9 ms·

Game companies invented this “problem” so they could extract more money from gamers. Go back 10-12 years ago and most PC games had server software and the commu

by cwhiz 6y ago

Game companies invented this “problem” so they could extract more money from gamers. Go back 10-12 years ago and most PC games had server software and the community hosted most of the matches. The community handled the cheaters. Game companies took this away so that they could sell season passes, hats, shirts, and other cosmetic garbage. This is a problem your industry created. So please spare us all the woe is me charade.

mjburgess 6y ago
Possibly. Or perhaps that delivering on AAA games now requires blockbuster-level financing whilst not having blockbuster-sized audiences. The cost of making games has ballooned, which provides a context for the monetizing behaviour of publishers.
dijit 6y ago
I did warn you that you wouldn't like it. But go back 10-12 years; lets see what's available; 2008: Battlefield: bad company. - no self-host option GTA IV. - no self host option Fallout 3 - no self host option. Left for Dead 2 - downloadable server option, no official servers -- I think your interpretation is very uncharitable. The cost of making games has increased in a near exponential rate, regardless of if there's servers or not. On a more personal note: I don't understand why everyone wants to eat the fancy cake but hate the baker for telling you what it took to make it.
- iforgotpassword 6y ago
  I agree it never made much sense for games like wow, but I preferred games where you could host yourself and tweak a thousand knobs and add mods and whatnot and integrate it into a website thanks to rcon. I'm not really gaming anymore for more than a decade but I'd be surprised if there aren't still games around that ship with server software. Just not the triple As anymore.
- hoorayimhelping 6y ago
  >On a more personal note: I don't understand why everyone wants to eat the fancy cake but hate the baker for telling you what it took to make it. Because nobody asked for the fucking fancy cake! Why do people in the industry not get this simple fact? We were all very happy with the cookies we had before. Which is why we kept coming back to the bakery and telling all our friends how awesome the bakery is. Then the baker says, "hey, those cookies suck, what you really want is the fancy cake! No more cookies, only cake" and despite the customers screaming at the baker, pleading with him to bring back the cookies, he just won't and is surprised that customers are frustrated that they can't get what they want. We eat the fancy cake now because it's the only thing available. But we want the cookies we had before.
  - ncallaway 6y ago
    No, that's where you're wrong. A lot of people say they want the cookies. But the people will actually pay more for the cake. It's not that game developers aren't listening. They are listening very closely, and being extremely responsive to where money is being spent.
    - a1369209993 6y ago
      That's a well-known fallacy called revealed preferences. If someone says they want cookies, but spends money on cake, that means they want cookies.
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      - fragmede 6y ago
        This is the first time I've heard of it being a fallacy, but if someone says they want cookies, but spends money on cake, if I have a factory that can make either cookies or cake, and it operates under capitalism, it seems self-evident that I should make cake.
        6y ago
- nhm33 6y ago
  Steam was direct attack on game ownership.. You don't seem to get the game industry has been stealing PC games since 1997 with ultima online. Buying any client-server game or piece of software means you're getting robbed. Almost every game in the 90's had the ability to host locally, Doom, duke 3d, descent, quake 1+2+3, we used IPX emlulators like kali/kahn to play games like warcraft 2 over the internet. So you need to go back further buddy, from 1992 to roughly 2004, all games had dedicated server functionality until the game industry realized the public was stupid with the rise of utlima online, everquest, guild wars 1 and wow, which lead to steam. Steam is basically corporately hacked software, why would you need to login to someones remote PC at valves HQ to play a game? Up until 2004, every PC game had dedicated server functionality built into it. Just go look at the FPS released from 1995 to 2004 roughly. This stopped because the public bought into the MMO scam o the late 90's, mmo's were just rebranded PC RPG's to get the public to take up corporately hacked software. So no. GTA 4, fallout 3, battlefield BC and LEft 4 dead 2 are POST STEAM and POST MMO games, after they'd figured out you were too stupid to realize you were being robbed and were oblivious. So go back to quake 3 engine based games and earlier PC games you'll notice they were complete DRM free pieces of software. You don't get the STEAM is unnatural corproate malware that was forced into half-life 2 because of what they learned about the public from 1997's ultima online. UO was what spawned the great game theft of the last 20 years. To have games that can be shut down remotely and who's servers can go offline means youre getting fraudulently coded software.
  - a1369209993 6y ago
    Note that this isn't a conspiracy, but just each game company individually following its incentives toward extractive business models (and occasionally openly bragging about it and encouraging others to do the same). (Not saying you claimed that, but it's easy to read your post as conspiracy theory rather than accusations of 'mere' ethical bankruptcy.)
    - nhm33 6y ago
      >Note that this isn't a conspiracy It is, since Silicon valley and big media companies have always hated the PC's power to copy files. Anyone who has any idea of the history of silicon valley and isn't a retard, knows this has been in the cards for a long time going back to pre internet days when businesses were trying to screw other businesses. https://tifca.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/ClienttoCloud_Vision_V2.pdf https://tifca.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/ClienttoCloud_V... So they openly state they want to undermine local executable files and make every piece of software client server.
- freeflight 6y ago
  I feel like that list is a bit misleading and your comment ignores how the PC gaming community always wanted to run their own dedicated servers and games not allowing to do so often got a lot of flack. Call of Duty games come to mind and afaik Battlefield games used to have that option too until EA changed it to “You can rent servers from us!”. Which doesn’t even go into other issues this had solved but then came back, like toxic communities resulting from the random nature of match making. In that context I still have very fond memories of the late 90s and early 2000s PC multiplayer scene: Whole communities grew around servers, who would usually self-moderate not just for cheating but also toxic behavior. 2 decades later this has been replaced with catch all bad word lists that warn and ban people for simply writing a wrong combination of letters, regardless of context, and media blasting gaming companies for their out of control toxic communities.
  - dijit 6y ago
    > I feel like that list is a bit misleading and your comment ignores how the PC gaming community always wanted to run their own dedicated servers and games not allowing to do so often got a lot of flack. I was responding to the parents assertion that server software shipped with games 10-12 years ago, I did a google search for "games shipped in 2008" (to be charitable and check the oldest games) and I took the first online capable games that were available on PC with no cherry picking. Whether they got flack or not is irrelevant, the vocal minority, especially in PC gaming is very dangerous. To give an example we got a lot of feedback on our game that we needed a dedicated PVP mode, so we spent a year (and many multiple millions of euros) making it, and never achieved anything over 100 concurrent players. It was well marketed, and you could say it's "not good", but our evidence shows that nobody even tried it enough to determine it's not good. > Call of Duty games come to mind and afaik Battlefield games used to have that option too until EA changed it to “You can rent servers from us!”. renting servers from us(tm) is decidedly _not_ a server package that you host yourself, although it's paid for, I'm not sure if it covers the costs of running. I think it probably doesn't given the fact that this isn't an option anymore. There's a small irony here because if it's expensive, less people will buy it, which means maintaining the software that lets you do it becomes more expensive because it's not amortised among lots of people and so it gets even more expensive. (in a death spiral kind of way). Regardless; your comment talks exclusively about PC titles, but the majority of AAA titles that have server backends are cross platform. I think this is part of the problem when talking about games in general. The PC guys like games tailored to their platform and really despise (or generally dislike) console players and how they interact with games. I can't say it's unfair but if we were to sell only on PC, releasing a server package and making directory services, we would not have covered the cost of making the game by even a third. And I know that because we have pretty decent consumer market knowledge, it's a requisite.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  The time range is incorrect, but there was an era when the community hosted all or most of the servers. CS and CS:S are still this way. Fallout 3 is single player, so that’s an uncharitable choice.
- cwhiz 6y ago
  That is a supremely cherry picked list. GTA4 was a single player game with some thrown in "community" features. Fallout 3 was a single player game. You see... we didn't ask for you all to ban dedicated servers and take on the cost of official servers. You did that to us against our objections so that you could extract more money from us. PC gamers would be perfectly happy playing Modern Warfare on dedicated servers. We don't have that option. We are forced to play on official servers and then you whine about the cost of doing that. That was YOUR decision! You can't force players to play on official servers and also whine about the cost of official servers. You have created this problem! If it is too expensive to host official servers then let the community host them like we used to. >I did warn you that you wouldn't like it. We don't like being patronized. It is peak irony for game developers to lament the cost of official servers when official servers were something they forced on the community so that they could sell more hats.
  - aaomidi 6y ago
    I absolutely love how you're nailing this on the head. This is a completely manufactured problem. The best part is they could've kept their money making cosmetics but still let people self host servers.
  - dijit 6y ago
    I know you hate me, frankly I don't really care at this point. I've been in the industry 6 years and I'm so utterly and completely burned out by being "a patronising and evil" presence when I make the mistake of trying to actually confer real information to people. Everyone complains that the game companies are ivory towers and that their voices aren't heard: we hear you. But you don't want what you think you want and I'm not trying to patronise you by saying that. Additionally, I didn't cherry pick the list I intentionally grabbed the first ones that had networking, almost no cross platform games from 2008 were heavily networked. (Fallout 3 was an oversight, I meant far-cry 3). As I've stated repeatedly in this thread: Self-hosting servers only works for session based games. Even then, those sessions can leave players with a very mixed experience (weird rules, mods, someone might have made themselves "god", it opens up the client to be exploited by the server). Weird latency issues and connection drops not withstanding. If it's dedicated servers that you rent from us as a company then: it can be expensive for you, if it's too expensive, less people do it, less people do it, the more expensive it becomes to maintain the provisioning/admin tools and it's amortised across much less players so the price goes _even higher_. Then there's the server list fiasco. Where do you connect? * XxXxBubBas-BayxxXx--freelootlvl25OnlY!?1 * 174.255.121.2:5543 * bit.ly/free-nudes We listened to the community before, many times, sometimes people are so outspoken that we really believe we'll have competitive edge if we're the ones to "listen" and every fucking time we get burned by it. So I don't blame anyone in the industry for listening to their CMK department more than the hardcore PC Master Race. The Hardcore PC Master Race do not represent all gamers.
- http-teapot 6y ago
  Half-Life, Unreal Tournament and every mods built on top of them had this. That’s why Minecraft is so popular: custom servers, custom communities, custom experience, decades of playability for the price of a single copy.
DavidVoid 6y ago
The most popular game modes in Overwatch and CSGO are their ranked modes. They'd lose much of their playerbases if they didn't have those modes, and you can't really have them without the inclusion of developer-controlled anti-cheat in the client. And console games did not have server software 10-12 years ago so I think it's a bit unfair to claim that the move away from player-hosted servers was only done for monetary reasons.
- kroltan 6y ago
  There were ranked modes way before centralized multiplayer services, Battlefield 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter Strike, all had ladders (as they were called at the time since it was a literal list of people sorted by stats - they could easily just present the Elo score or whatever instead), both official or community-hosted.
  - ashtonkem 6y ago
    Battlefield 2142 actually had the concept of ranked and unranked servers. Unranked servers allowed for more modification, but didn’t affect your global rank for obvious reasons, leading to sillier game play. It was a fairly effective system, IMHO.
    - http-teapot 6y ago
      America’s Army also had this back in early 2000s
caymanjim 6y ago
I don't disagree with the idea that game companies want a captive audience, and I loathe the microtransaction economy and psychological tricks that fill my games with distractions, but I'm not sure if that's directly related to the lack of community servers. I only play Valve games (CSGO, TF2, L4D2), so I don't know how true it is of other companies, but you can still run your own game servers. If anything, it's easier to do so now than it used to be. Few people do it, because the Valve-run servers are easier to interact with and they're good enough for what most people want. The community tried to handle cheaters before, but they weren't good at it. It relied on admins being present, and put the onus on them to identify and kick/ban cheaters. In a large-enough active gaming community, admins were around often enough, but the best they could do was guess at who was cheating. Sure, the egregious cases were obvious, but there was rarely definitive proof, and people who were subtle could cheat without getting caught. Good players who didn't cheat were also the victim of constant accusations. I was banned from plenty of servers just for having a good night and winning. I'm glad that anti-cheat software has gotten good enough that it works for casual play. It's rare that I see anything in CSGO these days that looks like cheating. Sure, it's out there, but it's not very common. On busy weekends as a server admin, I used to kick and ban dozens of people. On the public servers now, I might run into a couple suspicious people all weekend. I don't see companies running servers as directly related. At least in these Valve games, I still get the marketing spam through the Steam client and in the games themselves, and I can still use all the cosmetic junk whether I'm playing on an official server or a private server. It's better now.
- nhm33 6y ago
  >I don't disagree with the idea that game companies want a captive audience, and I loathe the microtransaction economy and psychological tricks that fill my games with distractions, but I'm not sure if that's directly related to the lack of community servers. It is, because they want to remove the idea of local application and executable files, that is what UWP is about, they even state they want all software to not be controlled by the end user in industry briefings. https://tifca.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/ClienttoCloud_Vision_V2.pdf https://tifca.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/ClienttoCloud_V... You don't seem to get the game industry has already won, steam, "MMO's" (aka regular PC RPG's rebranded and programmed client server). Was a direct attack on game ownership. There has been a war on software ownership for 20+ years now.

by cwhiz 6y ago

mjburgess 6y ago

Possibly. Or perhaps that delivering on AAA games now requires blockbuster-level financing whilst not having blockbuster-sized audiences. The cost of making games has ballooned, which provides a context for the monetizing behaviour of publishers.

dijit 6y ago

I did warn you that you wouldn't like it. But go back 10-12 years; lets see what's available; 2008: Battlefield: bad company. - no self-host option GTA IV. - no self host option Fallout 3 - no self host option. Left for Dead 2 - downloadable server option, no official servers -- I think your interpretation is very uncharitable. The cost of making games has increased in a near exponential rate, regardless of if there's servers or not. On a more personal note: I don't understand why everyone wants to eat the fancy cake but hate the baker for telling you what it took to make it.

iforgotpassword 6y ago
I agree it never made much sense for games like wow, but I preferred games where you could host yourself and tweak a thousand knobs and add mods and whatnot and integrate it into a website thanks to rcon. I'm not really gaming anymore for more than a decade but I'd be surprised if there aren't still games around that ship with server software. Just not the triple As anymore.
hoorayimhelping 6y ago
>On a more personal note: I don't understand why everyone wants to eat the fancy cake but hate the baker for telling you what it took to make it. Because nobody asked for the fucking fancy cake! Why do people in the industry not get this simple fact? We were all very happy with the cookies we had before. Which is why we kept coming back to the bakery and telling all our friends how awesome the bakery is. Then the baker says, "hey, those cookies suck, what you really want is the fancy cake! No more cookies, only cake" and despite the customers screaming at the baker, pleading with him to bring back the cookies, he just won't and is surprised that customers are frustrated that they can't get what they want. We eat the fancy cake now because it's the only thing available. But we want the cookies we had before.
- ncallaway 6y ago
  No, that's where you're wrong. A lot of people say they want the cookies. But the people will actually pay more for the cake. It's not that game developers aren't listening. They are listening very closely, and being extremely responsive to where money is being spent.
  - a1369209993 6y ago
    That's a well-known fallacy called revealed preferences. If someone says they want cookies, but spends money on cake, that means they want cookies.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - fragmede 6y ago
      This is the first time I've heard of it being a fallacy, but if someone says they want cookies, but spends money on cake, if I have a factory that can make either cookies or cake, and it operates under capitalism, it seems self-evident that I should make cake.
      - 6y ago
nhm33 6y ago
Steam was direct attack on game ownership.. You don't seem to get the game industry has been stealing PC games since 1997 with ultima online. Buying any client-server game or piece of software means you're getting robbed. Almost every game in the 90's had the ability to host locally, Doom, duke 3d, descent, quake 1+2+3, we used IPX emlulators like kali/kahn to play games like warcraft 2 over the internet. So you need to go back further buddy, from 1992 to roughly 2004, all games had dedicated server functionality until the game industry realized the public was stupid with the rise of utlima online, everquest, guild wars 1 and wow, which lead to steam. Steam is basically corporately hacked software, why would you need to login to someones remote PC at valves HQ to play a game? Up until 2004, every PC game had dedicated server functionality built into it. Just go look at the FPS released from 1995 to 2004 roughly. This stopped because the public bought into the MMO scam o the late 90's, mmo's were just rebranded PC RPG's to get the public to take up corporately hacked software. So no. GTA 4, fallout 3, battlefield BC and LEft 4 dead 2 are POST STEAM and POST MMO games, after they'd figured out you were too stupid to realize you were being robbed and were oblivious. So go back to quake 3 engine based games and earlier PC games you'll notice they were complete DRM free pieces of software. You don't get the STEAM is unnatural corproate malware that was forced into half-life 2 because of what they learned about the public from 1997's ultima online. UO was what spawned the great game theft of the last 20 years. To have games that can be shut down remotely and who's servers can go offline means youre getting fraudulently coded software.
- a1369209993 6y ago
  Note that this isn't a conspiracy, but just each game company individually following its incentives toward extractive business models (and occasionally openly bragging about it and encouraging others to do the same). (Not saying you claimed that, but it's easy to read your post as conspiracy theory rather than accusations of 'mere' ethical bankruptcy.)
  - nhm33 6y ago
    >Note that this isn't a conspiracy It is, since Silicon valley and big media companies have always hated the PC's power to copy files. Anyone who has any idea of the history of silicon valley and isn't a retard, knows this has been in the cards for a long time going back to pre internet days when businesses were trying to screw other businesses. https://tifca.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/ClienttoCloud_Vision_V2.pdf https://tifca.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/ClienttoCloud_V... So they openly state they want to undermine local executable files and make every piece of software client server.
freeflight 6y ago
I feel like that list is a bit misleading and your comment ignores how the PC gaming community always wanted to run their own dedicated servers and games not allowing to do so often got a lot of flack. Call of Duty games come to mind and afaik Battlefield games used to have that option too until EA changed it to “You can rent servers from us!”. Which doesn’t even go into other issues this had solved but then came back, like toxic communities resulting from the random nature of match making. In that context I still have very fond memories of the late 90s and early 2000s PC multiplayer scene: Whole communities grew around servers, who would usually self-moderate not just for cheating but also toxic behavior. 2 decades later this has been replaced with catch all bad word lists that warn and ban people for simply writing a wrong combination of letters, regardless of context, and media blasting gaming companies for their out of control toxic communities.
- dijit 6y ago
  > I feel like that list is a bit misleading and your comment ignores how the PC gaming community always wanted to run their own dedicated servers and games not allowing to do so often got a lot of flack. I was responding to the parents assertion that server software shipped with games 10-12 years ago, I did a google search for "games shipped in 2008" (to be charitable and check the oldest games) and I took the first online capable games that were available on PC with no cherry picking. Whether they got flack or not is irrelevant, the vocal minority, especially in PC gaming is very dangerous. To give an example we got a lot of feedback on our game that we needed a dedicated PVP mode, so we spent a year (and many multiple millions of euros) making it, and never achieved anything over 100 concurrent players. It was well marketed, and you could say it's "not good", but our evidence shows that nobody even tried it enough to determine it's not good. > Call of Duty games come to mind and afaik Battlefield games used to have that option too until EA changed it to “You can rent servers from us!”. renting servers from us(tm) is decidedly _not_ a server package that you host yourself, although it's paid for, I'm not sure if it covers the costs of running. I think it probably doesn't given the fact that this isn't an option anymore. There's a small irony here because if it's expensive, less people will buy it, which means maintaining the software that lets you do it becomes more expensive because it's not amortised among lots of people and so it gets even more expensive. (in a death spiral kind of way). Regardless; your comment talks exclusively about PC titles, but the majority of AAA titles that have server backends are cross platform. I think this is part of the problem when talking about games in general. The PC guys like games tailored to their platform and really despise (or generally dislike) console players and how they interact with games. I can't say it's unfair but if we were to sell only on PC, releasing a server package and making directory services, we would not have covered the cost of making the game by even a third. And I know that because we have pretty decent consumer market knowledge, it's a requisite.
ashtonkem 6y ago
The time range is incorrect, but there was an era when the community hosted all or most of the servers. CS and CS:S are still this way. Fallout 3 is single player, so that’s an uncharitable choice.
cwhiz 6y ago
That is a supremely cherry picked list. GTA4 was a single player game with some thrown in "community" features. Fallout 3 was a single player game. You see... we didn't ask for you all to ban dedicated servers and take on the cost of official servers. You did that to us against our objections so that you could extract more money from us. PC gamers would be perfectly happy playing Modern Warfare on dedicated servers. We don't have that option. We are forced to play on official servers and then you whine about the cost of doing that. That was YOUR decision! You can't force players to play on official servers and also whine about the cost of official servers. You have created this problem! If it is too expensive to host official servers then let the community host them like we used to. >I did warn you that you wouldn't like it. We don't like being patronized. It is peak irony for game developers to lament the cost of official servers when official servers were something they forced on the community so that they could sell more hats.
- aaomidi 6y ago
  I absolutely love how you're nailing this on the head. This is a completely manufactured problem. The best part is they could've kept their money making cosmetics but still let people self host servers.
- dijit 6y ago
  I know you hate me, frankly I don't really care at this point. I've been in the industry 6 years and I'm so utterly and completely burned out by being "a patronising and evil" presence when I make the mistake of trying to actually confer real information to people. Everyone complains that the game companies are ivory towers and that their voices aren't heard: we hear you. But you don't want what you think you want and I'm not trying to patronise you by saying that. Additionally, I didn't cherry pick the list I intentionally grabbed the first ones that had networking, almost no cross platform games from 2008 were heavily networked. (Fallout 3 was an oversight, I meant far-cry 3). As I've stated repeatedly in this thread: Self-hosting servers only works for session based games. Even then, those sessions can leave players with a very mixed experience (weird rules, mods, someone might have made themselves "god", it opens up the client to be exploited by the server). Weird latency issues and connection drops not withstanding. If it's dedicated servers that you rent from us as a company then: it can be expensive for you, if it's too expensive, less people do it, less people do it, the more expensive it becomes to maintain the provisioning/admin tools and it's amortised across much less players so the price goes _even higher_. Then there's the server list fiasco. Where do you connect? * XxXxBubBas-BayxxXx--freelootlvl25OnlY!?1 * 174.255.121.2:5543 * bit.ly/free-nudes We listened to the community before, many times, sometimes people are so outspoken that we really believe we'll have competitive edge if we're the ones to "listen" and every fucking time we get burned by it. So I don't blame anyone in the industry for listening to their CMK department more than the hardcore PC Master Race. The Hardcore PC Master Race do not represent all gamers.
http-teapot 6y ago
Half-Life, Unreal Tournament and every mods built on top of them had this. That’s why Minecraft is so popular: custom servers, custom communities, custom experience, decades of playability for the price of a single copy.

DavidVoid 6y ago

The most popular game modes in Overwatch and CSGO are their ranked modes. They'd lose much of their playerbases if they didn't have those modes, and you can't really have them without the inclusion of developer-controlled anti-cheat in the client. And console games did not have server software 10-12 years ago so I think it's a bit unfair to claim that the move away from player-hosted servers was only done for monetary reasons.

kroltan 6y ago
There were ranked modes way before centralized multiplayer services, Battlefield 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter Strike, all had ladders (as they were called at the time since it was a literal list of people sorted by stats - they could easily just present the Elo score or whatever instead), both official or community-hosted.
- ashtonkem 6y ago
  Battlefield 2142 actually had the concept of ranked and unranked servers. Unranked servers allowed for more modification, but didn’t affect your global rank for obvious reasons, leading to sillier game play. It was a fairly effective system, IMHO.
  - http-teapot 6y ago
    America’s Army also had this back in early 2000s

caymanjim 6y ago

I don't disagree with the idea that game companies want a captive audience, and I loathe the microtransaction economy and psychological tricks that fill my games with distractions, but I'm not sure if that's directly related to the lack of community servers. I only play Valve games (CSGO, TF2, L4D2), so I don't know how true it is of other companies, but you can still run your own game servers. If anything, it's easier to do so now than it used to be. Few people do it, because the Valve-run servers are easier to interact with and they're good enough for what most people want. The community tried to handle cheaters before, but they weren't good at it. It relied on admins being present, and put the onus on them to identify and kick/ban cheaters. In a large-enough active gaming community, admins were around often enough, but the best they could do was guess at who was cheating. Sure, the egregious cases were obvious, but there was rarely definitive proof, and people who were subtle could cheat without getting caught. Good players who didn't cheat were also the victim of constant accusations. I was banned from plenty of servers just for having a good night and winning. I'm glad that anti-cheat software has gotten good enough that it works for casual play. It's rare that I see anything in CSGO these days that looks like cheating. Sure, it's out there, but it's not very common. On busy weekends as a server admin, I used to kick and ban dozens of people. On the public servers now, I might run into a couple suspicious people all weekend. I don't see companies running servers as directly related. At least in these Valve games, I still get the marketing spam through the Steam client and in the games themselves, and I can still use all the cosmetic junk whether I'm playing on an official server or a private server. It's better now.

nhm33 6y ago
>I don't disagree with the idea that game companies want a captive audience, and I loathe the microtransaction economy and psychological tricks that fill my games with distractions, but I'm not sure if that's directly related to the lack of community servers. It is, because they want to remove the idea of local application and executable files, that is what UWP is about, they even state they want all software to not be controlled by the end user in industry briefings. https://tifca.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/ClienttoCloud_Vision_V2.pdf https://tifca.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/ClienttoCloud_V... You don't seem to get the game industry has already won, steam, "MMO's" (aka regular PC RPG's rebranded and programmed client server). Was a direct attack on game ownership. There has been a war on software ownership for 20+ years now.