I don’t doubt this this is generally the case, but most of the games I enjoy playing with friends offer their own servers. Which got me thinking about it, and they tend to be indie games.
Not just that. People wonder why online games are so toxic, overly competitive and filled with cheaters. Matchmaking is the reason.
You don’t have to be nice because chances are you’re never going to play with those people again. All other matchmade players are just glorified bots, they’re completely dehumanized. That means shitheads can act like shitheads without any repercussions. Compare that to community servers where the admin will ban you if you’re an asshole. You even end up making friends because the same people will visit the same server.
And what’s your purpose for playing when everyone you’re playing with are glorified bots? Well your focus turns on you which in turn means your main metric of fun becomes your own skill. Since you can directly measure your own skill you look a things like wins/losses and kdr. You start to focus on things that correlate to competitive play and if the matchmaking is skill-based the game actually pushes you into sweats as the goal is to get you to a statistical 50% winrate. Now compare that to community servers where you’re not pushed into sweats, the overall skill of players stays largely the same and because you’ll be playing with people you know there no need to focus on being the best you can be, you can just mess around with others.
And of course cheating is a huge issue, but again it’s one of those things where having an admin to vet sus players make a huge difference. The admin isn’t infallible but cheating is less of an issue if you’re playing with people you know.
But people would much rather give it all up and deal with toxicity, sweats and cheating because the server admin could be a badmin. But maybe I’m just old and am remembering the good old days when you could make friends playing on the same server.
I posted this above, but I really want to emphasize the point. The is not new, it’s not rare, but we need to demand it and be angry when we don’t get it. Dedicated servers should be the norm.
I never make friends in games these days. I just drone around and quit when I get tired of it. I don’t even like multiplayer anymore. This is why.
Back in Counter-Strike/CS: Source days I made a ton of real friends. I knew what was going on in their lives. I congratulated them when they got married and had kids.
My clan server was always full of regulars just laughing and telling jokes and making changes to the server to see what worked for us. We had it perfect. Vote for knife fights, fun sounds like “gotchya bitch” for a knife kill. We built it together and we all stumbled into the server by accident and it just fit who were so we stayed. We had a rotation of maps that we all agreed on.
They’re still on my friends list. Last online 11 years ago, 7 years ago, 13 years ago, 12 years ago.
Damn, looking at that hurt a little bit.
It’s sad just how fast time goes. I have no idea where they are now or what they’re doing. That sucks.
The last time I talked to the one dude he had overdosed on heroin and was trying to get his life together. He might not even be alive anymore.
For nearly 5 years I hung out with those dudes every night.
I meet people now that I could see myself being friends with, but there’s no incentive to talk to them again. Random lobby, play game, the end.
I was hoping GO (now 2) would have an active user base in the servers. Nope. No gungame, no endless custom maps, no fun sounds, just base shit.
As sad as it was, I’m glad you made me think about this tonight.
To me personally it isn’t about meeting people to play with is more of getting long life friends from playing games, it’s pretty much just play a couple of games and be done without much reconnect after, being an introverted person also doesn’t help.
Sometimes even cheaters could be dealt with without an admin in those days. Servers would have fun game settings and odd maps that would break cheating gameplay.
My brother and I often played CS in the same room, on opposing teams because we didn’t like being cheated and didn’t want to be cheaters. We found an empty server with a sniping-only map. Made for great fun and someone joined in about 15 minutes later. They seemed really good, so we joined together to see if we could make it challenging. The new guy was just too good, so we decided to swap back and forth with the new guy to see if one of us could make a 1v2 miracle happen. That’s when we figured out he was impossibly aim hacking. Bummer, our fun game was toasted.
Then we realized the map settings had friendly fire on and a 5 second start delay. Aim hacks don’t target your own teammates. A perfect trap was available: we’d headshot TK the cheater at game start and then 1v1 each other. The cheater tried swapping to the other team only to find my brother using the same TK tactic. Our cheating friend found himself without a chance to grift. Needless to say, he didn’t hang around for long.
I miss the days of opening Steam and being able to search a million servers to find the specific niche type of game I wanted in CS. Warcraft, custom maps, zombie… So fun
There’s people actively working on bringing those to cs2, but you wouldn’t know by the massive shitshow that the server browser is with thousands of redirects currently, which is why the community also built a server browser if you search CS2Browser you’ll find it, you can go back to enjoying it ^^
AKA dedicated servers. They exist now for games now, but are… well not rare, but very specific. Factorio has a dedicated server. Ark has a dedicated server. Valheim, Space Engineers (windows only), Satisfactory, to name a few that I’ve dealt with myself. Demand them. Punish devs who don’t accommodate them with your wallets. No user dedicated servers, no purchase. Fuck you and the distributed info-scraping service you rode in on.
I have a list of games I will never buy because they have succumbed to the lure of hosted services with no user control, no dedicated server support. Those devs want control; they want to control you, how you play and how you interact with those you play with.
Gates had a point. Everyone was spending thousands on hardware but wouldn’t spend a little more for Basic. There were free options, they weren’t poor ( computer hardware was very expensive in the 70’s), but everyone was using Basic without buying it.
It’s like today where people will spend thousands for a gaming PC, then complain about Windows when they should be using Linux.
OK. I’ve been browsing through the Lemmy comments here, and I’m drucking funk, fuck you.
Once there was a utopia. YOU Killed it. Fuck you. Um not really a utopia, but whatever, fuck you.
The beginning of the end was Gears of War or Halo. It wasn’t that they were particularly good, but they were easy. Anybody could just hop into a game. WOOOO! Game time. Then in came the corporations.
I need to give Epic a little bit of credit here. They’ve always been fighting against the establishment. So none of you remember the days of Unreal Tournament. You fucking mewling little pukes. The name Cliffy B means nothing to you. Once upon a time a game company made a FPS arena shooter game called Unreal Tournament. It was the sequel to their story based FPS called Unreal. It was amazing for its time, but who cares. They defined game engines in ways that are rippling to this day.
Blah blah blah, stuff, then they released a game called Gears of War. Ok, you’re new here. Epic was used to releasing amazing games and then engaging with their players. I know the name CliffyB for a reason. Oh, but Microsoft is a Company. They are serious business. This is a store. Epic would release MapPacks for the UT games, and they would contain some serious work, and they were available for free. Nope said MS. This is a Store. You buy things here. Fight fight fight. Don’t worry. The good guys (investment brokers) will win. Right.
But MS had Halo. Nobody here remembers the early source of Halo. The game that came before. I never played it myself, I just remember a high-school acquaintance talking about it. Something about Marathon. Yeah. Marathon, that seems like it was important. Hah ha ha ha, nothing.
Marathon becomes halo. Fuck. That’s a lot of shit to contain to one sentence. Oh Well, you’re dumb as fuck. Fuck you and your fucking modern ignorance.
“I can play Halo with my friends on my Xbos with such ease. I don’t need to smart.”
Begin the world of Consoles. This is way betterer. No brain need. Just two thumbs and some money.
“Oh, there is money here.” said the people who have MBAs and not much else to speak of. (So do you know what MBA is for? It’s for people who are fucking useless, but went to school anyways lol)
At this point, we need to lambaste Epic, because they took their success at game development and tried to turn it into power. “Fortnight FTW makes us have a store makes us infinite money!”
Ok, so now here we are. All the shitstains are in place, (including you lol, cough cough).
So now the people who are making decisions about games don’t actually know the first fuck about anything. Not about storytelling, not about non-linear storytelling, not about emergent gameplay, not about basic gameplay. They don’t understand what compels instrumental play vs free play. What they understand is that things “NAMES” sell, and you will buy.
And you’re buying. Look at all the dollars you’re spending on…
The beginning of the end was Gears of War or Halo.
Hey now I have many fond memories of playing user made maps in Halo CE on PC. For me it was when Duke Nukem Forever flopped. Everyone preordered it and it started a long line of games being delivered buggy and incomplete.
All consoles are computers, in the sense that their chips are turing-complete
Nobody has really come up with a computer that can only run things you like and none of the things you don't.
They're just computers locked down by digital rights management, opaque operating systems, or other protection measures.
“PC” historically refers to devices that are “IBM PC” compatible, although nowadays that mostly means machines with x86 chips… except that powerful ARM desktops, laptops, and servers are becoming a thing too so that’s not accurate either. Plus there’s that whole “Mac vs PC” ad which also makes the term more confusing.
But even going by the recent historical usage, I’d say the Steam Deck qualifies since it has an x86 chip, whereas the PS3 has a weird custom PowerPC cpu (which, ironically, was made by IBM).
Getting an Xbox into developer mode, booting retro arch, really whatever you want then doing literally whatever you want with it has never been easier. The 360 was far more difficult and continues to be difficult to hack and mod in meaningful ways. The series consoles you can crack open in like 30 minutes with an article and a YouTube video.
Steamdeck is more console than x86 PC is a platform. I get what you mean, but PS4 and PS5 are too technically x86 PCs. Most modern games’ tightly coupled target are actually APIs they are using.
It can be one click in a compiler to compile the game to ARM PC, but it’s a different story when you port your game engine to console, where you have to implement the same features using different APIs. (E.g. Raytracing, storing game data, connecting to profile, implementing multiplayer etc.).
In the example of SteamDeck, the platform is Win32 or Linux ABI compatible OS.
I guess that depends on your definition, but really I’d lump it into handheld computer, I’ve owned several, such as the GPD Win series
You can install desktop Linux software on it with no need to perform any types of “jailbreak” so while steam os is a proprietary skin for Linux, its not really locked down the way traditional brick consoles are.
Console doesn’t have a hard definition, so anyone could come through and make a case for why it is.
Edit: you can see the people replying after me all have different definitions and standards for the word, it’s arbitrary really
I enjoy PC gaming as much as anyone but the simple fact is you can't do what a Series S does for $250 with a $250 PC. Plus with gamepass the math doesn't even need a napkin. It's simply the best deal in gaming right now, whether you're paying for online play or not.
you can't do what a Series S does for $250 with a $250 PC. Plus with gamepass the math doesn't even need a napkin. It's simply the best deal in gaming right now, whether you're paying for online play or not.
The consoles themselves are often sold at a loss because they know they will make that money back on games. Which is a better value proposition is arguable, especially once you factor in how much more you'll be paying per game relative to steam sales, the ability of PCs to do things other than gaming, and the inevitable obsolescence of consoles. I can still play games on a modern PC from when steam was new.
Microsoft also offers a game pass for PC, but I'd rather own my games.
Online gaming requires servers to run, and servers require money. Either the game is more expensive, the online is a subscription, or you have to run the server yourself. There are games that do each of these.
Edit: or microtransactions. Fuck microtransactions.
It’s too bad every dev runs their own (often piss-poor) servers instead of giving us dedicated server hosting software to run our own. Can’t go back to those days even if we wanted!
GameSpy was a bloated piece of garbage that is only fondly remembered because the other options were worse. It crashed constantly which ripped you out of your game and it performed this trick especially often right when the game launched.
Ping was always wrong, lobbies displayed as full when they weren’t, server filtering was non-existent, required login every time you disconnected…
I was thrilled to move off of it to basically anything else
Bloated? It literally did 1 thing, and that was give you a list of servers that you could filter, despite your attestation it had no filtering.
The other options were worse
All Seeing Eye was often considered better; though I remember it being exactly the same program just with a different name.
It crashed constantly, ripping you out of the game
All it did with the game was connect you to the server you selected using the game’s own commands. If GameSpy itself crashed after you’ve connected to the server, the game wouldn’t be affected.
Not exactly. Electricity aside, servers also require maintenance. That requires server admins. Those don't come cheap.
Edit: also network costs. With the requirement of handling high user numbers at stupidly low latency levels, they'll need a seperate internet connection from corp and the data service will also not be cheap.
Online gaming requires servers to run, and servers require money. Either the game is more expensive, the online is a subscription, or you have to run the server yourself. There are games that do each of these.
To be fair though peer to peer has some fairly big flaws like giving other people your IP and in some implementations the connection speed for everyone is set by the weakest link.
Which has its own drawbacks. Community servers are great for something like Battlefield/Battlebit where a single server covers 30-128 players. Less so for smaller groups and as games “die”. Time has no meaning, but I want to say it was mid 00s Unreal Tournament (so after 2k3/2k4 came out, but while UT was still alive) where it increasingly became nigh impossible to find servers not running instagib or “pro” mods. Which made sense since it was mostly the various clans making their servers public when they weren’t practicing.
But also? Look at a live game like Destiny or Warframe. For the purely PVE content, you can get away with users running listen servers. And just ask any Warframe player about how much we just LOVE host migration. But once you add any form of competitive aspect, that is no longer viable. And community hosted servers for eight players in a matchmaking queue are just not going to be a thing.
On the console side of things? That monthly fee covers (some) game servers but also the content servers to download all the patches and games.
On the PC side? Generally you are either dependent on a major publisher/studio that can afford to leave a few racks running in a closet while they make new games. And you are fucked when they realize that and shut down the game. Or you hope that it is subsidized by DLC and microtransactions.
And, if it is your primary platform, I think the multiplayer fees on consoles (other than switch) are handled pretty well these days. You aren’t paying for halo matchmaking. You are paying for an instant game collection every month and gamepass. Which is more or less exactly what sony did after clowning on MS for charging money.
Ok yes, if they’re charging you a subscription to run your own server, there’s profit in that. I don’t know of any companies that do that, but I would not be in favor of them doing that. Considering that is not a common practice in the industry, I think we can move on.
remember Call of Duty Black Ops: Cold War? The game that didn’t have dedi servers for Zombies for several months after launch, cost $70, and had a battle pass?
Because people disagree with me? That doesn’t change the fact that that’s how the industry works. Multiplayer is always paid for by something. If nobody bought Shark Cards, GTA Online wouldn’t be free.
Also, consoles are subsidized. Microsoft makes money on your subscription, not your Xbox.
How much money do you pay to login to Mozilla/Chrome/Edge to make this post?
Various PC games before and after Xbox do not charge anything just to be online. it's not an outright requirement. To add consoles usually restrict internet entirely, which is a completely different thing from hosting rounds.
Your second sentence is closer to what the actual reason is, and goes more in line with rockslayer's post.
edit: I will concede that browsers aren't locked anymore behind the payment models it seems. But I will still stand by that everyone is arguing as if individual games don't have to do this, but i'm fairly certain still that no P2P or just outright free online games exist on consoles, which makes the argument moot.
I’m not sure what you mean. PC games usually run on your PC, unless you’re streaming. It’s the multiplayer server software that run on servers. And the servers are paid for by the company that makes the game, usually. Or the publisher. The actual server hardware is rented from cloud providers, if that’s what you mean. Servers aren’t free, that’s my point. If you want multiplayer online functionality, someone has to pay for the server. And ultimately that cost gets passed on to you, the end user.
Xbox: you have to pay to even be able to play online at all, even if the third party servers are paid for and operated by other means. Third party games still require you to pay xbox. They (third party) own the servers and pay for the servers. Even free games require you to pay Xbox.
PC: you can play games online without paying your OS provider.
Most companies aren’t in the business of giving away free services, and it’s wild to expect them to be. You wouldn’t expect a landscaping business to do all your landscaping for free after you pay for the first time.
Alright, then play games where you can host your own server. There are plenty. That doesn’t work for all games though (particularly ranked games where the server software has to be verified or people could easily cheat), so you’ll be limited in what you can play.
I’m not super familiar with current console allowances, but are you suggesting that people can just “host their own server” and not pay the psn or Xbox live fees that are forced onto them? I just don’t think that’s true. You have to pay the fee to connect to any server, even your own.
Most companies aren’t in the business of giving away free services,
First of all, this is wrong. Free to play is an insanely profitable business model.
But also it’s wrong because non-F2P multiplayer games aren’t a free service. You paid $60/$70 for the game, and whatever the cost of the servers is would have been factored into the sale price. The per-unit cost of hosting an online game is nowhere near the cost of the game, especially back in the day when most “servers” were just a matchmaking service for P2P game clients.
Nowadays, the cost of running a multiplayer game is lower than ever. Cloud hosting gives a ton of flexibility to design an online service that is affordable to run, not to mention the money printing machine that are microtransactions (often sold in non-F2P games that also require a subscription to play).
Online subscriptions are not meant to cover server/hosting costs. They’re a monopoly tax from the platform holder, who can charge you money to connect to the internet simply because they can, and they know you have no other option.
Normalizing needless online servers is part of the issue here (only with AAA titles). These companies set up servers and say shit like “well it has to be paid for somehow!”
Games like Diablo 4 where you need internet to play single player. Diablo 2 resurrection removed all the LAN/Self hosting features of original D2.
Blizzard isn’t the only company doing this either.
Your comment is exactly the same type I’d see from toxic users on reddit arguing that people should pay because Microsoft hosts servers for multiplayer and that the commenter gladly pays for it whenever I’d go to look at reddit posts calling out bullshit on pay walled multiplayer on consoles
Oh I don’t pay. I don’t play on PlayStation or Xbox, and I honestly don’t think people should, but I understand why people do. It’s easy, and playing on PC is harder.
The more middlemen you put between the developer of the game and the end user the more money you’re going to pay. You might get a better/easier experience, but it will cost more. That’s just economics. So minimizing that is good for the end user if they’re cool with having a harder time setting things up and playing.
This is basically an argument for itemizing any and all things that can be articulated tbh. I don't pay a "kitchen" fee or an "electrical" fee or a "dishwasher" fee when I go to a restaurant. They calculate what things cost on the whole then price accordingly. That's how 95% of non-single-item transactions occur.
I'm not even necessarily against the concept of paying for the service on consoles (I kind of go back and forth on it personally) but this argument simply doesn't hold water.
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