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I'm all for free online console gaming, but servers and maintenance needs to get paid.
How do you think it works for PC games?
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Hits a buzzer
We'd set up unofficial servers by modding the game.
That's what happens for old games that lose dev hosted servers and matchmaking. If online playing was locked behind a subscription, it would be treated as if it was no longer available.
However, it would be a lot harder for me to get my friend group to try new games if it took any modding.
The annoying thing about that is Xbox games on PC are free to play online but I have to pay to play the exact same game online on my £450 Series X.
That's not true though, at least for over a year now.
F2P games do not require Xbox live to play anymore.
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Traditionally, we the players paid for the servers. If it was a server browser game like counter strike, the various clans would pay for their own servers. Companies that sold gaming servers would also host some as an advertisement of how good their servers were
Peer to peer?
P2P if it's free and expected to last.
If it's a separate server, I don't see that as infinitely sustainable for most companies.
Hahaha...
GTA5 is P2P with a central component.
So if R* kills the servers, your game is done for without modding.You need some entry point into a peer-to-peer network in order to make connections with peers. This often takes the form of a central server. In theory you can do have it be a bit more decentralized and have an initial list of peers to try to connect to who can then communicate about other peers, but you still need this initial entry point which is a potential point of failure long term, and I don’t think any games actually do this?
So… Technically speaking, in order to reliably connect peers most games are going to rely on a central server, which does technically cost some money to run, though it should be much cheaper to host than a proper game server which will actually be running the game and physics and stuff server side. With older games like quake you could easily connect to a server even without the master server (though you wouldn’t be able to use the server browser) and it was not terribly difficult to replace the master server with an alternative one.
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Even in P2P you'll still need someone to go tell you what other IP addresses are in the group that you're trying to join. And you have to know the IP address of that someone. You're not going to scan the entire Internet to figure out who all else is attempting to play the exact same game as you, that would take literal days every time (assuming you rule out anyone IPv6, if you include them that suddenly becomes millions of years).
Even in P2P you will need to hit a commonly known and trusted resource to tell you what other IP addresses you need to go talk to.
Yeah, P2P is not free because you need an entry point to the network… It is vastly cheaper to host a peer discovery server than a game server, so it’s not completely unreasonable to expect it to be covered by the cost of the game… But it is technically unsustainable in the long run as it is an ongoing cost. Per user, especially across a platforms like Xbox live and PSN I suspect it’s like… ridiculously cheap to run per year?
Such a lame argument. 1) so you're suggesting they don't make money by selling the game? 2) you don't think gamers wouldn't prefer to host servers themselves if they had the option?
Let the users run servers. Then, all you really need to run is a simple connection server that lets people search for game servers.
We specifically moved away from this in the late 90s because it sucked ass.
No it didn't, and we still have user servers for some games. Such games typically have a few official servers run by the developer, with tons of community servers with a wide variety of gameplay.
The reason we don't have them as much anymore is purely corporate greed. It's the same reason most games don't have mods, even though they stole their most popular gameplay modes from them.
No it didn’t
We did, indeed. This is the entire reason for centralized servers existing. It turns out that trying to find the right server for a death match in Doom on a third party site wasn't as fun as it sounds.
Sorry but what did "we" specifically move away from? Because user hosted servers are very much still a thing for a lot of games and none of the problems you mentioned are really inherent to the concept. Web technology and integration was just a lot... less mature in the nineties.
People who were alive at the time and flocked to centralized servers. Markets respond to demand.
Like I said I don't really share that experience. To my knowledge user hosted servers are still a thing. Your claim lacks supporting evidence. Or even an argument beyond "old games old" really, because user hosted servers don't equate having to use third-party websites anymore for most games.
The argument I was addressing was "It didn't suck ass" when it provably did because people went ape shit over Steam and Battle.net giving centralized ways to find games.
Yeah which is my entire point, because both of those examples were ways to find user hosted servers as well as ones hosted by the developers. So your argument doesn't make sense as a retort to what the initial OP was saying IMHO, which included:
Then, all you really need to run is a simple connection server that lets people search for game servers.
Those are what Steam and Battle.net are in this context, the connection server, which is different from the game server which was meant by "let the users run the servers".
Those are what Steam and Battle.net are in this context, the connection server, which is different from the game server which was meant by “let the users run the servers”.
This is what I meant by "moved away from"
As you also state, there are currently games with user-run servers. With the exception of Minecraft, they all do less business than games with a centralized server.
There's a reason for that, and it isn't some mythical cartel. If there was such a cartel, then there wouldn't be games that host their own servers.
Any sort of competitive game, as an easy example, will always be more popular if it has a server hosted by the game itself, to make cheating harder. Even GTA's online play was blasted by players for not having enough security. The rise of fast internet led to demand for more multiplayer, and especially competitive-multiplayer games.
Im old enough to remember reading the debates on "is multiplayer worth companies spending time on" in PC Gamer and other physical magazines, at the time. The original mentality was that multiplayer modes were a waste of time that detracted from game quality by diverting resources, because games were too hard to find anyway.
Idk why people are so desperate to find supervillains everywhere that they refuse to acknowledge how the current system evolved, historically.
Back in the 90s, no one could afford a good computer that could run a game and serve it's users.
It's 30 years later and today, most people have a phone that's hundreds of times more powerful. Not only that, many people now have dedicated Internet that is, again, hundreds of times faster than what most people who had computers in the 90s.
It's even easier than ever to stand up a server with docker containers, which was not even possible back then. Virtual systems was still a niche development and was at least a few years away from regular use.
You are right that back then, it sucked ass. But today, it's more possible than ever.
You are right that back then, it sucked ass. But today, it’s more possible than ever.
Right but this means that it was not, in fact, random acts of greed but rather offering services people want that made the switch happen, which is the topic of discussion here
No, that isn't what happened. User run servers, particularly dedicated servers hosted by proper hosting companies, got good before they were taken away. Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Counterstrike 1.6, then all the Source games, hell even early EA's Battlefield and Call of Duty had user servers. Communities formed on these servers along with innovative gameplay modes - I know this first hand running Counterstrike surf servers in the 00's.
They also had mods. Valve hired the developers of the Counterstrike mod to help make source, and EA hired the developers of the BF1942 mod Desert Combat to make Battlefield 2. Then Activision stole the zombie mod from COD modders and then locked away modding so they could sell maps (which modders had been making for free, with better quality). EA followed suit not long after.
It was around this time that user servers started to be prohibited in new games. It was part of the same greed, with servers it gives the publisher more control - you'll have to buy the new game to keep playing if they switch the servers off.
User servers being taken away was a business decision, it did not happen because the concept was flawed.
I love how you talk about all these games with private servers, but not user numbers, because it cuts to the heart of this discussion immediately.
The reason the gaming community grew exponentially is that gaming was made significantly easier, especially PC gaming.
I understand you don't like the change and pine for the old days, but we aren't discussing things we like, were discussing events that happened
But finding servers, official or community, was never hard in any of the games I listed. Like I say, the game runs a simple server that catalogues them - when you run a server it tells the game server its details, then a player polls the game server for IPs and the player's client then fetches the details and pings from each server. User servers are exactly the same as official servers in this regard.
The reason gaming grew is simply because more and more people had internet and computers/games consoles, and because young gamers got older such that it became more acceptable for adults to play.
Everything you've said hasn't been true for more than 20 years.
But finding servers, official or community, was never hard in any of the games I listed. Like I say, the game runs a simple server that catalogues them - when you run a server it tells the game server its details, then a player polls the game server for IPs and the player's client then fetches the details and pings from each server. User servers are exactly the same as official servers in this regard.
The reason gaming grew is simply because more and more people had internet and computers/games consoles, and because young gamers got older such that it became more acceptable for adults to play.
Everything you've said hasn't been true for more than 20 years.
But finding servers, official or community, was never hard in any of the games I listed.
You're not the mainstream person who wants to play FIFA, Madden, and COD and just pick the fucking thing up and hit "play game"
Everything you’ve said hasn’t been true for more than 20 years.
We are literally talking about the past.
CoD 4 didn't come out in the late 90's. We didn't move away from dedicated servers, the dev's disabled that option going forward and not because it sucked ass, but because people who did not pay for the game could connect to private servers.
CoD didn't but Team Fortress Classic did, and helped popularize the dedicated server trend
Devs disabled it in modern games for a variety of reasons, and fighting piracy was indeed one of them.
If your problem is that you want to be able to pirate games, though, you should know that's not a winning argument and will never happen. No company is going to voluntarily support you pirating their software
See if a very popular game came in the late 00's had user ran servers we didn't actually move away from them in the late 90s even if there were games in the late 90s that did not have user servers.
With no user ran servers it's not only pirates who cannot play multiplayer games but even paying customers when the developer decides it's not worth it anymore.
See if a very popular game came in the late 00’s had user ran servers we didn’t actually move away from them in the late 90s even if there were games in the late 90s that did not have user servers.
We did if it isn't common. "Moving away" very specifically is a term used when something isn't abandoned outright but is much less common than before
With no user ran servers it’s not only pirates who cannot play multiplayer games but even paying customers when the developer decides it’s not worth it anymore.
Yeah I'm not wholly in support of this, I'm just explaining how we got here. That seems to upset people quite a bit for reasons I cannot understand.
Then let us run private servers. It use to be that I could buy a copy of Unreal Tournament or Quake and the server hosting software would either come with the game or could be downloaded elsewhere for free. I could then run the server on my own computer and internet connect or buy server space from a third party.
Unless you pay them for internet bandwidth, there's no servers needed for internet access on the side of Microsoft
Just recently Microsoft lifted the need to have a subscription to play free games though, it was always just a block.
Big mistake. Seriously, Lemmy has this weird thing about not paying for anything. From music, movies to games. From being a massive open source community you'd expect them to understand things are not free.
Imagine buying a game, then buying a subscription to play it online, only for the company to drop support for the game and because they never released the server software, you just own dead software now. I'm fine with buying software to support the devs, but it sucks that you can't play disconnected games because some suit wanted to maximize profits.
Yep. I’ve noticed a lot of people on this site find the tiniest reason to try and justify their pirating and why they’re totally not stealing (or, if they are, it’s always morally justified, somehow). Not saying there aren’t times where piracy is justified (DRM, anyone?), but it’s certainly a lot less than this site would have you believe.
I know you're getting down voted into oblivion (or at least as much as one can on Lemmy), but you're 100% correct. For a social media platform dominated by nerds who worship Linux, there are a lot of people here who seemingly don't understand how networking and servers actually work.
I feel bad for the people running the instances
For someone so confident, you don't seem to know how business works. They aren't charging a subscription to pay for servers exactly, that's just an excuse. They charge because it's the most profitable option. They take a cut of game sales, which more than makes up for server costs.
Game companies have to pay to host the servers for their games and they usually don't charge a subscription. If they did people would avoid their games. Console developers can because (they think) you don't have a choice. If the subscription cost them customers, they'd stop doing it.
Steam has to host the same servers they do. Steam doesn't have a subscription though. They just take a portion of sales, like console manufacturers also do, to pay for it. If that's possible, clearly a subscription isn't required.