When the ad hominem attacks and “bootlicker” insults come out, it is usually because the technical and legal arguments have run dry. Let’s bypass the emotional outbursts and look directly at the staggering technical inaccuracies in your response.
$100 Enterprise Server Myth
You claim an authorization server costs $100 a year. Let’s look at the actual math for enterprise infrastructure. Amazon’s enterprise DDoS protection (AWS Shield Advanced) costs a flat $3,000 a month before you even factor in data transfer fees. https://aws.amazon.com/shield/pricing
Enterprise-grade Multi-AZ databases run thousands of dollars a month depending on IOPS and storage scale. Maintaining standard SOC 2 Type II security compliance to handle user data costs between $30,000 and $150,000+ a year. https://drata.com/learn/soc-2/cost
All this infrastructure requires a 24/7 rotation of Site Reliability Engineers, who average over $130,000 a year in base salary. https://www.kore1.com/sre-salary-guide-2026
You are off by a factor of about ten thousand
“Stop Killing Games”
You claim companies can “easily turn off server checks” once they drop support for a game. This betrays a complete absence of experience with modern captive console infrastructure and server-authoritative game loops.
For a live-service game, the server is not a DRM tollbooth checking an ID at the door. The client on your machine is largely a dumb terminal. The server actively runs the critical game logic: authoritative physics, AI behavioral trees, secure state management, and proprietary matchmaking APIs. You cannot “just turn off the check.”
To make a live-service game function offline, a studio has to completely re-engineer the backend architecture to compile and run locally on the client’s hardware. They have to strip out licensed third-party middleware and completely rewrite the game to bypass the strict Technical Requirement Checklists (TRCs) and Xbox Requirements (XRs) mandated by Sony and Microsoft. You are demanding that a studio spend months of uncompensated engineering and QA labor to build a bespoke offline off-ramp for a deprecated product. It is a fundamental rewrite of the game’s spine, not a flipped switch.
Historical Revisionism of 2013
You are actively rewriting history regarding the digital resale market, likely because you were only experiencing it from the consumer side of the screen. Having been deeply embedded in the development and publishing pipeline during the transition to the eighth-generation consoles, I find the historical revisionism around what happened in 2013 baffling.
The digital resale and loaning mechanics were not theoretical whiteboard concepts or corporate propaganda. They were fully functional APIs baked directly into the Durango (Xbox One) and Orbis (PS4) DevKits. The hardware and the SDKs were entirely engineered around digital entitlement transfers. Xbox explicitly outlined the infrastructure to allow digital trade-ins at participating retailers and a “Family Sharing” plan that allowed a digital library to be shared across ten different accounts. https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2013/06/06/license/
We were on the verge of a true digital secondary market. It was killed because a vocal minority of consumers kicked up such a massive fuss about physical plastic that Microsoft’s stock tanked and they completely backpedaled. Sony, who had the exact same infrastructure functioning in their dev kits, watched the backlash, scrapped their announcement, and presented the exact opposite plan eight hours later just to play the hero. Both companies then scrambled to re-engineer their system software prior to launch. Consumers killed the digital resale market themselves because they refused to accept the digital infrastructure required to make it function. https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2013/06/19/update/
Misunderstanding of Mr. Rogers and VHS
Bringing up Mr. Rogers testifying in the Betamax case is a beautiful piece of nostalgia, but you completely misunderstand the legal ruling. Mr. Rogers testified in favor of time-shifting, the ability for families to record a broadcast to watch it at a more convenient time.
You can label the legal realities of software licensing as “corporate propaganda” all you want. But your entire worldview relies on pretending that complex, server-authoritative digital ecosystems are equivalent to static cave paintings, that global enterprise server architecture costs less than a Netflix subscription, and that re-engineering a live game for offline use requires zero human labor.
You are demanding permanent, absolute dominion over the ongoing intellectual labor of development teams and operations engineers, and you want it all for a one-time fee of $60. That is not a defense of consumer rights. It is a fundamental denial of how modern technology actually operates.
As with several commenters before you, you have brought a lot of emotional outrage to this discussion, but absolutely zero factual evidence to back up your legal or ethical claims. Your stance on the ethical capitalization of intellectual labor does not liberate anyone. By demanding, uncompensated access to a team’s ongoing maintenance and server labor for a single upfront fee, you are echoing the exact rhetoric used by robber barons to justify indentured servitude and union busting. You have simply replaced the 19th-century factory floor with a digital storefront, demanding the exact same permanent exploitation of the workers who keep it running.
I am just explaining to you how you act. If you don’t want people to treat you like a bootlicker then don’t act like one. It is rather simple honestly.
Oh look, you make up a bunch of additional costs that are not related to running the authorization server at all. You don’t have to use anything you are describing unless you want to. You don’t have to store personal information, you don’t have to have expensive DDOS protection which has turned into quite the racket for companies like cloud flare. You don’t have to have engineers on staff at all times.
You once again construct a strawman to satisfy your insatiable desire to be correct. No one said they expect a live service game to be run indefinitely. I find it amazing how quickly you construct lies. If you are not going to bother to read and understand then don’t be surprised when people dismiss the AI slop you spew.
I am so sorry that the last console push towards digitization didn’t work out because people didn’t like the restrictive systems being proposed. That they didn’t want to run down to GameStop to be able to trade a game with a friend. It was a ridiculous idea and blaming the consumer for what they want is both ham fisted and disingenuous to the situation.
I never said anything you claim. It is pretty bizarre how you just lie continuously and rely on AI to make your arguments. You have basically just argued with yourself the entire time. To each his own.
I can explain the technical realities of this industry to you all day, but I cannot understand them for you. When you run out of actual counter-arguments and retreat into throwing out ad hominem insults and blaming “AI” for my formatting, it just proves you have no capacity to refute the facts. Calling me a bootlicker doesn’t make your technical ignorance disappear.
You claim that DDoS protection, data compliance, and live engineers are optional costs. That alone exposes your complete lack of experience in IT operations. If you spin up a public-facing authentication server for a global product without enterprise DDoS mitigation, it will be packet-flooded and taken offline by a botnet within fifteen minutes. If you are authenticating digital licenses, you are verifying user accounts. That means you are handling Personally Identifiable Information, which immediately subjects you to GDPR compliance frameworks. And if you think a global server cluster runs indefinitely without engineers to update expiring SSL certificates, patch OS vulnerabilities, and restart crashed instances, you live in a fantasy world. Those aren’t strawman costs. They are the non-negotiable reality of operating anything on the modern internet.
Your comment about having to run down to GameStop to trade a game with a friend proves you don’t even understand the 2013 infrastructure you helped destroy. The Family Sharing plan didn’t require a retailer at all. It allowed up to ten designated friends to instantly access your entire digital library directly from their own consoles via the cloud. The retailer partnership was a completely separate feature designed to let you trade in digital licenses for store credit—a secondary market feature people are begging for today. Consumers killed an infrastructure that would have let them instantly share games across the country from their couch because they were misinformed then, and you are clearly still misinformed about it over a decade later.
Now you are backtracking and claiming no one expects a live service game to run indefinitely. If you acknowledge that servers eventually shut down, and you still can’t refute the fact that stripping out server-authoritative code to build an offline mode requires months of expensive, manual engineering labor, then your entire argument evaporates. You can’t admit that servers must eventually die, and then complain when a publisher refuses to perform hundreds of thousands of dollars of uncompensated labor to build a bespoke offline off-ramp just for you.
Beyond all that, your hopes, dreams, and unreasonable expectations are moot. The industry doesn’t care what you think, and isn’t going to give you what you want, because people like you complain far more than you spend. The market has changed beyond recognition since those Xbox One/PS4 days and now you and your ilk represent a rounding error. The industry will continue to move forward providing their real customers with what they actually want, with or without you. Maybe you should look into a new hobby you can afford.
Absolute nonsense, you spewed a bunch of AI garbage at a person who has worked in the server space before.
An authentication server does not need to store personal information. You inability to understand the actual technology is obvious at this point. You grossly overestimate the amount of work an engineer would need to do to keep an authentication server running. You say the kind of garbage a Cloudfare salesman would. You server would be taken instantly offline! What a joke.
Certainly if you are targeted by a botnet you are going to have problems, but nothing last forever and if you don’t put a target on your back then it is not a problem generally. I get people like to pay protection fees to the digital “Mafia” to protect them from the masses because of their shit business practices.
In fact, the problem with botnets is because of corporations security practices not despite them. They have created their own problem because of lax security and then an expensive solution is used like Cloudflare instead of them just securing their Internet connect devices to begin with.
I am not backtracking shit. Please point out where I said or Stop Killing Games said anything like this. At this point you are just being fucking obtuse pretending the discussion is about keeping live service games going indefinitely.
You say the industry doesn’t care what I think but then blame consumers for dictating what corporations are doing!? Clearly you are being disingenuous here.
The only person who needs to pack up and go home is you. Cheers!
When the ad hominem attacks and “bootlicker” insults come out, it is usually because the technical and legal arguments have run dry. Let’s bypass the emotional outbursts and look directly at the staggering technical inaccuracies in your response.
$100 Enterprise Server Myth You claim an authorization server costs $100 a year. Let’s look at the actual math for enterprise infrastructure. Amazon’s enterprise DDoS protection (AWS Shield Advanced) costs a flat $3,000 a month before you even factor in data transfer fees. https://aws.amazon.com/shield/pricing Enterprise-grade Multi-AZ databases run thousands of dollars a month depending on IOPS and storage scale. Maintaining standard SOC 2 Type II security compliance to handle user data costs between $30,000 and $150,000+ a year. https://drata.com/learn/soc-2/cost All this infrastructure requires a 24/7 rotation of Site Reliability Engineers, who average over $130,000 a year in base salary. https://www.kore1.com/sre-salary-guide-2026
You are off by a factor of about ten thousand
“Stop Killing Games” You claim companies can “easily turn off server checks” once they drop support for a game. This betrays a complete absence of experience with modern captive console infrastructure and server-authoritative game loops.
For a live-service game, the server is not a DRM tollbooth checking an ID at the door. The client on your machine is largely a dumb terminal. The server actively runs the critical game logic: authoritative physics, AI behavioral trees, secure state management, and proprietary matchmaking APIs. You cannot “just turn off the check.”
To make a live-service game function offline, a studio has to completely re-engineer the backend architecture to compile and run locally on the client’s hardware. They have to strip out licensed third-party middleware and completely rewrite the game to bypass the strict Technical Requirement Checklists (TRCs) and Xbox Requirements (XRs) mandated by Sony and Microsoft. You are demanding that a studio spend months of uncompensated engineering and QA labor to build a bespoke offline off-ramp for a deprecated product. It is a fundamental rewrite of the game’s spine, not a flipped switch.
Historical Revisionism of 2013 You are actively rewriting history regarding the digital resale market, likely because you were only experiencing it from the consumer side of the screen. Having been deeply embedded in the development and publishing pipeline during the transition to the eighth-generation consoles, I find the historical revisionism around what happened in 2013 baffling.
The digital resale and loaning mechanics were not theoretical whiteboard concepts or corporate propaganda. They were fully functional APIs baked directly into the Durango (Xbox One) and Orbis (PS4) DevKits. The hardware and the SDKs were entirely engineered around digital entitlement transfers. Xbox explicitly outlined the infrastructure to allow digital trade-ins at participating retailers and a “Family Sharing” plan that allowed a digital library to be shared across ten different accounts. https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2013/06/06/license/
We were on the verge of a true digital secondary market. It was killed because a vocal minority of consumers kicked up such a massive fuss about physical plastic that Microsoft’s stock tanked and they completely backpedaled. Sony, who had the exact same infrastructure functioning in their dev kits, watched the backlash, scrapped their announcement, and presented the exact opposite plan eight hours later just to play the hero. Both companies then scrambled to re-engineer their system software prior to launch. Consumers killed the digital resale market themselves because they refused to accept the digital infrastructure required to make it function. https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2013/06/19/update/
Misunderstanding of Mr. Rogers and VHS Bringing up Mr. Rogers testifying in the Betamax case is a beautiful piece of nostalgia, but you completely misunderstand the legal ruling. Mr. Rogers testified in favor of time-shifting, the ability for families to record a broadcast to watch it at a more convenient time.
The Supreme Court ruled that time-shifting was a “fair use” exemption of copyright. They did not rule that the consumer suddenly gained ownership of the intellectual property, nor did they grant consumers the right to dictate how the studio distributed future media. Fair use is a legal defense for how you interact with a medium; it is not a transfer of ownership. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/464/417/ https://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/opinions/2010/09/10/09-35969.pdf
You can label the legal realities of software licensing as “corporate propaganda” all you want. But your entire worldview relies on pretending that complex, server-authoritative digital ecosystems are equivalent to static cave paintings, that global enterprise server architecture costs less than a Netflix subscription, and that re-engineering a live game for offline use requires zero human labor.
You are demanding permanent, absolute dominion over the ongoing intellectual labor of development teams and operations engineers, and you want it all for a one-time fee of $60. That is not a defense of consumer rights. It is a fundamental denial of how modern technology actually operates.
As with several commenters before you, you have brought a lot of emotional outrage to this discussion, but absolutely zero factual evidence to back up your legal or ethical claims. Your stance on the ethical capitalization of intellectual labor does not liberate anyone. By demanding, uncompensated access to a team’s ongoing maintenance and server labor for a single upfront fee, you are echoing the exact rhetoric used by robber barons to justify indentured servitude and union busting. You have simply replaced the 19th-century factory floor with a digital storefront, demanding the exact same permanent exploitation of the workers who keep it running.
I am just explaining to you how you act. If you don’t want people to treat you like a bootlicker then don’t act like one. It is rather simple honestly.
Oh look, you make up a bunch of additional costs that are not related to running the authorization server at all. You don’t have to use anything you are describing unless you want to. You don’t have to store personal information, you don’t have to have expensive DDOS protection which has turned into quite the racket for companies like cloud flare. You don’t have to have engineers on staff at all times.
You once again construct a strawman to satisfy your insatiable desire to be correct. No one said they expect a live service game to be run indefinitely. I find it amazing how quickly you construct lies. If you are not going to bother to read and understand then don’t be surprised when people dismiss the AI slop you spew.
I am so sorry that the last console push towards digitization didn’t work out because people didn’t like the restrictive systems being proposed. That they didn’t want to run down to GameStop to be able to trade a game with a friend. It was a ridiculous idea and blaming the consumer for what they want is both ham fisted and disingenuous to the situation.
I never said anything you claim. It is pretty bizarre how you just lie continuously and rely on AI to make your arguments. You have basically just argued with yourself the entire time. To each his own.
I can explain the technical realities of this industry to you all day, but I cannot understand them for you. When you run out of actual counter-arguments and retreat into throwing out ad hominem insults and blaming “AI” for my formatting, it just proves you have no capacity to refute the facts. Calling me a bootlicker doesn’t make your technical ignorance disappear.
You claim that DDoS protection, data compliance, and live engineers are optional costs. That alone exposes your complete lack of experience in IT operations. If you spin up a public-facing authentication server for a global product without enterprise DDoS mitigation, it will be packet-flooded and taken offline by a botnet within fifteen minutes. If you are authenticating digital licenses, you are verifying user accounts. That means you are handling Personally Identifiable Information, which immediately subjects you to GDPR compliance frameworks. And if you think a global server cluster runs indefinitely without engineers to update expiring SSL certificates, patch OS vulnerabilities, and restart crashed instances, you live in a fantasy world. Those aren’t strawman costs. They are the non-negotiable reality of operating anything on the modern internet.
Your comment about having to run down to GameStop to trade a game with a friend proves you don’t even understand the 2013 infrastructure you helped destroy. The Family Sharing plan didn’t require a retailer at all. It allowed up to ten designated friends to instantly access your entire digital library directly from their own consoles via the cloud. The retailer partnership was a completely separate feature designed to let you trade in digital licenses for store credit—a secondary market feature people are begging for today. Consumers killed an infrastructure that would have let them instantly share games across the country from their couch because they were misinformed then, and you are clearly still misinformed about it over a decade later.
Now you are backtracking and claiming no one expects a live service game to run indefinitely. If you acknowledge that servers eventually shut down, and you still can’t refute the fact that stripping out server-authoritative code to build an offline mode requires months of expensive, manual engineering labor, then your entire argument evaporates. You can’t admit that servers must eventually die, and then complain when a publisher refuses to perform hundreds of thousands of dollars of uncompensated labor to build a bespoke offline off-ramp just for you.
Beyond all that, your hopes, dreams, and unreasonable expectations are moot. The industry doesn’t care what you think, and isn’t going to give you what you want, because people like you complain far more than you spend. The market has changed beyond recognition since those Xbox One/PS4 days and now you and your ilk represent a rounding error. The industry will continue to move forward providing their real customers with what they actually want, with or without you. Maybe you should look into a new hobby you can afford.
Absolute nonsense, you spewed a bunch of AI garbage at a person who has worked in the server space before.
An authentication server does not need to store personal information. You inability to understand the actual technology is obvious at this point. You grossly overestimate the amount of work an engineer would need to do to keep an authentication server running. You say the kind of garbage a Cloudfare salesman would. You server would be taken instantly offline! What a joke.
Certainly if you are targeted by a botnet you are going to have problems, but nothing last forever and if you don’t put a target on your back then it is not a problem generally. I get people like to pay protection fees to the digital “Mafia” to protect them from the masses because of their shit business practices.
In fact, the problem with botnets is because of corporations security practices not despite them. They have created their own problem because of lax security and then an expensive solution is used like Cloudflare instead of them just securing their Internet connect devices to begin with.
I am not backtracking shit. Please point out where I said or Stop Killing Games said anything like this. At this point you are just being fucking obtuse pretending the discussion is about keeping live service games going indefinitely.
You say the industry doesn’t care what I think but then blame consumers for dictating what corporations are doing!? Clearly you are being disingenuous here.
The only person who needs to pack up and go home is you. Cheers!
How many years have you spent in the video game industry?