I’m all for free online console gaming, but servers and maintenance needs to get paid.
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?
How do you think it works for PC games?
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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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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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.
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.
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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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
even a 7 year old pc with a 1080ti outperforms a ps5. maybe time to switch.
I’ve researched it a fair bit and for the same price you will never get the same performance on a PC as on a ps5. The issue is that games are highly optimised for the one platform and not optimised for Pc.
On paper the raw specs may be better, but in reality the console almost always performs better.
there are plenty of sites with benchmarks showing a 1080ti outperforming a ps5 in gaming. the cost of a pc with this setup must be close to a ps5 now? maybe not i haven’t actually looked :). But yes dollar for dollar you’ll probs get best performance from a ps5 if buying current components. If budget is an issue ps5 is definitely a better option.
I had the dilemma of being a hardcore PC gamer for 15 years now but ever since I got my home theater setup I cannot justify using a PC in place of the PS5. The PS5 brings loads of convenience, easy of use and compatibility to my setup. HDR support is hit and miss, you can’t easily wake the PC from sleep with a controller, no HDMI CEC, and the list goes on. The tradeoff of a less performant console outweighs the cons of a PC for my use case.
I use my Steam Deck for home theater stuff, I don’t game from my couch much though - super prefer mouse and keyboard. Steam Deck with a gyro-mouse remote and a full keyboard on the back is pretty awesome for browsing YouTube or watching movies
Full keyboard on the back of a deck? I am kinda new to my deck and since getting my home theater stuff setup haven’t touched it much.
No, sorry, full keyboard on the back of the usb remote I use for my Steam Deck - which is docked
yeah console is definitely more convenient re pick up and go. But for quality gaming the PC is superior by far. I personally have both a 4080ti and a PS5 and i almost never turn on ps5 anymore, Media is watched via a Firestick Stick in TV…i should probably sell the PS5.
“Imagine paying for the internet twice.” -PC Gamers
Yeah, with the Steam Deck being as good and cheap as it is, consoles hardly even have the “cheaper” justification anymore. Now it’s just the artificial exclusives.
Both Microsoft and Sony have started releasing their stuff on PC (DRM-free in Sony’s case.) Even the exclusives are becoming less of an issue now.
Truth. I’ve been enjoying those.
Yes, World of Warcraft never existed.
It existed and was popular and then poof…it’s gone. That model is kind of dead unless you count battle passes, which are optional…unlike a wow subscription.
Technically speaking, it’s more of online gaming growing around it than it disappearing per-say. Although total subscriber count is always a speculation nowadays, there is prently of evidence of it still retaining 50-70% of peak subscriber count from 2010.
But online gaming became so accessible and widespread that WoW turned from a worldwide phenomenon to a somewhat niche game compared to mainstream MOBA and FPS games.
Laughs in PC gaming
Yeah, well this is partly why PCs don’t get all the games. Uniform hardware of the consoles and subscriptions to access online play makes them a lot more attractive. Less dev cost, more $. E: plus consoles cost less than a good gaming PC, so that means more players to buy more games.
The publishers/Developers never see that online subscription money. They have to host their own servers anyways.
Yeah, well this is partly why PCs don’t get all the AAA games
Ftfy.
PC gets a fuckton more games than consoles, very few games are actually console exclusive and especially exclusive to all consoles but not PC.
Makes sense, they need a carrot to lure people into their walled garden.
I don’t remember the last AAA I played. They’re just not good anymore
They’re just rehashed and reskinned SOSDD. Same franchises been around forever, it’s too much of a gamble to risk big on something new. Starfield, for example, is proof enough.
I think this is getting less true, and especially with Game Pass and now Sony putting a lot of first party titles on PC, I’m hard pressed to think of a AAA game that isn’t available, or won’t be if I don’t mind waiting a 6 months.
Both Xbox and PSN had to start offering extra bonuses to stop people from having that “Hey, wait…” moment. For a lot of people, the free games were the whole cake, not the cherry on top.
The lack of self awareness is amazing. Yep, fuck Microsoft! How dare they make a product that the gaming community chose to support instead of buying competing products! Shame on THEM for making the thing YOU voluntarily paid for!
We did this to ourselves. Literally.
The funny thing is that Microsoft also attempted to bring paid online to PC back in the GFWL days and failed.
I think most people accepted Xbox Live being paid due to the fact that online gaming on consoles wasn’t all that prominent compared to PC at the time.
Tbh, I’m not only blaming those corps but also the whalers for enabling it. It could have died but people funded it and now here we are. I mean paying subs for servers made sense, then they did game pass, microtransactions and all other stuff, and now it’s unplayable for me. Solo games on consoles, and multiple players on PC only if they’re worth it. Even with some trash games like CoD, I miss them when they weren’t subscription based. I bought CoD Vanguard out of nostalgic and it didn’t even take me a week to get turned off by game pass. I regretted it, I tried to have it refunded but I played a bit too longer past refund period.
It sucks so bad. I’m glad I kept my old consoles like n64, ps2, ps3, wii, wii u, GBA SP, DS etc. I still get hooked playing those old games.
I got switch, but only for zelda games, thankfully they haven’t mess with those type of games… So far…
Not only the PCMASTERRACE doesn’t pay subscription, we also got 20 great games for free over X-mas from Epic, Gog, Indigala and many more.
And if you really want a subscription, Amazon Prime gives you 5-10 games per month for free. Permanently.
Switched to PC gaming years ago and never looked back. Praise gaben.
As somebody with a PC, I don’t understand this. Does this mean that console games are only subscriptions now?
If you want to play anything online with a console, you have to pay for a yearly subscription.
Yep, that’s terrible.
It’s why I went back to PC gaming. As an aging man with children, I am no longer interested in having a bleeding edge gaming machine so I went to consoles for a while. It was too painful keeping a subscription on something I don’t often play so I didn’t bother with a PS5 and got a steamdeck instead.
I can’t go back to consoles lol. I do so many other things on my PC and it just also happens to be great for running games. And you can play damn near anything you want. I setup Dolphin the other day just so I could play through SSX Tricky. I regularly play through Star Fox 64 or Streets of Rage. My friends and I will still randomly do a run through of L4D2. And then we can still play whatever modern games we want. Can’t do all that on a console.
People pay it. There’s yer problem.
Paying to play exclusives online is fair game, servers need funding and all, but the fact that you need to pay for online games of third party devs who won’t see anything from the extra expense is bull.
Its funny that people are like “look at PC gaming its so free” while paying to host their own servers for individual games, partying up in Discord Nitro and buying battle passes for games they already bought for full price.
Hosting your own servers is a niche thing nowadays, and even where that is the case there’s usually official servers.
Hell I don’t know a recent major PC title that even supports hosting your own servers. Not even Quake Chumpions let’s you host your own servers.
Arma, counter strike, valheim, v rising, insurgency, satisfactory, battlebit. There’s all sorts of multiplayer PC games that support server hosting.
Yes, but it’s not so ubiquitous that having to host your own server is a legitimate concern for the average PC gamer, and the case of there still being off8cal servers which are a viable option for people who don’t want to host their own.
No, but what’s funny, is that you think these are good examples to make your point. A low amount of gamers actually hosts their own paid servers. Nitro is completely optional and, matter of fact, I don’t know a single person who uses it. Battle passes aren’t PC exclusive and you don’t have to purchase a single one to game normally.
So you’re unsurprisingly just making points out of thin air! There’s so many advantages consoles have compared to PC gaming, but you just wanted to shit on a freshly made bed, didn’t you?
It was mostly a tongue in cheek comment. But hey because there’s all these other not quite as successful paid services and no-one you know uses them, therefore they are less valuable, we shouldn’t be mad about those ones right?
Who pays for nitro? Or battle passes for that matter?
And the only server hosting Ive ever paid for was $8 for 3 months. Thats not a big deal compared to console online prices
Wtf does nitro even give you? Discord is bloated as fuck as it is