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If your concern is that you don't get to store it yourself, which is absolutely ridiculous, that's fixed simply if the option exists to download it yourself.

Indeed, I imagine for Australians like myself with poorer internet speeds, the replay will initially be stored on the computer.

What a ridiculous thought. Not only is it easily disprovable on a personal level, since I have more information stored "in the cloud" than I do on my own PC, but it's amazing that you'd even say something like this. I'm baffled you'd even try to make that case.

Humans are an absolutely STUNNING example of an animal that is very much NOT under the direct control of "basic behaviour".

Oh, and "Hunter Gatherers" died out a long time ago. We're Farmers and Cultivators now. We MAKE food when we want it, how we want it, where we want it... even third-world countries use farms.

Maybe you can make a case for Amazonian tribes and very isolated island cultures still being "hunter gatherers", but the rest of the human race moved past that several millennia ago.

Humans are a stunning example of arrogance that feigns control over such "basic behavior". Have a clear look at the world around you and you'll realize that pretty much everything is driven by instinctual primitive desires. The fact that "higher intelligence" is used to fulfill these doesn't change anything.
But such philosophical questions are extremely offtopic here.

Then why did you bring it up in the first place?

I didn't bring up this kind of discussion, I just tried to explain why many people want to have their replays on their own HDD. To me it seems pretty obvious it is due to basic human nature. I didn't expect anyone to disagree with such a magnitude as you did.

Not possible for replays to be initially stored on clients - clients don't have access to the entire game state, only the server does. Therefore only the server can record replays.

Looks like you are the one who assumed wrong as lot of aesthetics are not going to be saved and IF there are incompatibilities, replay will just play with some visual glitches based on what neutrino said

Anyways,

Well my worry isn't with just storing large data... it's storing and accessing large data cause of shitty internet infrastructure in USA. And my worries are more or less aimed at ridiculous cases such as replays being entire game installation itself, which some people thought they would be :lol:

Part of the idea is that we'll be able to run our own servers, so assuming the replay file sits only on the game server, if you're running your own, you'll have access to the replay.

Though I imagine you'll want to control where the replays are stored so users can decide for themselves on their own servers and Uber can point their servers to a central store - that way Uber can have central store for users to browse replays and maybe play a famous game from a certain point on a randomly selected server which downloads the replay, so you don't have to run it on the original server that hosted the game.

Speaking purely of single player without an internet connection here, my understanding is that the 'server' will be running in the background as you play the game, which should allow for each singleplayer replay (at least) to be initially stored on the computer.

If you are running your own server then you can do what you want with the replay. If you don't have the server connected to Ubernet it's not going to get uploaded.

I would expect most servers will plug into our infrastructure / matchmaking etc. and this will just auto happen. The only time you should be running servers that are not connected to UberNet is if you literally don't have an internet connection available.

Or if you're on a LAN party, I'd guess. Or a high level competetive match. I mean; even Blizzard couldn't keep their online stuff running on some of their Starcraft II competitions. Running those on a LAN would probably be a good idea.

Ubernet won't have to deal with the ludicrous numbers that Battlenet has to...
at least, not for right now.

Someday... maybe... *dreams*

Given what I've been hearing about Company of Heroes 2, I think Planetary Annihilation will easily be the second most popular RTS in the world. Granted RTS genre isn't all that populated compared to MOBA/ARTS/FPS but still, if Uber has some plans for always online services with high stream rate, they should prepare themselves for incoming success.

But Planetary Annihilation will support offline mode vs bots right? If so I'm not too worried because I assume majority of buyers will probably be focused on that mode.