Massively Overpowered

My favorite Ultima-related story is "The Assassination of Lord British": http://massivelyop.com/2015/10/03/the-game-archaeologist-the-assassina…

This seems a good summary of the case I was talking about: https://massivelyop.com/2020/02/28/lawful-neutral-cheating-copyright-l…

I have a soft spot in my heart for ahead-of-their-time or there-but-for-mismanagement game oddities. :-) There's also an alternative universe where the Japanese game industry cracked the MMO formula instead of Ultimate Online / EverQuest. See Sega's Heat.net / 10six: https://massivelyop.com/2016/07/23/the-game-archaeologist-segas-10six-… As a beta player, it was hellaciously fun, in a very similar way to EVE, even on dialup. Other oddities: LucasArts' 80s Habitat: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habitat_(video_game) 3DO's pre-Niantic Meridian 59: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meridian_59 Sierra's The Realm Online: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Realm_Online (also beta'd this one, which was really slick and well-executed)

Though the latter bit about the ‘size of economy’ is doubtful to me: the populations of top MMOs are in millions each, but surely the players don't spend the sums of their monthly rent and food bills in the games. This report from January 2021 puts the daily volume of transactions in WoW at about two million USD: https://massivelyop.com/2021/01/21/world-of-warcraft-players-move-21b-… I eyeballed the rate for late-ish 2021 from this hastily found site, at 20 bucks per 200k gold—seemed to change little in the past year, so hopefully holds true for January 2021 as well: https://www.playerauctions.com/market-price-tracker/wow/

Apsis Online - https://massivelyop.com/2022/01/10/whatever-happened-to-multi-user-rog…

That’s a fun story! Asherons Call had something along those lines, https://massivelyop.com/2018/01/30/re-examining-the-significance-of-as… though it only really got interesting on one server. Sadly getting a repeat on todays emulators seems unlikely to be possible.

> an epic last stand to try to kill the invincible dragon, something that had only been done once before and was itself a legendary piece of MMO history. From a story linked below it sounds like the sleeper has been killed many times. The article seems to incorrectly state this 2022 attempt would be the second kill ever… >> players of Rallos Zek, who were congratulated by SOE and given official confirmation of a game-first accomplishment. The Sleeper would be killed many times after this, but never quite as memorably. https://massivelyop.com/2022/04/04/the-game-archaeologist-when-everque…

Here's a good account of what happened as any: https://massivelyop.com/2022/04/04/the-game-archaeologist-when-everque… And apparently there was an earlier attempt made by a Taiwanese guild prior to the Rallos Zek expedition: https://blog.summercat.com/the-killing-of-kerafyrm-the-sleeper.html

Is the Dune MMO from Funcom https://massivelyop.com/2020/04/24/funcom-dune-still-a-few-years-away-… ("more ambitious and robust version of Conan Exiles") still going ahead?

They can't ship a game but they are paying out dividends. https://massivelyop.com/2021/10/17/star-citizen-financial-report-outli…

Streaming game services, not so much. Yes. The game industry is very reluctant to use Improbable's Spatial OS, because, through a deal with Google, they force you to host your game, expensively, on Google's servers.[1] Nobody wants to spend $100 million developing an AAA title using that system, and then suddenly get an email that Google is discontinuing the product. (Spatial OS is technically interesting, and, hopefully, someone else will do something like it, with reasonable licensing terms.) [1] https://massivelyop.com/2018/01/12/chronicles-of-elyria-is-dropping-vi…

You normally speaking shouldn't care. But there have actually been Kickstarter cases brought to court that were resolved in the favor of the backers. Examples: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/06/feds-take-first-action-aga… (most likely fraud) https://icv2.com/articles/news/view/32334/court-orders-fines-payments-… (seems to have been either bad timing or someone that needed the court to get off their ass) https://massivelyop.com/2022/10/12/chronicles-of-elyria-dev-celebrates… (many millions of $, case dismissed) So it's a bit of a toss-up. Especially the second is weird because the state is awarded $54K versus a pittance to the backers and apparently the backers did in fact receive their stuff. All in all, other than outright fraud I don't see much in terms of real world recourse here, and even then you have to wonder if you shouldn't just write it off. The last one is interesting: by handing a lot of $ to a project initiator you are also effectively funding them from defending from you suing them...

"do I have to distribute my work under the terms of the GPL even if I don't distribute any GPL code directly" That is an interesting question that have a handful court case in the US, however the result has gone both way. The primary example of that has been cheat software that injects into copyrighted games, which both goes again the copyright and EULA of the game. In the example of blizzard, there is cases when they won against the cheat software on copyright grounds, as you can read here: (https://massivelyop.com/2020/02/28/lawful-neutral-cheating-copyright-l… Basically, the art of work that get created when you run software is also a kind of copyrighted work, and a bit like how movie character is copyrighted as well as an actually movie itself. If a second company make a new movie with the same characters, story and so on, even if its all "original" code, it is still a derivative work. The article above describe those as "non-literal elements", the graphics, sounds, animations and characters produced by the literal code. So to answer the question "when is my program a derived work of a GPL work", it would seem to be when the non-literal elements of the GPL is changed in ways that require copyright permissions by the GPL author. It should be noted however that in practically all cases involving the linux kernel, companies that distribute non-gpl kernel modules are also distributing the kernel as part of products.

Here are a few stories about sites/services being shutdown...I expect the real deuluge won't happen until after it takes effect. StreetLend.com - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16954306 Super Monday Night Combat - https://www.polygon.com/2018/4/28/17295498/super-monday-night-combat-s… Tunngle - https://www.tunngle.net/en/ Ragnarok Online - http://massivelyop.com/2018/04/26/ragnarok-online-shuts-down-in-europe… Verve - https://adexchanger.com/mobile/verve-closes-european-business-thanks-t… SteamSpy - https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/8bdkuz/steam_sales_tracker_…