It’s uncommon, absolutely. But I bought Super Mario Odyssey around the third time I got an alert that it was on sale, for $50 or so. This took a couple years, so it’s reasonably rare, but if the future looks like the past, it will happen
The Switch was the generation where I really started to have adult money, and while a lot of the games I got were lower-priced indie titles, I did get pretty much all of the big 1st party titles.
There’s a reasonable chance I get a Switch 2, but I’m not gonna be buying a lot of games over $70, and the ones I do will probably be when they go on sale for like, 10-15% off. I suspect I’ll be buying fewer games this generation, and I’m okay with that.
Yeah that’s basically why I didn’t pull it out as an option in the first place, it’s not always practical. A lot of your proprietary code is going to be external dependencies linked/built against, or your own IP reused from the last project. But not all of it, and I can definitely see that smaller chunk causing a lot of problems.
You need a team that does a lot of dependency management and similar things well while building it, that don’t actually help them get the game out faster, to keep the problem manageable. Or a team who specialize in open sourcing games like this, which could become a thing if this was more commonplace.
The one MMO I’ve meaningfully played, RuneScape, has open source replicas of its server from different points in time, that the community has made. I’m not gonna pretend it’s zero work, but a developer with the source code absolutely could do these things. It also doesn’t need to be perfectly compatible with the original one, you can replace a complex DB backend with something standard and less performant. Only runs on Linux, or MS Server 2k8? The community of people who care will figure it out.
Maybe a source code release would be preferable in this kind of option. EA just did this with a few Command and Conquer games.
If a multiplayer-only game turns down official servers, and you can’t self-host within the game, they should owe players a separate server binary they can run, or a partial refund for breaking the game. It should not be hard, especially if it’s a known constraint when they develop the game.
If it doesn’t work well without the Internet, it’s a bad investment. Features that require the Internet degrading a bit is one thing, but if a toilet or toaster can’t do its basic job offline, it was ewaste the second it rolled off the factory line.
The way Java is practically written, most of the overhead (read: inefficient slowdown) happens on load time, rather than in the middle of execution. The amount of speedup in hardware since the early 2000s has also definitely made programmers less worried about smaller inefficiencies.
Languages like Python or JavaScript have a lot more overhead while they’re running, and are less well-suited to running a server that needs to respond quickly, but certainly can do the job well enough, if a bit worse compared to something like Java/C++/Rust. I suspect this is basically what they meant by Java being well-suited.
I’ve been using Cinnamon for most of the last decade, but switched to Gnome3 recently, heavily customized to work like Cinnamon. Basically because Wayland is finally stable enough to use.
If Cinnamon gets Wayland support working well, that’s my choice. Otherwise I’ve got some Gnome3 configs that make it work pretty well, and I’d happily run it into the ground too.
It sounds like they sent emails to the district and made some noise in online spaces that made their intentions clear. If it was just wearing wristbands as silent protest, we’d never have known, but they told the district via email, the general public online that they were going to do someone bigoted, and then they did a minor version of it.
Imagining the perspective of an administrator, they really should do something about that to protect their students. And it seems like they went with a temporary ban, which seems proportionate.