" What isn’t realistic is stamping their feet and demanding that companies make it possible for people to run their own servers for live service games, just the licensing issues are going to be a nightmare to solve"

Like....what licencing issues? After the game is "dead" and the parent company doesn't want to support it anymore, we could easily release the source code or even just the executables for the servers. There's nothing complicated about it, it's just some windows executables with a whole load of config files to tell them what to serve and how. I once had to go to a gaming conference with a really basic laptop to setup a local-only version of our servers to host some private lobby of the game - it took all of 30 minutes to set it up. But oh no, players can't have that because what, it's too complicated?

Like, as someone who actually wrote some of these servers for various services in these games, I really don't buy this entire argument that it can't be done. If anything, it's just the people at the top who have no idea about tech dragging their feet and coming up with implausible "what if" scenarios as to why it can't be done. For at least 3 of the games I worked on I could give you a zip file with all the files and you'd have the servers up and running within an hour, given powerful enough hardware. And then what, we can't change the servers the clients connect to? Please. Modders would have that done within 24 hours of release, probably with a nice GUI for players to use.

>> that could do this work has been dissolved or are working on other things.

Yes, and their help isn't needed with any of it, the game is by definition dead at this point, the alternative is the publisher shutting everything down and no one ever playing it again.

>>If you don’t like games that require a server to function don’t buy them, that’s a choice that can be made.

It's not just about consumer choice - it's also about us losing part of the culture that cannot be restored once shut down.

I say that wholeheartedly as someone who has worked on games that are(for the time being) still online. And in few years they will be inevitably shut down, leading to years of my life and effort being inaccessible to anyone - the only way that you will be able to experience it is through Youtube videos. That's a cultural tragedy, and I'm 10000% for companies being forced through law to include it in their design that _eventually_ the servers have to be released to the public. They don't have to offer any support whatsoever, the communities will figure it out, guaranteed.

Windows really has a fantastic support for C++ and rendering programmers imho, the tooling is world class and Visual Studio has no match as an IDE. Even if somehow my tools worked on Mac or Linux I'd still pick windows out of sheer convenience of using it for work.

But as things stand - all major console toolchains are windows only. If you're making a game for PlayStation, Xbox or Switch, you have to be on windows.

And then we went to Paestum, which is an even older Greek settlement in Italy - with the original Greek temples still standing. Mindblowing, and I'm used to old stuff being around(a friend of mine lives in a house where a portion of it is a listed structure dating to the 12th century, it's just a bathroom and a storage room for them lol).

One of the reasons why I stopped going on Facebook, even though a lot of communities I care about have moved there. I wrote a long comment about someone's suggestion about car maintenance, only to get a reply "I didn't come here to discuss this, if you don't like what I said then go somewhere else". Like, WHY EVEN BE IN A PUBLIC FORUM THEN. But I feel like that's just me and my early internet sensibilities. Nowadays people want to post something, get some likes, and not be challenged. Even a mild disagreement is met with immediate aggression a lot of the time, because people are just not used to talking on the internet at all(imho).

Unfortunately, no :-( in crashes it's common for the person with a seatbelt to be killed by the body of the person without the seatbelt flying across inside the car like a cannonball. Bodies tend not to fly straight forward except for perfect head on collisions, and even in those cases the person sitting behind you without a seatbelt is going to kill you as they go through your seat. If you're alone in the vehicle I can maybe buy the argument that it doesn't matter, but even then there's plenty of examples of people being literally ejected out of the car and into harms way.

Interviewer: But it must be somewhere… Well what’s out there?

Senator Collins: Nothing’s out there!

Interviewer: Well there must be something out there.

Senator Collins: There is nothing out there - all there is is sea, and birds, and fish.

Interviewer: And?

Senator Collins: And 20,000 tons of crude oil.

Interviewer: And what else?

Senator Collins: And fire

Well, at least Ukrainians aren't publishing state sponsored books about Komrade Hitler like Russia does - the state sponsored revisionism about Hitler happening in Russia right now is insane, I was going to say you forgot that you fought him, but then again, WW2 started by Russia making a pact with Hitler, so maybe actually nothing was forgotten.

>>history like their midget bandera hero

The funny thing is only completely brainwashed Russians seem to care about Bandera at this point, if FSB is providing you with talking points online then they really need to update their guidance. I just find it interesting what is it about HN that makes you guys come out of the woods - surely FSB isn't paying that much to post on random tech forums online? Or is it just paid per hour?

https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2025-11-16/kin...

And if you saw these media posts, I'm sure you'd agree with those arrests in majority of the cases.

>>It’s also a crime in the UK to offend someone.

Is that what American "news" tell you? Because it's absolutely not true.

https://www.worldometers.info/population/countries-in-europe...

But either way, European nations are nearly all screwed - their expenditure on pensions and healthcare will quadruple in the coming decades as the demographics change heavily towards elderly peple.