4 ms·

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 al

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.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  I agree with you, but my experience tells me that most people in HN aren't the kind of folks we would meet on GDC corridors.
- a1369209993 6y ago
  > I did a google search for "games shipped in 2008" (to be charitable and check the oldest games) In 2008, I was playing (typical example among others) Warcraft 3, which shipped in 2004 (and FWIW supports LAN play, without any server at all, as the third item on the main menu). I suspect this may explain some of your confusion (ie, at any given point in time, most software in use shipped before that point in time). No comment on the object-level argument though; I don't like online play in the first place.
  - dijit 6y ago
    Can I play Warcraft 3 on PS3? EDIT: I see a typo in my above post, I meant to say games that can play on PC and PS4 (as in, cross platform games) PC-only games have UX that players are much more forgiving of.
    - a1369209993 6y ago
      > I meant to say games that can play [both] on PC and PS4 Okay... that's a thing you can talk about, I guess, but it's not what cwhiz was talking about: > Go back 10-12 years ago and most PC games had server software [emphasis added] Also that doesn't really address my point at all; did console games released in 2004 have closed servers, or did they not support network play at all? > as in, cross platform games If you can give me examples of games that run on linux I'll be happy to discuss them at length. :)
      - dijit 6y ago
        Sorry, I think we somehow ended up talking passed each other. Parent said that "if we go back 10-12 years and games had dedicated server software", tried to find some examples games that are of similar deployment to mine (IE; multi-platform AAA games with network play) to see if that assertion held true. It seems like, aside from Valves games (which exist on XBox afaik) most do not offer a dedicated server software. If we go far enough back (2004) then there's only the Xbox which had network capability, meaning that there's not so many networked games that work multi-platform. I think it's inferred but when I say "cross platform" I mean Windows and whatever the presiding consoles are.

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.

pjmlp 6y ago
I agree with you, but my experience tells me that most people in HN aren't the kind of folks we would meet on GDC corridors.
a1369209993 6y ago
> I did a google search for "games shipped in 2008" (to be charitable and check the oldest games) In 2008, I was playing (typical example among others) Warcraft 3, which shipped in 2004 (and FWIW supports LAN play, without any server at all, as the third item on the main menu). I suspect this may explain some of your confusion (ie, at any given point in time, most software in use shipped before that point in time). No comment on the object-level argument though; I don't like online play in the first place.
- dijit 6y ago
  Can I play Warcraft 3 on PS3? EDIT: I see a typo in my above post, I meant to say games that can play on PC and PS4 (as in, cross platform games) PC-only games have UX that players are much more forgiving of.
  - a1369209993 6y ago
    > I meant to say games that can play [both] on PC and PS4 Okay... that's a thing you can talk about, I guess, but it's not what cwhiz was talking about: > Go back 10-12 years ago and most PC games had server software [emphasis added] Also that doesn't really address my point at all; did console games released in 2004 have closed servers, or did they not support network play at all? > as in, cross platform games If you can give me examples of games that run on linux I'll be happy to discuss them at length. :)
    - dijit 6y ago
      Sorry, I think we somehow ended up talking passed each other. Parent said that "if we go back 10-12 years and games had dedicated server software", tried to find some examples games that are of similar deployment to mine (IE; multi-platform AAA games with network play) to see if that assertion held true. It seems like, aside from Valves games (which exist on XBox afaik) most do not offer a dedicated server software. If we go far enough back (2004) then there's only the Xbox which had network capability, meaning that there's not so many networked games that work multi-platform. I think it's inferred but when I say "cross platform" I mean Windows and whatever the presiding consoles are.