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Modern Warfare 2 - No Dedicated Servers. Are other developers going to follow suit?
November 11th 2009, 17:00 MSK by teenageriot Could this be the start of a new trend in order to try to squeeze more money out of the PC community? Although this recent announcement has sent shockwaves through the PC gaming community, I think the overall response has been rather mild. Currently the petition in favor of the Dedicated Servers holds little over 140,000 signatures, I'd imagine with changes as chocking as these we would stand together to prevent this from happening in the future. Again, with the new IWnet matchmaking system they are getting rid of the following: no more choosing what level you want to play no more connecting to a low ping games by choice no more clan matches no more mods no more custom maps no more filtering matches no more joining on to a game with all your mates no more high capacity matches (eg. 30/40/50 people in a match) no more benifits of playing online over the console version link to the petition link to article explaining the new matchmaking system What do you think? |
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Topic: Modern Warfare 2 - No Dedicated Servers. Are other developers going to follow suit?
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Today has been a good day to post. <Hugin_len> Basically, cheesy doesn't have awful taste in music, he's simply very white.
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I love the smell of unread posts in the morning. "CS is still one of the best, and fun, tactical FPS multiplayer games out there." -- Perkins
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Yeah it is lively as hell. Hooray, no work today! |
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What the? I've been at work shaking my moneymakers. Wait, I meant hands. I meant using my hands. To work. On a computer. |
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No work for ME because I am reading planetcrap! |
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I dunno if posting would help, it still seems weak to me. |
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Today has been prettybusy. you? There are mosre posts today than there have been in a month. |
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WTF. |
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Deadlock - The general's motivation in MW2 wasn't revenge. He was trying to up the numbers of the army by creating the conflict in the first place. It might as well have been part of the MGS4 war economy story. \"Making love to a woman is like working on an assembly line. No matter how good you are at it, you\'ll eventually be replaced by a foreigner or a machine.\"
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(/me grabs dead thread, chokes the life out of it) Not to bring up the hated topic of game piracy or anything, but these numbers sound a LOT more believable, and make more logical sense, than anything we've heard in the past. Let's consider the following scenario. Because game pirates can get apps for free, they download a couple new games every day -- or about 500 games in a year. On the other hand, normal gamers tend to play the same game for a longer time -- buying an average of 5 games per year. If this seems low to you, then consider that you are also reading a post on an indie game developer blog. You are probably more hardcore than the average gamer. Anyway, given these statistics, if the market consists of 10 million gamers, then there are 500 million pirated game copies, and 90 million purchased game copies, From the perspective of every individual game, 80% of its users are using pirated copies. However, only 10% of the market consists of pirates. They do indeed use the Blizzard argument, but also another example of the sale they just did. "Fucking Radio Shack. It's a wonder they even know how to use a bathroom and don't just walk around all day with shit in their pants." - smds
"the concept that a happy worker is a productive worker is hardly an entry from Matt's Big Book Of Things The Fairies Said." - Dum |
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Sometimes I feel like there are too many unknowables to this but argue in circles. 2D Boy's game certainly worked fine with a mouse and still saw incredibly high piracy percentages, so that seems important. On the other hand it's not online enabled, it's not a Blizzard AAA^10 game in quality and hype, but… does that explain anything? And does it even matter what any single game does as piracy on the PC has such momentum that any one release won't magically make all the difference. And certainly not due to any one variable that others can then copy. There's nothing to pin down, everything is so wishy-washy from the underlying raw numbers to the conclusions we all draw. Somewhere along the line I think we can agree that to make a successful PC game you'll want to be online aware, run on a broad selection of computers old and new, your company should have a spotless reputation amongst your audience and hype should be managed so it reaches its crescendo just as people legally get their hands on the game. But that's not terribly useful information beyond maybe giving second thoughts to porting that latest console singleplayer action game to the PC. |
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Gaggle Way to muddle the topic. Yes, there are a LOT of unknowns. But we know near the number of pirates vs. gamers, we can easily determine people aren't losing 90% of their sales to pirates. Basically we've been hearing that 80-90% of the players running games on the PC (and iphone) are pirates. So with that data, people have been extracing the percentage and saying that's our piracy rate. If you do the math though, that's obviously not the case, right? If number of pirates (we know the numbers much better on the iphone due to it's nature) are somewhere between 5-10% of total potential customers, then 80-90% number above is useless. At least on the iphone, the potential sales lost to piracy is a big fat 5%. And it's probably 5-20% on the PC. So the people complaining 80-90% piracy are blowing shit out their asses. "the concept that a happy worker is a productive worker is hardly an entry from Matt's Big Book Of Things The Fairies Said." - Dum
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I don't mean to muddle things up, and this certainly isn't a religious debate for me so I'll pull back if my idle chatter drags things south. I guess my response is: Haven't we always known 80-90% were bullshit numbers? That doesn't strike me as news. The idea of calculating new percentages is neat, but I can't help but feel it doesn't really get us anywhere noteworthy. The underlying equation is ultimately about human behavior, so beyond Jamie writing an interesting profile on that I don't quite see that coming up with new ways to track the piracy percentage brings us closer to any answers. There'll never be a "right answer" to this, it'll always be a soft mushy number whether it's 80%, 5% or 20%. However, Regardless of the percentage I think there's a list of guidelines that can be followed that lessens the impact of piracy. I can see the fun in discussing and analyzing the elements of such guidelines, but I don't particularly care about the exact number underneath. Maybe that's just me *shrug*. |
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I do believe that together you and I can keep this thread on lifesupport for a few precious extra minutes though. Not like anyone here is going to thank us of course, but in their hearts I know they're grateful. |
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What I meant by muddling up, is exactly what you're saying, that the numbers don't mean much to you. If we ignore the numbers, we aren't paying attention to the real problem. If we say car wrecks happen, so lets deal with the underlying cause, what's the next step? To determine how often they happen, in what circumstances, what times of day, etc. The numbers are the story. So in the case of piracy, we need to know the numbers to start figuring it out. The numbers we do have controlled environments (see iphone numbers) suggest the following that total jail broken phones == 5%. If that's true, and we can assume it's moderately accurate in this case (because of the environment), then we know that when we get numbers like \"50%-90% piracy\" that's just people that don't understand math. If we a potential install base of X and you get 10% of X in sales, it's completely inaccurate to suggest that subset Y (5% of X) installing your game to their max (in this case, 5%) is 50% piracy rate. Instead, it's 5% piracy rate. In other words, if we say the total install base on the iPhone is 1000 and we sold to 100 customers, it's misleading at best to suggest another 50 people illegally downloading the game is a 50% piracy rate. The numbers are always the story. (says the programmer) "the concept that a happy worker is a productive worker is hardly an entry from Matt's Big Book Of Things The Fairies Said." - Dum
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This isn't a math issuse it's a perspective issuse. The article is trying to be realistic about pirate purchasing habits in the absence of piracy by makeing the assumption that they would act like the average consumer. Sure it's true (although I'd aruge they're more likely to look more like the hardcore/bob level game buyer then average)but no more or less so then the usualy 1 copy = 1 sale no matter what perspective. Don't forget garnishes such as: Fish shaped solid waste.
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I bet if we got rid of the piracy issue those pirates would BUY those 500 games each year! |
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Of course, we know they have the money, because they're saving it, they must have years worth of savings built up after pirating so many games! |
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Matt, my opinion would be that car crashes are inherently more testable, but even foregoing that it's verifiably a more researched field with a lot more at stake. Getting percentages right in car crashes is a matter of life and death.. so agreed, numbers matter in that field; a life saved in traffic is a big deal. Not so with game piracy. There's a million vaguely-understood not-researched-at-all variables involved, and they're not really testable so any metrics quickly become suspect. This is at the core of your topic as I see it: By stating that the high numbers aren't necessarily correct you (or the original author at any rate) go on to offer an alternative way to measure, and through that you aim to solve… what exactly? That's what I don't understand. You're weighing the correctness of one metric against another, but I don't see the relevance of those thoughts. So what if the piracy percentage corresponds to 50% or 5% lost sales? What theories can we extrapolate that are meaningful at 5% lost sales but not at 50%? I'm not shooting down your interest in game piracy numbers, but generally speaking I'm tired of reading of different ways to calculate piracy percentages and would rather talk about what could be done to limit piracy. Oh well *shrug*, I guess we've made our opinions clear. Ain't nothing wrong with your topic, even if you do have to suffer with me dragging it sideways :) |
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gaggle I held my numbers discussion to the iPhone for the very reasons you mentioned, we don't have firm numbers. On the iPhone we do. You can pirate games unless you've jailbroken your phone. You can't do that without Apple knowing about it. So we know exactly the max number of pirates. No ifs ands or butts. So again, the story is in the numbers. If you don't like the numbers, explain to me how they are bad. "the concept that a happy worker is a productive worker is hardly an entry from Matt's Big Book Of Things The Fairies Said." - Dum
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Even if I were to agree with the iPhone numbers being firm it boils to me not knowing what that knowledge gives us. If we say we have these firm numbers (and I do contest their, uhm, firmness), does that change anything? Is there a topic of discussion that opens up because of these numbers? That doesn't strike me as being the case. What I do think is interesting are discussions on what could be done to limit piracy though, such as which incentives would bring us away from pirating? Maybe my idea of incentives don't match yours and that would open the floor for fruitful discussion. I still recall the suggestion that came out of a discussion we had about DRM, where I found myself thinking I actually would buy/accept DRM'ed games if the DRM was promised up front to go away over time (such as full-on Ubisoft-style DRM for three months, Steam DRM for a year, then no DRM). That was a new idea for me, brought on by a discussion we had. Maybe there are more interesting ideas like that. |
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Our current discussion boils down to your original comment about muddling the issue. I am doing exactly that. I can't focus my attention on the numbers because they're not that important to me, but you're brushing up close to a topic I am interested in. This being Planetcrap and since we're not adhering to what could be called human traits I then proceed to drag the topic into territory more suitable for me. Them's the breaks eh. |
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I could sprinkle some smileyfaces but I trust you understand the lighthearted nature of our conversation. Ah fuck it: :P |
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If you care about the number of pirates, you're doing it wrong. You need to worry about the number of lost sales due to piracy and the number of lost sales due to DRM, and no one has those numbers. BUYBUYBUY
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Bob Those numbers don't and can't exist, so why focus on them? We can make educated guesses all day long, none of us even being actually educated on the matter, but even if we were, they'd still just be guesses. Gaggle Don't the available numbers tell us a story already? The story is that lost sales due to piracy aren't. Those numbers don't exist because they can't exist. If someone steals ten tvs from your store, do put better security and hope they will buy ten tvs next time? No, you put up better security and hope no one steals tvs again and your regular customers can still get in past the new security system... Pirates are a lost cause. And not a market. If you're looking to sell your game, you pay attention to viable markets. Pirates aren't.* What we do have is numbers that state, unequivocally, that the total pirate percentage on the iphone is 5%. That's it. If every single pirate on the iphone downloaded your game, thats only a 5% total of the potential market. What's hard about that? We have numbers. Those number say pirates aren't a big deal. An yet, we still have argument? I don't get it. In other words, why are we worrying about limiting piracy at all? Why are they even in the discussion? I'd say it's because people don't like people using their shit for free and when they can see them and point at them (look, 50% of my users are pirates! kill the bastards!). But in reality, they don't matter. They aren't a majority, they aren't a near majority, they are such a minority they aren't even in the scope. *Except in cases like donation games the original article and World of Goo did. I bet they convinced some pirates to pay for their games, even though they probably already downloaded them. "the concept that a happy worker is a productive worker is hardly an entry from Matt's Big Book Of Things The Fairies Said." - Dum
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Didn't your originally linked article claim 5% only for NA, speculating higher piracy numbers elsewhere in the world? And even then I'll argue it's bollocks to claim a flat rate of piracy across all games. Especially as we move away from the iPhone, which is hardly representative of piracy as a whole. There are so many layers of uncertainty, as well as I find the notion of a single number that permanently represents piracy peposterous. As Bob says it's not even an important number because what really matters is the lost sales and that's a whole load of extra guesswork right there. I've tried but I really can't share your interest in the numbers, nor your fixation on the perceived accuarcy of the iPhone numbers. But I can see it's what holds your focus, so... yeah sure, iPhone numbers. Neat. Glad we can put that nagging uncertainty behind us. |
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#225 by Matt Perkins Pirates are a lost cause. And not a market. If you're looking to sell your game, you pay attention to viable markets. Pirates aren't. This was the most interesting point of this discussion. And if pirates are market, treat them like a market, not like thieves. #224 by BobJustBob You need to worry about the number of lost sales due to piracy and the number of lost sales due to DRM, and no one has those numbers. I agree with this. But, again, no one has those numbers and never will. While I'm a very untypical pirate, often buying games I've pirated before and liked (around 20 games on Steam alone). My DSi? I haven't used it in months. So who cares if I have 20GB of DSi games downloaded somewhere? Parhelic Triangle is coming. Eventually.
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Matt, my issue is, what happens when the culture is such that the entire market mutates into a giant mass of pirates? Legitimate customers + some inevitable parasitic frosting of pirates is fine. All your customers (or a really significant percentage anyway) assuming that piracy is the way to go as the first option, not so fine. "Bioshock, sadly, is no Painkiller." - BobJustBob
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What happens if the slope gets slippy you mean? I mock but I know far more 'non-techy' people who are into torrenting movies etc. these days so I sort of agree with you. |
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And there's markets like China where piracy is absolutely pervasive. "Bioshock, sadly, is no Painkiller." - BobJustBob
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Well, that got me thinking about the "Freemium" model, it's said to be popular in most of Asia so in a way that's a model that limits the effect of piracy even in markets with 100% piracy on for-pay software. But not everything can be MMOs and social games... I mean, they can't right? On the other hand if you're serious about selling a game in China what alternatives can we think up? Can you imagine the Half-Lifes, Final Fantasies and Street Fighters in a free-with-premium-content model? |
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Half Life with only pistol in free version. Parhelic Triangle is coming. Eventually.
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Yeh, eck... Team Fortress 2 is easier to imagine though, and building on that I suppose TF2-esque elements could be added to Left 4 Dead without totally messing everything up? Whether it be visual-only additions or gameplay changing weapons is up for discussion. Trickier with a singleplayer game. Well there's that Cerberus Network thing from Mass Effect 2 that makes DLC available, that's one vector. Not exactly piracy prevention, though I suppose it helps a bit on that too, though it does limit the second-hand market. |
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Let's be serious here... All software is going to be donationware, or something like it, within our lifetimes if things continue as they are (i.e. - cheap, fast internet/storage). The only reason games aren't more like music in their piracy numbers is that running a game isn't as easy as playing a cd. It's that level of complexity that keeps companies having the upper hand at this point. But that won't last. Technology will continue to get easier and easier, faster and faster. Games, much like movies (though not quite the same again because of the theatre), are going to have to come around to a new way of doing business. Wait until downloads are so fast as to be considered instantaneous, then tell me how bad piracy is. Or when I can run any game can run on any system... Not to mention prices are going to have to either go way up or come way down. So all of that said, that's another good reason not to worry about pirates as a viable market. All they are, if you want to treat them so (and it's my opinion you should), are an unpaid, overly harsh review system. If the pirates like it, it gets spread around and the sales are greater (guesstimate, but it's proven to work with music). If they don't (Titan Quest anyone?), the game is going to have a much harder road of it. Maybe, if you start now, you can convince people that your company provides enough value by using their proprietary system (such as Steam) or you can work out an honor system (such as the indie game deal that is there) to train people differently. But, and I don't know why people can't get this, you're not going to be able to stay ahead of pirates by out teching them. It hasn't worked yet, why would it start working now? "the concept that a happy worker is a productive worker is hardly an entry from Matt's Big Book Of Things The Fairies Said." - Dum
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It could easily go the other direction whereby draconian and (properly designed) DRM schemes become embedded in the hardware and/or the value provided by the software/service is irrevocably tied into the platform provided by the supplier such that all piracy will be virtually eliminated (or at least relegated to the extremely sophisticated hacker community). The idea that piracy is impossible to stamp out through the use of technology is something of a fallacy. Most DRM schemes to date have been embarrassing flawed implementations which have been fairly even to crack and in such a way that a single crack can be applied to all users or in all cases. |
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G-Man Yeah, you'd think that would be possible and... Microsoft has been talking about that for almost a decade or so now right? And as for software as a service... It has potential, but it's also dependant on future technology (instant content delivery). "the concept that a happy worker is a productive worker is hardly an entry from Matt's Big Book Of Things The Fairies Said." - Dum
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Wait until downloads are so fast as to be considered instantaneous, then tell me how bad piracy is. Or when I can run any game can run on any system... |
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Interesting links. Well... yes. But I want to say no, my knee-jerk response is that pirates will always have the upper hand when it comes to software: It's not physical, games are inherently not a product you can bundle up as a product. I'd like to agree with Matt. But you're right. On the extreme end of 'gaming as a service' we currently have OnLive and I think you'll be hard pressed to find flaw in the efficiency of their technology as an anti-piracy tool. There really are domains in which piracy would not survive, though wether or not the markets move to such solutions remain to be seen of course. OnLive comes with its own set of inherent problems that aren't easy to fix, but I agree that piracy isn't could face insurmountable obstacles. That line of reasoning quickly gets a little theoretical though. For my taste I'm pretty happy with a Steam-like setup in the here and now, it provides enough upsides and its DRM is sufficiently 'behind-the-covers' that they've made an honest man out of me. Well that, and earning a monthly paycheck helps too. |
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Hardware DRM is fragile. MS can do it with the 360 because they control the whole system, whereas with PCs you only need one link in the chain to refuse to enforce it and the whole scheme falls apart. The main thing limiting 360 piracy isn't the hardware DRM, it's the threat of being banned from Live. Look at the iPhone. You have to jailbreak it to run pirate apps and anything Apple doesn't approve. Do the cellphone providers ban you from their network for jailbreaking your phone? No, because it's not in their interests. They get their money from people using their network, they don't give a damn whether you're paying Apple for apps. "I hope you one day decide to smarten the fuck up so I can stand to look at your posts." - gaggle
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Shadarr: The situation isn't analogous because the cell providers can't tell what kind of phone you're connecting to their networks with let alone whether or not you've jailbroken it. In fact, in this instance Apple are Microsoft and the cell provider is your ISP. |
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Also, I think you're understating how much of a deterrent hardware DRM is. I've no idea how hard it is to mod a 360 and I've no idea whether or not it can be done these days without sending your console off to someone that you'll probably never meet in person. Either way I would expect that it's out of reach for most people. The main reason that hardware DRM hasn't taken off on the PC (by which I also include Mac) platform is, I think, because it represents a fundamental shift in how people use and perceive that particular platform - open vs. closed. |
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Sorry for the hat-trick. Personally, I think the only way that developers/publishers can eliminate piracy on the PC without introducing draconian measure that only really affect paying customers is to stop developing and publishing for the platform. |
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That's not a solution. Also, I think you're underestimating how much info your service provider has about the phone, but I don't have any insightful link on that. Parhelic Triangle is coming. Eventually.
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Milan: There is the IMEI, which will give you the type of handset but it won't tell you whether or not the phone has been jailbroken - unless jailbreaking changes the IMEI in some fashion. I suppose that's possible. |
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Just quit worrying about pirates. Make a good game. Sell that good game. Ignore people who don't like to pay for said good game. If you can, deny them services. If not, again, don't worry about it. Piracy is yet another excuse for people pushing out shovelware and complaining when people don't buy it. "Look at all of those lost sales! If only those people were honest, I could have sold them more crap that I pretended wasn't crap!" "the concept that a happy worker is a productive worker is hardly an entry from Matt's Big Book Of Things The Fairies Said." - Dum
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So anyway, have you heard? Modern Warfare 2 has no dedicated servers. It turned out to be a catastrophe and no one ever plays it. |
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I heard that the guys who made MW2 aren't even with the company anymore! Obviously because of this issue... "the concept that a happy worker is a productive worker is hardly an entry from Matt's Big Book Of Things The Fairies Said." - Dum
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Anyone here play BO? I play often at night. |
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Topic: Modern Warfare 2 - No Dedicated Servers. Are other developers going to follow suit?
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