As a question & maybe a bit of a contradiction to what I previously said: Do you see a difference between full fledged MMOs & shoehorned MP stuff to enforce online on Singleplayer Games?

While I said my piece about the singleplayer game practice my mentality towards MMOs is actually reversed. When I start with one I already accepted its death (surprisingly I managed to only activly play the ones not being switched off yet).

Damn, you are right. I have never tried CoH/CoV but I always wantet to. And now it's dead.

Played CoH for few years. Loved every bit and loved the community (that's probably the thing i miss most). And mind you, i played it when was subscription based. But that was MMO, so its death was expected to some point.

But SP games like Diablo 3, Darkspore, Hitman (yeah the new Hitman game is an always online affair) should be okay to play when the MP part disappeared....

For those of you who missed it, here is the VOD of the GOGCast with Ross:
https://www.twitch.tv/gogcom/v/55019972
A Youtube and the audio-only versions will follow soon.

Have a nice day. :)

Hitman is still playable offline, sadly some features are locked off.

Yup, also can't start in different locations of the level that you've unlocked.

It's all about money. Reasonable arguments and discussions won't change it even a bit. Why? Look at how Ubisoft's Tom Clancy's The Division is selling. It's always online, but noone seems to care that Ubi can pull the plug anytime, whenever they want.

We need to support multiplayer games with dedicated servers and LAN support - and only that. No games locked to official servers, no always on-line bulls***, etc.
We should support games sold only as stand-alone, independent products, not services.
I think that's it. Vote with wallets - that is the only way.

I understand de PC part, but not the console part. It's still linked to a dying hardware with no backwards compatibility options, and actually only survive through illegal emulation, if at all. And all new console games new day one patches to make them work properly, so the retail version is pretty much worthless from the get go.

Which is why I found kind of funny all the hassle they gave microsoft in the gogcast about the online thing (which I actually have the theory that it was an agreement with sony+microsoft with third parties that sony bailed out of without warning in a very profitable backstabbing maneuver). 0-Day patches make sure you need online connection and their network user to game anyway.

Thank you very much, a mod should edit this link into the OP of this thread.

It's very unfortunate that so many online games get shut down. I even made a wiki on some of the games that have user-made hacks to insert their own Master Servers into the game, including Battlefield 2142, Battlefield 2, and Aliens vs Predator 2, that still have online players (BF2 the most by hundreds). Mostly the more popular games after GameSpy shut down.

It is about profit, and it's giving these companies some bad rep. If they're aware of this problem, it would be very easy to program a simple way to redirect and host personal master servers at any time, as long as they do so from the start. Technically, they could even modify the games after the fact like these modders do, although with more difficulty.

I was hoping someone could figure out how to use/modify Torrent protocol or something similar (like Ad-Hoc Wifi?) to host a dynamic listing of servers and their information. You could think of it like a text file filled with server addresses that host, free to add to or remove, although parsed to be only server addresses and nothing else. Heck, it could even be a static torrent file with nothing in it, and computers connecting to the torrent are automatically listed and pinged as servers, unless users opt out. I'm sure there's some way to phase out the need for actual Master Servers on an actual server.

Great to see Ross and his mission popping up here!
Thanks for the Support, GOG!!!

What makes it suck even more, is that this usually means the video is MP4 video, and Firefox has an MP4 codec built in for a while now that works with HTML5, so it is probably technically possible for Twitch to just slightly modify their web page code to accomodate HTML5 MP4 video playback without having to change or convert their video at all, thereby allowing plugin-free playback.

Since Mozilla and Google have announced for some time now that they're killing plugins by the end of this year, and Adobe has also released statements deprecating Flash, the writing is on the wall for a long time now to website owners to stop using Flash in their products and services and transition to HTML5. Adobe even provides easy ways to help website owners transition away from Flash in their own products, so there is not a lot of excuses other than laziness for not changing things sooner IMHO.

The downside is that all those Flash games and animations will be unplayable (for most people) when that happens -- I'm sure the vast majority have not been, and are not going to be, remade in some other form. Yeah, there's a lot of trash that few will really mourn, but things like , [url=http://explodingrabbit.com/resources/super-mario-bros-crossover.84/]this, and this will be sorely missed. (Yes, I realize that none of these games will load for you, since you don't use Flash. :P )

Some things will most likely become unavailable I'm sure, but it isn't all lost for website developers that actually care about their sites and take some measures to ensure they keep running. Flash games and animations are generally created inside Dreamweaver or other such tools, and from what I've read it is my understanding that content creators can simply load up Dreamweaver and export their creations into an HTML5 compatible format. They may need to make some minor compatibility changes perhaps but they have options available to them other than their content simply no longer being usable if they choose to actually take the steps to ensure a smooth transition in the mean time.

Aside from that however, Mozilla has been hard at work for several years now on something called "Shumway" (named after the alien in the 80s TV comedy 'Alf') which is an in-browser Flash to HTML5 converter essentially. This is a project similar in nature to what they did for rendering PDF documents in-browser, first as a developmental addon called pdf.js, and once it was stabilized it was integrated into the browser by default and has worked quite well for a long time now. As it stands currently, Shumway is very experimental and not really suitable for the average Joe as it has a long way to go in order to work well with most Flash content out there. It does however work with Flash video on some websites currently but that is spotty and does not integrate well with embedded video at the moment. It allegedly works with some Flash games as well however I have yet to get it to work with any content like that while testing it. It's got a long way to go until it is usable IMHO but they've got lots of time to get there too. I do have to warn others that might like to test it out however that it is not currently a drop in push button thing to test, and requires a lot of dicking around to get it to work, so I would discourage non-developers from attempting to play with it for now.

It isn't clear what Google and other browser vendors are planning to do in the post-Flash world, but if Mozilla gets things right with Shumway, Firefox may be the only viable secure way to view Flash content in the future, without the security nightmares that installing Flash brings to the table. The beauty of Mozilla's solution is that it does not really add any new native code to the browser that could bring with it security issues, nor bloat out the code, instead they just essentially convert the Flash content into HTML content on the fly so to speak and render it all using the existing technology built into the browser, much like they did with the built in PDF viewer.

The only other thing I've heard out there concerning problems forthcoming with the death of Flash is with regards to the advertising industry which is very Flash-strong. Google has given the ad industry the heads up on this too, and they've provided tips and tools to advertisers to make the transition, as well as developing server side Flash conversion tools that work with some amount of Flash content from what I understand. Mind you, if Flash ads stop working none of us will ever cry about it (not that we see ads anyway thanks to ad blockers). :)

So, the bottom line is that while Flash is currently on life support while the countdown is being decremented, various companies are providing transition tools, tips, tutorials, etc. both to developers and to end users over the long haul to help minimize problems. There will likely be problems because some site owners no longer maintain their sites nor keep abreast of what is going on, but that's the nature of the Internet - you either keep up with the technology or eventually fall into a sinkhole of apathy.

:)