This assumes a large portion of the game doesn’t rely on servers.
replyWe can reverse engineer those too, by looking at what the game client expects. Its harder, obviously. But far from impossible.
replyI started writing my own world of warcraft server about 20 years ago by disassembling the WoW binary. I got to the point that you could log in to the game and run around in a big empty world. I even found a couple mistakes in wow's in-game encryption in the process. Lots of teams have gotten much further than I did. There's whole communities who play wow on private servers.
If we can do that for MMOs, we can do that for just about anything. Especially with LLMs. LLMs are incredibly good at this sort of work.
The online portions will be reverse engineered and there will be community servers or the online checks will be replaced with offline stubs. You think in twenty years they won’t be able to do this in minutes for practically nothing using GPT 15 or whatever?
replySure, but that's orthogonal to discs. Nothing prevents a game developer from making "check the server" the first thing that happens when the game on a disc loads.
replyAnd, in my mind, there’s a real difference between providing a hosted service and layering on DRM.
replyThough it would be nice if more game makers ultimately provided a server. That used to be more common.
This is why Stop Killing Games exists.
replyThis assumes the game isn't designed from the beginning to be entirely reliant on the operation of servers. For instance there never has been and never will be any form of offline function for Destiny 1 or 2, even if all the person wants to do is play the single player campaigns.
replyDestiny 1 partially ran on consoles, though. It was mostly p2p: https://gist.github.com/nessus42/55c1260d88e2028689de0c49381...
replyYes, but never in the absence of the Bungie servers. It did have a full sequential single player campaign, but parts of the single player campaign took place in shared instances where the user could see other players running around the map. The single player campaign could also be played cooperatively with other players in the same 'fireteam' if desired, but that was optional.
replyDo we know any of the technical details of that? Is the SPC just instanced multiplayer with all game logic on the server, or is it just getting some encryption key?
replyFirst, SPC, at least in Destiny 2, required you to do Strikes. Second, you get item drops. Technically there is no SPC in either Destiny because it's an MMORPG. There are just plenty of things you can do all by yourself and things that you meant to do alone, and those things usually come with item farming, so you need server-side to make it fair.
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