needed simply to
| fund the games. Look at Warzone, brings in $5.2M per day.
| There are countless other examples.
|
| Investors want to go where there is maximum profit. But
| that doesn't mean we need these schemes just for the
| games to exist.
| dageshi wrote:
| I think the other reason, besides micotransactions being
| more profitable, is it's just a better business model for
| most companies. Having a reasonably predictable regular
| income is preferable to a one off hit or miss of a single
| player AAA game.
|
| Companies like Sony still do it, but Sony gets a cut of
| every transaction on their platform, so they have their
| regular income as well.
|
| Microsoft has sort of figured out a solution with
| gamepass where they can make large offers to devs in
| order to minimise their risk.
|
| Whole industry is shifting towards it.
| dharmab wrote:
| It's not speculation. The data is NDA'd, but the authors
| of that video are industry consultants who can give a
| general opinion.
| exporectomy wrote:
| But there are movies that you can't rewatch because the company
| didn't release them and isn't playing the film anymore.
| TheSkyHasEyes wrote:
| Neither of you are wrong. But this isn't good context since
| the game was in their hands. Your example means the movie
| isn't in your hands.
| munk-a wrote:
| A lot of really old games were unplayable without the manuals -
| most of these have gotten fan-patches to disable the security
| checks. I imagine we'll see something similar with more modern
| games but for the always online features.
|
| Usually with enough dedication you can track down and hack out
| the activated code - and if an old DRM system falls into disuse
| a lot of companies will just release the details on it making
| it even easier to patch out.
| dmos62 wrote:
| An example I ran into recently is Far Cry 3. It's not that
| old either. It has a coop campaign that's now unplayable due
| to server disrepair. Invitations to lobby do not work.
| dharmab wrote:
| Pirates, modders and reverse engineering tools.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| When piracy is more user friendly than a paid service, the
| service owners should take a step back and rethink what
| they're doing.
| dmix wrote:
| Note: the last tweet in the thread said they emailed Microsoft
| and they fixed it. So the games work again.
| daveevad wrote:
| > In September of 2021, the content server for Massive Ads
| (http://madserver.net) started delivering blank content to
| anyone that requested it. Presumably, Microsoft shut down the
| service. Of course, this had the effect of knocking a few games
| offline that couldn't understand the responses they were
| getting. I sent a few emails to Microsoft and they were helpful
| enough to refuse connections to the address. So as of now, you
| should be able to play SWAT 4 again.
|
| Neat fix - presumably an empty response blew up the XML parser
| but ECONNREFUSED escapes to safer code?
| onkoe wrote:
| Bit unrelated, but I really like that domain name. Looks like
| "mad"
| dncornholio wrote:
| Neat fix for a solution that was flawed to begin with.
| Sending blank 200 response is a bad idea. If your service
| stops, stop sending 200 status responses to any client.
| dharmab wrote:
| As I understand it, the blank 200s were needed for other
| games which didn't handle the connect refusal as gracefully
| .
| darknavi wrote:
| Right, the game shouldn't have crashed regardless of the
| response from a web service, let alone an ad one.
| kevingadd wrote:
| It would have to handle ECONNREFUSED etc to work in offline
| scenarios or on firewalled networks, I suppose?
| pc86 wrote:
| This makes sense since "rendered unplayable while connected
| to the internet" sort of implies if you disabled your
| internet, everything started working again.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-09-14 23:01 UTC)