u/Vast_Lawyer_5521

Tiktok has been flooded by people claiming that you can reach financial freedom if you buy into their $597 Course.

They teach you Digital Marketing 101 stuff, on how to make an online brand etc, and how to create faceless videos using AI Platforms. My issue with all of this, is that once you get in, if you wanted to make any money, they suddenly have a 50% reselling commission or something like that.

Now there are over 50 thousand people selling the SAME kind of products. And they have all different names as well, but it's the same "get rich" quick scheme, and "financial freedom".

My issue with all of this is that.. how is this NOT an MLM? There's no "downward pipeline" where you make profits off the ones you recruit, but the creator of the product is getting residual income based on the resellers they have recruited (and the resellers that recruited other resellers).

If anyone knows what I'm on about, Tiktok is just full of resellers.

The core idea behind the Stop Killing Games movement is to have clear End-of-Life (EOL) terms in a game’s Terms of Service and some form of continued access after shutdown. This is reasonable. However, I think a lot of people misunderstand what they’re actually asking for when they say things like “let us connect to unofficial servers” or “give us the ability to run our own servers.” Like it’s some simple feature request.

Servers contain core game logic, progression systems, economies, anti-cheat, and persistent data. 

Enabling players to run their own servers would, in many cases, require exposing proprietary server code, internal tooling, and database structures if they still want to play the account they had. That introduces serious concerns around security risks for the company complying with this.

It’s difficult to see proposals like that making it through any serious technical or legal review.

A more realistic expectation is something like an offline mode post-EOL, where the game can run locally without reliance on server infrastructure. This would require developers to design games with both offline and online pathways from the outset, something we already see in titles like those from FromSoftware. (Dark souls 1-3 etc.)

The push for player run servers often comes from comparisons to private servers, particularly in games like World of Warcraft. But those examples are frequently misunderstood. Private servers typically exist because of extensive reverse engineering, which includes packet sniffing, protocol reconstruction, and other legally questionable methods just to approximate server behavior. Even then, they are imperfect replicas, often plagued by bugs, and broken quests.

This is the issue I have with all of this, and perhaps someone can talk sense to me and help me see why this wouldn’t be an issue, and maybe that I’m misguided to some degree. How would we feasibly get to “run our own servers” or have them “hand us the servers”?