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John Carmack goes off about online-only games being abandoned

268 points by Michelangelo11 4y ago

johnnymorgan 4y ago
Microsoft Allegiance is a good example of a company opening the source to the community to keep it alive after they closed their doors. It's a model I'd like to see included down the road when we can abstract the compute costs
cglong 4y ago
Why was an Internet Archive link posted? https://www.pcgamer.com/john-carmack-goes-off-about-online-only-games-being-abandoned-i-believe-in-saving-everything/ https://www.pcgamer.com/john-carmack-goes-off-about-online-o...
- loganc2342 4y ago
  Typically that would be to get around a paywall. As far as I know PC Gamer doesn’t have one so this is peculiar. Someone can correct me if I’m mistaken about that.
  - trollied 4y ago
    It does not have a paywall.
- Michelangelo11 4y ago
  HN didn't want to accept the direct link (the error message was something along the lines of it being expired or broken, even though it loaded fine in Chrome), so I tried some workarounds, and this attempt worked.
- dang 4y ago
  We've changed the URL now from https://web.archive.org/web/20230206154619/https://www.pcgamer.com/john-carmack-goes-off-about-online-only-games-being-abandoned-i-believe-in-saving-everything/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230206154619/https://www.pcgam....
andrewmcwatters 4y ago
I don’t personally know any other field whose products have deteriorated over time like the game industry’s and it being clear because the quality of software developers in that field have went down. In other industries, changes in material usage can be cost saving in nature or more robust. But in the games industry, new generations of players are literally losing out in features that previously existed, or quality concerns that one never had to think about before.
- flir 4y ago
  Not convinced about programmers being worse, but printers, maybe? That's an actively user-hostile industry if ever there was one.
- sosodev 4y ago
  The quality of developers in game dev has not declined. Studios grew and merged into massive companies that follow the established pattern of profits over people.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - Spooky23 4y ago
    Exactly. There’s not a ton of competition.
    - pixl97 4y ago
      There is not a ton of competition in games? I generally disagree on that if you stick to Windows based games. Now if you're playing on any of the consoles, well longevity is decided by the platform owner. In the indie games industry there are likely more games than ever that are better than ever and can be self hosted. The unaddressed problem here is that 'online only' skinner box style games are massive money makers when they are a hit. Couple that with ever increasing costs in making top of the line games and you can see why the people handing out funding want to go that way.
andsoitis 4y ago
is it better to keep pouring money into something that only 10,000 love? or is it better to use that money to create something that millions would love?
- wffurr 4y ago
  Release the server code and let the 10,000 maintain it themselves.
  - sosodev 4y ago
    Even that requires significant effort that companies are not willing to invest. They'd have to scrub the server of proprietary code, like integration with an account server, and update the client to work with the new system.
    - tikkabhuna 4y ago
      I'm not in the game industry, so I may be wrong, but there doesn't seem to be any push in the game industry to use open source for common problems. Why should a matchmaking/game browser use proprietary code? Create standards and use off the shelf components for common problems. Whenever I go into the settings menu of a game I wonder how much time has been spent reinventing it.
- mftb 4y ago
  Is it better to build something that is beloved for a month or 10 years?
- smoldesu 4y ago
  Arguably you can do both, if you let the community sustain the old thing (like what Carmack did with Quake).
  - oblak 4y ago
    Exactly. Besides, "pouring money into something millions would love" is an absurd statement. 1. Success is not guaranteed. At all 2. Things enjoyed by the masses don't need additional support to stay alive
leereeves 4y ago
"Your company suffers more harm when you take away something dear to a user than you gain in benefit by providing something equally valuable to them or others." I'm glad a game developer is saying this to other game developers. Maybe they'll listen. I know that as a player, I think twice before buying games from publishers like Ubisoft that have a history of shutting down games - even games that I don't play.
- Freedom2 4y ago
  I don't doubt Carmacks legacy as a game developer, but which was the last game he had a significant hand in? I wonder if the industry has changed far too significantly under his feet for us to take his word like we used to.
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    Why would you take anybody's word? You listen to knowledgeable people's arguments and decide if they hold together for you. You don't pick idols and just repeat what they say. Carmack shouldn't shut up because you've decided that his "legacy" is stale.
  - gameman144 4y ago
    Carmack has had a material role in advancing VR gaming tech even recently. Just one example is that he petitioned Samsung to remove the requirement for triple-buffering on their screens, to allow for better latency and in-game experience. Samsung declined, so he hacked apart his phone to make a proof-of-concept prototype of the screen without the triple-buffering. He demoed this to Samsung, and they agreed to make the change because the experience was so much better. It's tough to say "what game has Carmack had an impact on lately", because the scope of his role has was to impact the ecosystem of games and VR as a whole. You don't see pushback on Joe Biden along the lines of "But what has he done for Scranton lately?", because the role of president encompasses a larger scope. Similarly, the role of John Carmack has been larger in scope than improving one game at a time (and has been for a while).
CatWChainsaw 4y ago
Online-only games have different dimensions of cost benefit than single-purchase games. They require studios to maintain servers "in perpetuity", which incentivizes the worst impulses of the industry like microtransactions, lootboxes, and pay-to-win.
- anonymouskimmer 4y ago
  Or they could price the games initially the way things like annuities are priced. Or free (or license) the games so that others can run the servers. Given the throughput increase in computational power and broadband this should be a decreasing cost even if the use stays static in perpetuity.
- superkuh 4y ago
  Like Carmack says in the article, these dimensions of cost are a choice. Games which have private servers that anyone can run last forever at no cost to the company. But studios (excepting Valve with TF2) have never been able to make a game with microtransactions/etc that also works with private servers. So they chose the money instead of making a good game.
- andrewmcwatters 4y ago
  The absolute costs of running game servers is so miniscule that for a majority of the most popular games that have less than say 10k concurrent players any given day, a company's interest payments would cover their costs several times over. I guarantee that you can run them in perpetuity. I worked for a game hosting company in my early career.
  - dontlaugh 4y ago
    That’s not even remotely true for the vast majority of games. Just look up the cost of game servers for Rust or Ark and you’ll see it tends to be over $1 per slot. With many slots unused, the per month per player cost is only sustainable with recurring revenue like subscriptions/similar or players directly paying for game servers.
turtleyacht 4y ago
Hello, I am GameGPT and I create games. Drag-and-drop assets or use the prompt to generate a game! "Hey, there was this multiplayer game my friends and I loved to play called ___ and it had the following mechanics. Here are some maps and the instruction manual. You can even check out some examples from the following YouTube links." Etc. Reverse engineering. Please wait...
- sumit7228 4y ago
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- sumit7228 4y ago
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somethoughts 4y ago
To me it seems confounding that Meta doesn't just figure out a long term strategy to do the opposite of acquihire. Basically while forming a highly experimental group like EchoVR and/or acquire hiring like EchoVR, prepare to have the optionality to do a micro-spin off where the team gets some equity and Meta maintains a 50% stake, which enables a future spin-in. I could see how EchoVR might not make much of a dent in Meta's earnings, but that'd be a significant customer base to start off with. This applies to other FAANG companies too - like Google. Why not take a handful of Fuschia engineers, group them together and then have them partner with say, Framework.
- AdrianB1 4y ago
  Where should that strategy come from? In the end of the day, Meta is just the company of one huge and profitable product (Facebook) that just happened to be successful, not the result of a great strategy. There is no history of a great strategy to support the expectation of having one now. But they have a lot of money, so acquisitions are easy.
  - somethoughts 4y ago
    Agree - probably the better way to structure the deal would have been to do a partnership where the smaller company uses the SSO of the FAANG company and future profit sharing in exchange for cash, equity and server infrastructure. Alas - definite agreement - likely structuring acquisitions to account for higher interest rates and future layoffs a decade into the future is probably asking too much of management.
rektide 4y ago
Two of my truly-beloved games are gone or about to go. Titanfall: Assault was a great 5 minute mobile auto-battle-arena game, shut down in 2018. I've never had a game that built & escalated into such a fun little conflict before or since. Dreadnought is a lovely paced spaceship brawler, a great slugest, and is shutting down end of the month. Neither of these games had anywhere near 10,000 active users, I'd guess. I still there was a chance for the really excellent niche things to do more than fizzle over time & disappear.
- strictnein 4y ago
  On the topic of Titanfall ... Titanfall 2 is probably my favorite online FPS (in addition to having some really great single player) and Respawn has been letting it slowly degrade for years now. It'll be really sad when it's completely unplayable. Calling down Titans in it and the original Titanfall was such an experience. So fresh and different, in addition to the really sharp and refined player movement. EA did them no favors by launching Titanfall 2 at the same time as a CoD and Battlefield title (EA was competing with itself which makes no sense). Had they launched in the spring, away from those two behemoth titles, the game would have had a much better life.
  - oneplane 4y ago
    Thankfully, Northstar makes Titanfall 2 completely independent of EA if need be. Right now they still check the EA client ID against EA's servers to get around copyright/legal issues, so you have to own the assets according to EA in order to play a modded private hosted version, but there is no reason the EA-check couldn't be removed. The loader is open source, so anyone who wants to could fork it and do that. I suspect, however, that this time people got lucky: the Titanfall 1 and 2 games contained most, almost all of the server-side requirements/assets, so hosting a server was mostly a matter of breaking in to one DLL file and a few game script modifications to get access to the entire source engine and game features. As far as I understand, the main missing content were the navigation meshes for the AI, a few scenario scripts, and some party/lobby features. Most, if not all of those have been reverse-engineered or created by the community, so that's not even an issue anymore. But the more games get individually specialised engines, less and less server features included in the client-side game releases, the harder it becomes to do this type of stuff. In the case of idTech, unreal engine and Source, most things outside of the main menu and settings panel are 'maps' and those are either 'hosted' by your own game client, or by a remote server. That means that due to the architecture, the client package has to have at least some server features. If games have training modes, or explore/tryout/singleplayer modes, there has got to be more server-logic/code/assets in the client package to enable that.
kvark 4y ago
John have strong beliefs about how a business should operate. I bet he also has strong beliefs about politics, music, you name it. I love the act of software preservation, playing old games, seeing longer product cycles, but what ground do we have to criticize Meta’s business decision here? None.
- smt88 4y ago
  Carmack successfully co-founded one of the most legendary game studios of all time, and then he had a leadership role at Meta. Meta is pivoting to being a game company (in the sense that the "Metaverse" is a shitty game). Carmack's strong views on politics and certain other topics are indeed silly and uninformed, but his commentary in this case is interesting and valuable. He may be wrong in the end, but he's also not speculating like other business pundits.
- eropple 4y ago
  > what ground do we have to criticize Meta’s business decision here We are people in the world. The reality that our public square--which includes the ways in which we play--is being controlled by businesses who do not answer to us and do not care about that public square except in the way that value can be extracted from it is well within our rights to criticize. And, frankly, legislate.
  - npteljes 4y ago
    I guess the thing is to distinguish when the private park turns into a public square. Ideally, I'd like them either to be supported, or open sourced. Then the community could really pick it up if they want to, or if the publisher doesn't want that, they could just support it for longer.
- LegitShady 4y ago
  >but what ground do we have to criticize Meta’s business decision here? None. I don't get it. What qualifications or grounds does anyone need to criticize a large corporations anti consumer actions? None needed, so not having special permission or be pre-qualified for some random person's satisfaction literally doesn't matter. Anyone can criticize meta and no one needs a grounds aside from their criticism existing.
FartyMcFarter 4y ago
I love Carmack's general message here, but this part is not something a lot of developers have the luxury to do: > "Most of game development is a panicky rush to make things stop falling apart long enough to ship, so it can be hard to dedicate time to fundamental software engineering, but there is a satisfaction to it, and it can pay off with less problematic late stage development." When you're at id Software and don't have to answer to anyone with regards to deadlines or funding, it's fine to think like this. Unfortunately a lot of developers have a lot more constraints than Carmack did when he made his best games.
- deleted 4y ago
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- progman32 4y ago
  I took it as an appeal to management to consider the trade offs they're forcing.
  - FartyMcFarter 4y ago
    That might be the case, but in games development you often have a company (studio) answering to another (publisher), and it's the publisher's management that decides the deadlines and funding. The people managing the engineers would have no control over those. Carmack's company didn't have this problem when they made the games they eventually open-sourced. When they did get bought by a publisher, they no longer open sourced their games as far as I know, so who knows what the engineering practices were like at that point.
    - pathartl 4y ago
      Games are this interesting medium of art where they're really not easily replicated, but very easy duplicated. There's practically no equivalent to a cover for a song that exists for a game. You can distribute a ROM, maybe swap some assets, but the code only exists in the binary it was compiled to. It was only up until recently (with decompilations) that a game was effectively set in stone unless it was open-sourced. I don't know. I think it's silly for decades-old-games to run into licensing issues when trying to go open source. The tech is effectively obsolete except in the instance of that specific game.
abraxas 4y ago
It should be self evident to everyone that with all those "cloud" services you don't own shit. Even if you are more of a prosumer say, hosting your app in a cloud account or your digital assets there is always enough EULA wiggle room there for the vendor to wash their hands if your data goes in a puff of smoke. Your interest is secondary to profit maximization. I'm sure most count on you getting over the inconvenience or outright data loss. I bet they run game theory scenarios to figure out what they can get away with and still see profits rise. Caveat emptor.
- neilv 4y ago
  > It should be self evident to everyone that with all those "cloud" services you don't own shit. No, it shouldn't be, and isn't. And claiming it is sounds like an argument by megacorp lawyers, when there's finally a huge class-action suit led by someone who is out for precedent-setting blood: "It should've been self-evident that we rigged this in such a way that it would suddenly stop working, at a time of our choosing." When that wasn't what they said in the marketing when they sold it, nor when customers invested many hours creating artifacts within it. Like it's not self-evident that when you buy a bicycle, the shop will later come steal it back. Or, when you buy canvas and oil paint, the art supply store won't break into your house and destroy your paintings.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    Then may I ask after a decade of this behavior, why have we not seen a successful lawsuit against said megacorporations? At least in US law I don't think there is a chance of the consumer winning in our current legal environment.
rileymat2 4y ago
I would like online tools that are purchased for a onetime fee have significantly more regulations. Give people either a defined time period that their purchase will be supported for or open source the server side so it can be run after the company decides to discontinue support. IMO, if you charge a one time fee, and stop supporting something for economic reasons, users should be entitled to a refund. Or, more specifically, don't sell an infinite commitment for a fixed price.
justinpombrio 4y ago
His actual statement here. It's very realistic and well thought out. https://web.archive.org/web/20230206155610/https://uploadvr.com/john-carmack-statement-echo-vr-closure/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230206155610/https://uploadvr....
Michelangelo11 4y ago
One thing that's really sad to me is that older games end up being a lot more durable than newer ones (from say the last 15 years or so). For example, you can still play games like Master of Orion 2 or Total Annihilation in multiplayer, because they rely on players hosting servers, and some people still host servers 25+ years after release (and people have even written fan patches to make that possible today, if necessary). But modern games that rely on matchmaking through the developer/publisher? Forget it, when they go down, there's no saving them, alas. So really this is a pretty clear-cut case of functionality deteriorating because the maker of the game has way more power than before to change the game _after_ the customer bought it (the recent brouhaha where BMW or whoever offered a subscription to boost your car's top speed by unlocking a speed lock in software also comes to mind, not to mention "purchased" streaming-only movies disappearing forever once the streaming service dies, etc.).
- corbulo 4y ago
  Whats most tragic is it's not expensive to just allow players to host it themselves for a game thats already multiplayer. It would do a lot for brand reputation. For some reason it seems like only in the last 2 years have publishers been just barely waking up to reputation actually mattering. Really bizarre era of consumer behavior. 'You're gonna buy my crapware games and you're gonna like it! You're gonna read my articles shitting on you and you're gonna like it!' Cyberpunk (as much as I love it) and Battlefield 2042 were inevitable symbolic trainwrecks. <10k daily players for the latest Battlefield title? Time to wake up.
  - andrewmcwatters 4y ago
    I tried Battlefield 2042 and it was really cool to see such large open fighting spaces, but they're also so large they're boring. People are so spread out a large portion of the time can be spent playing just finding an enemy to shoot at... By comparison Battlefield: Bad Company 2 was clear the best Battlefield game of all time. And the graphics to this day still hold up.
    - the_only_law 4y ago
thrill 4y ago
"Your company suffers more harm when you take away something dear to a user than you gain in benefit by providing something equally valuable to them or others." Google Reader.
- astrange 4y ago
  …is not the only RSS reader in the world and there's no reason you should've been upset for more than a day before getting NetNewsWire.
sosodev 4y ago
I think there's a huge opportunity for indie developers to clone popular games and make them more consumer friendly. It seems like a lot of huge corporations will blindly chase profits with zero consideration of what their fans want. I've been building a company (https://hyperspacelogistics.com/ https://hyperspacelogistics.com/) where we believe that doing what's best for the fans is actually best for the company. In fact, we state "We strive to support actively used products for as long as possible" as one of our core values. Our upcoming game GunZone will even include a dedicated server so players can still play even if the company dies out. Funny that this standard of old games is now considered a big feature.
- pathartl 4y ago
  I've been going through a bunch of old games recently for a project involving a regular LAN party some friends and I hold. If I can make a suggestion, bundle as much documentation as you can with the dedicated server. It's infuriating how many times I've run into games where the potential commands/switches have been documented online across 30 websites, but every site is incomplete. Tons of games don't even document how to set the listen address or port, or even what runtimes might be needed in order to run.
jmyeet 4y ago
I can't help but think of SimCity 5. I've always loved the SimCity series and at various times have spent a large number of hours tinkering with a large city. It's relazing. SimCity 4 was a great entry to the series. it had some oddities (eg regions allowed you to just send trash into the void) but it's a single player game so who cares? Much like No Man's Sky and "balance", as an aside. But EA decided SimCity 5 had to be played online. Why? Because reasons. Often there's hand-waving about "piracy" but really it's just about control and "encouraging" micro-transactions as a future revenue source. Being able to flaunt your city to other players is a prime driver for people buying digital cosmetics. But this meant SimCity 5 was vastly more complicated as software. The city size was a lot smaller. They wasted time on multiplayer features nobody cared about. Basically they had zero understanding of who their target market was and what theye liked. As long as some VP can put up a graph in PowerPoint showing projections on micro-transaction revenues and get a fat bonus, who really cares about what the players want. So what happened/ SimCity 5 was a flop nobody even talks about anymore and it caused Cities Skylines to come into existence. Fallout 76 [1] is another big example of turning something people loved (ie Fallout 3 and New Vegas) into something despised just because you, the publisher, can't get out of your mind that "online = more revenue". Old games are loved, so much so that people build software emulators of hardware that is no longer made just to play them. As for two of John's points: Why not allocate a single developer at Meta to maintaining the game? Because that's career suicide for that developer. You'll never get promoted for that. You'll probably be viewed as non-essential and gently shown your way to the door with a subpar performance review when some director later needs a better rating for someone they care about and the ratings have to fit a bell curve. Why not sell it off? Because then it's gone. if you hold ownership you might be able to sell it for a lot in the future. Sell it for $10,000 now and you've gained money that is immaterial and lost any future potential. It just doesn't make sense. You'll spend more than that on lawyers just reviewing the contract. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjyeCdd-dl8&t=1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjyeCdd-dl8&t=1s
- duxup 4y ago
  Sim City 5 was so strange to me. It was going to be an instant buy for me but then as I read the developer statements before release ... it started getting really weird. It was clear it wasn't going to be Sim City, or at least a lot of design decisions had nothing to do with what I thought of as Sim City. Such a sad waste. Really strange too because if there was an obvious formula to make a ton of money there it was and they still screwed it up.
c0l0 4y ago
All I can say is that I love this man.
WalterBright 4y ago
I've had two internet ratio players that were bricked because they'd phone home to the server, and the company running the server would go bust.
nsteel 4y ago
But leaving things out to slowly die is maybe just as bad. I spent hours and hours playing TF2, and while I can still play it, last time I did it was full of hackers. It has ruined the memory for me.
NathanFlurry 4y ago
I've worked at a few small studios that have shut down games with ~200 CCU peak because the cost/benefit of maintaining the ops for these games was not worth it. > Another alternative would be spinning off the project: Meta letting it go and allowing team members to leave, take over the rights for a nominal fee of $10,000, and maintain it. In my experience, studios have a contradictory FOMO mindset of letting other people run the game: * If someone else makes money off it, they want to be part of it * At the same time, they don't want to run it themself * It's not worth the effort to open source it, also see argument #1 What usually ends up happening is the community reverse engineers the protocol and writes their own OSS backend. Shameless plug: I founded Rivet (W23, https://rivet.gg https://rivet.gg) to simplify multiplayer game server ops. We talk to a lot of studios with hard-to-manage old games (i.e. 3+ years old can be ancient in gaming). We often help studios move these to our standardized ops so they don't have to worry about it anymore. We also help lower the server cost for old games by auto-scaling their servers based on player demand.
lkrubner 4y ago
This is a very good article. The bit at the end was especially strong: ----------------------- "Be disciplined about your build processes and what you put in your source tree, so there is at least the possibility of making the project open source," said Carmack. "Think twice before adding dependencies that you can’t redistribute, and consider testing with stubbed out versions of the things you do use. Don’t do things in your code that wouldn’t be acceptable for the whole world to see. "Most of game development is a panicky rush to make things stop falling apart long enough to ship, so it can be hard to dedicate time to fundamental software engineering, but there is a satisfaction to it, and it can pay off with less problematic late stage development." The last phrase is quite the euphemism for "the game disappearing entirely, forever" and through Carmack's repeated exhortations and examples you get a sense of someone who's very frustrated at seeing things built on foundations that can ultimately prove self-defeating. We've entered an era where even many singleplayer games require some sort of server ping, while other games don't work at all if you're offline (which outside of MMOs has sometimes felt like industry overreach).
- jwmcq 4y ago
  I'd say it even makes a difference for single player games that don't "phone home" - I was actually thinking about this the other day in relation to the recent (and mostly welcome) trend of remastering older games, and how these releases seem to vary so widely in quality. Obviously I don't know for sure, and there will be other factors like money / time spent on remastering, but I'd still wager that e.g. the fact that the Metroid Prime remaster was able to add in a (seemingly) whole new lighting system and control scheme whereas the the GTA trilogy remaster couldn't even get half of its weather effects working probably speaks volumes to the respective code quality of their originals. Either way, I'm certain that I'd much rather work on porting / patching / remastering a game from a studio that's following the advice Carmack gives here.
cjbgkagh 4y ago
Microsoft would say their biggest competition is previous versions of Windows. I assume the same could apply to games, especially networked games with high replay ability. Given the choice between supporting the ‘competitor’ or killing it I can understand why studios would kill it.
bennysonething 4y ago
"The default today may be a distributed mess of spaghetti, but that is a choice." I'd like to hear more of his thoughts on this. The distributed and service orientated the stuff I work in gets, the less we ship. It's glacial.
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thomastjeffery 4y ago
John Carmack is a strange character. Ideologically, he sees the failure of Oculus' business model; but practically, he has ignored it from the word, "go". Let the business-obsessed people deal with that.. spoiler: they did. He's the one who made the whole thing viable in the first place! I would hate to stand in his shoes, to watch the fruits of my labor rot on the ground below, begging someone to simply reach down and pick them up: someone whose entire business model forbids them. Was it worth it? Sure, he got to work on something really cool, and get paid lots of money... Yet it seems obvious from where I'm standing that this story could have been written with much more satisfying goals, and still played out with most of the same benefits reached. Just look at the valve index! Huge success without any of this walled-garden bullshit or compromise, and it's still king 4 years in. The only advantage Oculus has had is affordability, but I'm still not convinced walled-garden paths are the only ones that lead to cheap.
- satvikpendem 4y ago
  > he sees the failure of Oculus' business model Huh? Oculus is the best selling VR headset available, it sold way more than the Index. > The only advantage Oculus has had is affordability ...yes, this is how consumer sales works. People buy what is affordable.
  - thomastjeffery 4y ago
    Moral failure. The whole thing this article is about. For example: > Carmack goes on to say that Bosworth greenlit the release of the Oculus Go root build (an unlocked OS allowing full access (opens in new tab)) that he had long pushed-for, but "after seeing how much internal effort was involved to make it happen, I almost felt bad about it," said Carmack. "The constraints are just different in a company the size of Meta." The "constraints" are their business model: underprice the hardware and overprice the software. It's not a new model, this is what consoles have done since Carmack made Doom!
    - satvikpendem 4y ago
      I don't see how that's a moral failure, it's just how console businesses operate, as you noted.
pipeline_peak 4y ago
To me Meta was always a big PR stunt to steer people away from all the negative press FB was getting. I really don’t think the creator of Quakes opinion is all that important, sorry.
vood 4y ago
Not related to the content, the amount of ads in this website makes the article barely readable, especially on mobile.
Waterluvian 4y ago
Warcraft 2 and 3 both got illegitimate Battle.net servers. It seems to work very well. Not sure it’s legal but it’s a model that I could see a sensible game company adopting: give out the server code as part of abandoning support.
- effingwewt 4y ago
  Indeed and have been running for quite a while, even wow had the classic servers up until blizzard came after them when blizz decided to make their own. They also afforded options blizzard had been too lazy to bother with, such as playing on a favorite patch, etc.
steelframe 4y ago
I've heard people in the Interwebs ask why anyone cares so much about "old" games, since game tech advances so much. In one forum there were a couple of people referring to some five-year-old game as an "ancient relic." Meanwhile my kids are literally playing Super Mario Bros right now while I'm typing this comment. That's a 38-year-old game. Every time Mario falls down a hole or gets nailed by a ricocheting turtle shell, I hear squeals of delight and frustration, and then they hit the "continue" option to try the level again for the 15th time. It's not really "angry mad," but "happy frustrated." There's far more quality interaction going on with Super Mario Bros than with whatever random "modern" FPS they sometimes play, where they are mostly zoned out and are getting more "angry mad" rather than "happy frustrated" when they are killed in those games.
- effingwewt 4y ago
  Social manipulation works far better on children and they figured that out some time ago. I heard my girlfriend's then 10 year old son complaining 5 years ago now about fortnite players being garbage because they had no skins and were called 'noskins'. I didn't play it so I asked if they gave stat increases or anything and he said no, just cosmetic. I asked what a skin had to do with playing ability and was told 'Tch, you just don't get it' -replete with eyeroll. A few months ago heard the same thing from a friend's kid (~same age) who'd just gotten his first xbox. 'Eww noskins', with the added cherry of him complaining about using a controller as it was so much harder than using a phone screen. YouTube was the cause of it back 5 years ago, idk about now, but the companies get their messages in no matter what. It all works far too often and worries me about where we are headed. I often wonder how I'd have turned out if watching GI Joe and Transformers as a kid had beaten me upside the head with more than 'dont steal, drugs bad, police good, buy toys' messages of the 80s.
travisporter 4y ago
Thank Microsoft they didn’t abandon age of empires 2

Microsoft Allegiance is a good example of a company opening the source to the community to keep it alive after they closed their doors. It's a model I'd like to see included down the road when we can abstract the compute costs

cglong 4y ago

Why was an Internet Archive link posted? https://www.pcgamer.com/john-carmack-goes-off-about-online-only-games-being-abandoned-i-believe-in-saving-everything/ https://www.pcgamer.com/john-carmack-goes-off-about-online-o...

loganc2342 4y ago
Typically that would be to get around a paywall. As far as I know PC Gamer doesn’t have one so this is peculiar. Someone can correct me if I’m mistaken about that.
- trollied 4y ago
  It does not have a paywall.
Michelangelo11 4y ago
HN didn't want to accept the direct link (the error message was something along the lines of it being expired or broken, even though it loaded fine in Chrome), so I tried some workarounds, and this attempt worked.
dang 4y ago
We've changed the URL now from https://web.archive.org/web/20230206154619/https://www.pcgamer.com/john-carmack-goes-off-about-online-only-games-being-abandoned-i-believe-in-saving-everything/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230206154619/https://www.pcgam....

andrewmcwatters 4y ago

I don’t personally know any other field whose products have deteriorated over time like the game industry’s and it being clear because the quality of software developers in that field have went down. In other industries, changes in material usage can be cost saving in nature or more robust. But in the games industry, new generations of players are literally losing out in features that previously existed, or quality concerns that one never had to think about before.

flir 4y ago
Not convinced about programmers being worse, but printers, maybe? That's an actively user-hostile industry if ever there was one.
sosodev 4y ago
The quality of developers in game dev has not declined. Studios grew and merged into massive companies that follow the established pattern of profits over people.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- Spooky23 4y ago
  Exactly. There’s not a ton of competition.
  - pixl97 4y ago
    There is not a ton of competition in games? I generally disagree on that if you stick to Windows based games. Now if you're playing on any of the consoles, well longevity is decided by the platform owner. In the indie games industry there are likely more games than ever that are better than ever and can be self hosted. The unaddressed problem here is that 'online only' skinner box style games are massive money makers when they are a hit. Couple that with ever increasing costs in making top of the line games and you can see why the people handing out funding want to go that way.

andsoitis 4y ago

is it better to keep pouring money into something that only 10,000 love? or is it better to use that money to create something that millions would love?

wffurr 4y ago
Release the server code and let the 10,000 maintain it themselves.
- sosodev 4y ago
  Even that requires significant effort that companies are not willing to invest. They'd have to scrub the server of proprietary code, like integration with an account server, and update the client to work with the new system.
  - tikkabhuna 4y ago
    I'm not in the game industry, so I may be wrong, but there doesn't seem to be any push in the game industry to use open source for common problems. Why should a matchmaking/game browser use proprietary code? Create standards and use off the shelf components for common problems. Whenever I go into the settings menu of a game I wonder how much time has been spent reinventing it.
mftb 4y ago
Is it better to build something that is beloved for a month or 10 years?
smoldesu 4y ago
Arguably you can do both, if you let the community sustain the old thing (like what Carmack did with Quake).
- oblak 4y ago
  Exactly. Besides, "pouring money into something millions would love" is an absurd statement. 1. Success is not guaranteed. At all 2. Things enjoyed by the masses don't need additional support to stay alive

leereeves 4y ago

"Your company suffers more harm when you take away something dear to a user than you gain in benefit by providing something equally valuable to them or others." I'm glad a game developer is saying this to other game developers. Maybe they'll listen. I know that as a player, I think twice before buying games from publishers like Ubisoft that have a history of shutting down games - even games that I don't play.

Freedom2 4y ago
I don't doubt Carmacks legacy as a game developer, but which was the last game he had a significant hand in? I wonder if the industry has changed far too significantly under his feet for us to take his word like we used to.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  Why would you take anybody's word? You listen to knowledgeable people's arguments and decide if they hold together for you. You don't pick idols and just repeat what they say. Carmack shouldn't shut up because you've decided that his "legacy" is stale.
- gameman144 4y ago
  Carmack has had a material role in advancing VR gaming tech even recently. Just one example is that he petitioned Samsung to remove the requirement for triple-buffering on their screens, to allow for better latency and in-game experience. Samsung declined, so he hacked apart his phone to make a proof-of-concept prototype of the screen without the triple-buffering. He demoed this to Samsung, and they agreed to make the change because the experience was so much better. It's tough to say "what game has Carmack had an impact on lately", because the scope of his role has was to impact the ecosystem of games and VR as a whole. You don't see pushback on Joe Biden along the lines of "But what has he done for Scranton lately?", because the role of president encompasses a larger scope. Similarly, the role of John Carmack has been larger in scope than improving one game at a time (and has been for a while).

CatWChainsaw 4y ago

Online-only games have different dimensions of cost benefit than single-purchase games. They require studios to maintain servers "in perpetuity", which incentivizes the worst impulses of the industry like microtransactions, lootboxes, and pay-to-win.

anonymouskimmer 4y ago
Or they could price the games initially the way things like annuities are priced. Or free (or license) the games so that others can run the servers. Given the throughput increase in computational power and broadband this should be a decreasing cost even if the use stays static in perpetuity.
superkuh 4y ago
Like Carmack says in the article, these dimensions of cost are a choice. Games which have private servers that anyone can run last forever at no cost to the company. But studios (excepting Valve with TF2) have never been able to make a game with microtransactions/etc that also works with private servers. So they chose the money instead of making a good game.
andrewmcwatters 4y ago
The absolute costs of running game servers is so miniscule that for a majority of the most popular games that have less than say 10k concurrent players any given day, a company's interest payments would cover their costs several times over. I guarantee that you can run them in perpetuity. I worked for a game hosting company in my early career.
- dontlaugh 4y ago
  That’s not even remotely true for the vast majority of games. Just look up the cost of game servers for Rust or Ark and you’ll see it tends to be over $1 per slot. With many slots unused, the per month per player cost is only sustainable with recurring revenue like subscriptions/similar or players directly paying for game servers.

turtleyacht 4y ago

Hello, I am GameGPT and I create games. Drag-and-drop assets or use the prompt to generate a game! "Hey, there was this multiplayer game my friends and I loved to play called ___ and it had the following mechanics. Here are some maps and the instruction manual. You can even check out some examples from the following YouTube links." Etc. Reverse engineering. Please wait...

sumit7228 4y ago
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somethoughts 4y ago

To me it seems confounding that Meta doesn't just figure out a long term strategy to do the opposite of acquihire. Basically while forming a highly experimental group like EchoVR and/or acquire hiring like EchoVR, prepare to have the optionality to do a micro-spin off where the team gets some equity and Meta maintains a 50% stake, which enables a future spin-in. I could see how EchoVR might not make much of a dent in Meta's earnings, but that'd be a significant customer base to start off with. This applies to other FAANG companies too - like Google. Why not take a handful of Fuschia engineers, group them together and then have them partner with say, Framework.

AdrianB1 4y ago
Where should that strategy come from? In the end of the day, Meta is just the company of one huge and profitable product (Facebook) that just happened to be successful, not the result of a great strategy. There is no history of a great strategy to support the expectation of having one now. But they have a lot of money, so acquisitions are easy.
- somethoughts 4y ago
  Agree - probably the better way to structure the deal would have been to do a partnership where the smaller company uses the SSO of the FAANG company and future profit sharing in exchange for cash, equity and server infrastructure. Alas - definite agreement - likely structuring acquisitions to account for higher interest rates and future layoffs a decade into the future is probably asking too much of management.

rektide 4y ago

Two of my truly-beloved games are gone or about to go. Titanfall: Assault was a great 5 minute mobile auto-battle-arena game, shut down in 2018. I've never had a game that built & escalated into such a fun little conflict before or since. Dreadnought is a lovely paced spaceship brawler, a great slugest, and is shutting down end of the month. Neither of these games had anywhere near 10,000 active users, I'd guess. I still there was a chance for the really excellent niche things to do more than fizzle over time & disappear.

strictnein 4y ago
On the topic of Titanfall ... Titanfall 2 is probably my favorite online FPS (in addition to having some really great single player) and Respawn has been letting it slowly degrade for years now. It'll be really sad when it's completely unplayable. Calling down Titans in it and the original Titanfall was such an experience. So fresh and different, in addition to the really sharp and refined player movement. EA did them no favors by launching Titanfall 2 at the same time as a CoD and Battlefield title (EA was competing with itself which makes no sense). Had they launched in the spring, away from those two behemoth titles, the game would have had a much better life.
- oneplane 4y ago
  Thankfully, Northstar makes Titanfall 2 completely independent of EA if need be. Right now they still check the EA client ID against EA's servers to get around copyright/legal issues, so you have to own the assets according to EA in order to play a modded private hosted version, but there is no reason the EA-check couldn't be removed. The loader is open source, so anyone who wants to could fork it and do that. I suspect, however, that this time people got lucky: the Titanfall 1 and 2 games contained most, almost all of the server-side requirements/assets, so hosting a server was mostly a matter of breaking in to one DLL file and a few game script modifications to get access to the entire source engine and game features. As far as I understand, the main missing content were the navigation meshes for the AI, a few scenario scripts, and some party/lobby features. Most, if not all of those have been reverse-engineered or created by the community, so that's not even an issue anymore. But the more games get individually specialised engines, less and less server features included in the client-side game releases, the harder it becomes to do this type of stuff. In the case of idTech, unreal engine and Source, most things outside of the main menu and settings panel are 'maps' and those are either 'hosted' by your own game client, or by a remote server. That means that due to the architecture, the client package has to have at least some server features. If games have training modes, or explore/tryout/singleplayer modes, there has got to be more server-logic/code/assets in the client package to enable that.

kvark 4y ago

John have strong beliefs about how a business should operate. I bet he also has strong beliefs about politics, music, you name it. I love the act of software preservation, playing old games, seeing longer product cycles, but what ground do we have to criticize Meta’s business decision here? None.

smt88 4y ago
Carmack successfully co-founded one of the most legendary game studios of all time, and then he had a leadership role at Meta. Meta is pivoting to being a game company (in the sense that the "Metaverse" is a shitty game). Carmack's strong views on politics and certain other topics are indeed silly and uninformed, but his commentary in this case is interesting and valuable. He may be wrong in the end, but he's also not speculating like other business pundits.
eropple 4y ago
> what ground do we have to criticize Meta’s business decision here We are people in the world. The reality that our public square--which includes the ways in which we play--is being controlled by businesses who do not answer to us and do not care about that public square except in the way that value can be extracted from it is well within our rights to criticize. And, frankly, legislate.
- npteljes 4y ago
  I guess the thing is to distinguish when the private park turns into a public square. Ideally, I'd like them either to be supported, or open sourced. Then the community could really pick it up if they want to, or if the publisher doesn't want that, they could just support it for longer.
LegitShady 4y ago
>but what ground do we have to criticize Meta’s business decision here? None. I don't get it. What qualifications or grounds does anyone need to criticize a large corporations anti consumer actions? None needed, so not having special permission or be pre-qualified for some random person's satisfaction literally doesn't matter. Anyone can criticize meta and no one needs a grounds aside from their criticism existing.

FartyMcFarter 4y ago

I love Carmack's general message here, but this part is not something a lot of developers have the luxury to do: > "Most of game development is a panicky rush to make things stop falling apart long enough to ship, so it can be hard to dedicate time to fundamental software engineering, but there is a satisfaction to it, and it can pay off with less problematic late stage development." When you're at id Software and don't have to answer to anyone with regards to deadlines or funding, it's fine to think like this. Unfortunately a lot of developers have a lot more constraints than Carmack did when he made his best games.

deleted 4y ago
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progman32 4y ago
I took it as an appeal to management to consider the trade offs they're forcing.
- FartyMcFarter 4y ago
  That might be the case, but in games development you often have a company (studio) answering to another (publisher), and it's the publisher's management that decides the deadlines and funding. The people managing the engineers would have no control over those. Carmack's company didn't have this problem when they made the games they eventually open-sourced. When they did get bought by a publisher, they no longer open sourced their games as far as I know, so who knows what the engineering practices were like at that point.
  - pathartl 4y ago
    Games are this interesting medium of art where they're really not easily replicated, but very easy duplicated. There's practically no equivalent to a cover for a song that exists for a game. You can distribute a ROM, maybe swap some assets, but the code only exists in the binary it was compiled to. It was only up until recently (with decompilations) that a game was effectively set in stone unless it was open-sourced. I don't know. I think it's silly for decades-old-games to run into licensing issues when trying to go open source. The tech is effectively obsolete except in the instance of that specific game.

abraxas 4y ago

It should be self evident to everyone that with all those "cloud" services you don't own shit. Even if you are more of a prosumer say, hosting your app in a cloud account or your digital assets there is always enough EULA wiggle room there for the vendor to wash their hands if your data goes in a puff of smoke. Your interest is secondary to profit maximization. I'm sure most count on you getting over the inconvenience or outright data loss. I bet they run game theory scenarios to figure out what they can get away with and still see profits rise. Caveat emptor.

neilv 4y ago
> It should be self evident to everyone that with all those "cloud" services you don't own shit. No, it shouldn't be, and isn't. And claiming it is sounds like an argument by megacorp lawyers, when there's finally a huge class-action suit led by someone who is out for precedent-setting blood: "It should've been self-evident that we rigged this in such a way that it would suddenly stop working, at a time of our choosing." When that wasn't what they said in the marketing when they sold it, nor when customers invested many hours creating artifacts within it. Like it's not self-evident that when you buy a bicycle, the shop will later come steal it back. Or, when you buy canvas and oil paint, the art supply store won't break into your house and destroy your paintings.
- pixl97 4y ago
  Then may I ask after a decade of this behavior, why have we not seen a successful lawsuit against said megacorporations? At least in US law I don't think there is a chance of the consumer winning in our current legal environment.

rileymat2 4y ago

I would like online tools that are purchased for a onetime fee have significantly more regulations. Give people either a defined time period that their purchase will be supported for or open source the server side so it can be run after the company decides to discontinue support. IMO, if you charge a one time fee, and stop supporting something for economic reasons, users should be entitled to a refund. Or, more specifically, don't sell an infinite commitment for a fixed price.

justinpombrio 4y ago

His actual statement here. It's very realistic and well thought out. https://web.archive.org/web/20230206155610/https://uploadvr.com/john-carmack-statement-echo-vr-closure/ https://web.archive.org/web/20230206155610/https://uploadvr....

Michelangelo11 4y ago

One thing that's really sad to me is that older games end up being a lot more durable than newer ones (from say the last 15 years or so). For example, you can still play games like Master of Orion 2 or Total Annihilation in multiplayer, because they rely on players hosting servers, and some people still host servers 25+ years after release (and people have even written fan patches to make that possible today, if necessary). But modern games that rely on matchmaking through the developer/publisher? Forget it, when they go down, there's no saving them, alas. So really this is a pretty clear-cut case of functionality deteriorating because the maker of the game has way more power than before to change the game _after_ the customer bought it (the recent brouhaha where BMW or whoever offered a subscription to boost your car's top speed by unlocking a speed lock in software also comes to mind, not to mention "purchased" streaming-only movies disappearing forever once the streaming service dies, etc.).

corbulo 4y ago
Whats most tragic is it's not expensive to just allow players to host it themselves for a game thats already multiplayer. It would do a lot for brand reputation. For some reason it seems like only in the last 2 years have publishers been just barely waking up to reputation actually mattering. Really bizarre era of consumer behavior. 'You're gonna buy my crapware games and you're gonna like it! You're gonna read my articles shitting on you and you're gonna like it!' Cyberpunk (as much as I love it) and Battlefield 2042 were inevitable symbolic trainwrecks. <10k daily players for the latest Battlefield title? Time to wake up.
- andrewmcwatters 4y ago
  I tried Battlefield 2042 and it was really cool to see such large open fighting spaces, but they're also so large they're boring. People are so spread out a large portion of the time can be spent playing just finding an enemy to shoot at... By comparison Battlefield: Bad Company 2 was clear the best Battlefield game of all time. And the graphics to this day still hold up.
  - the_only_law 4y ago

thrill 4y ago

"Your company suffers more harm when you take away something dear to a user than you gain in benefit by providing something equally valuable to them or others." Google Reader.

astrange 4y ago
…is not the only RSS reader in the world and there's no reason you should've been upset for more than a day before getting NetNewsWire.

sosodev 4y ago

I think there's a huge opportunity for indie developers to clone popular games and make them more consumer friendly. It seems like a lot of huge corporations will blindly chase profits with zero consideration of what their fans want. I've been building a company (https://hyperspacelogistics.com/ https://hyperspacelogistics.com/) where we believe that doing what's best for the fans is actually best for the company. In fact, we state "We strive to support actively used products for as long as possible" as one of our core values. Our upcoming game GunZone will even include a dedicated server so players can still play even if the company dies out. Funny that this standard of old games is now considered a big feature.

pathartl 4y ago
I've been going through a bunch of old games recently for a project involving a regular LAN party some friends and I hold. If I can make a suggestion, bundle as much documentation as you can with the dedicated server. It's infuriating how many times I've run into games where the potential commands/switches have been documented online across 30 websites, but every site is incomplete. Tons of games don't even document how to set the listen address or port, or even what runtimes might be needed in order to run.

jmyeet 4y ago

I can't help but think of SimCity 5. I've always loved the SimCity series and at various times have spent a large number of hours tinkering with a large city. It's relazing. SimCity 4 was a great entry to the series. it had some oddities (eg regions allowed you to just send trash into the void) but it's a single player game so who cares? Much like No Man's Sky and "balance", as an aside. But EA decided SimCity 5 had to be played online. Why? Because reasons. Often there's hand-waving about "piracy" but really it's just about control and "encouraging" micro-transactions as a future revenue source. Being able to flaunt your city to other players is a prime driver for people buying digital cosmetics. But this meant SimCity 5 was vastly more complicated as software. The city size was a lot smaller. They wasted time on multiplayer features nobody cared about. Basically they had zero understanding of who their target market was and what theye liked. As long as some VP can put up a graph in PowerPoint showing projections on micro-transaction revenues and get a fat bonus, who really cares about what the players want. So what happened/ SimCity 5 was a flop nobody even talks about anymore and it caused Cities Skylines to come into existence. Fallout 76 [1] is another big example of turning something people loved (ie Fallout 3 and New Vegas) into something despised just because you, the publisher, can't get out of your mind that "online = more revenue". Old games are loved, so much so that people build software emulators of hardware that is no longer made just to play them. As for two of John's points: Why not allocate a single developer at Meta to maintaining the game? Because that's career suicide for that developer. You'll never get promoted for that. You'll probably be viewed as non-essential and gently shown your way to the door with a subpar performance review when some director later needs a better rating for someone they care about and the ratings have to fit a bell curve. Why not sell it off? Because then it's gone. if you hold ownership you might be able to sell it for a lot in the future. Sell it for $10,000 now and you've gained money that is immaterial and lost any future potential. It just doesn't make sense. You'll spend more than that on lawyers just reviewing the contract. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjyeCdd-dl8&t=1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjyeCdd-dl8&t=1s

duxup 4y ago
Sim City 5 was so strange to me. It was going to be an instant buy for me but then as I read the developer statements before release ... it started getting really weird. It was clear it wasn't going to be Sim City, or at least a lot of design decisions had nothing to do with what I thought of as Sim City. Such a sad waste. Really strange too because if there was an obvious formula to make a ton of money there it was and they still screwed it up.

c0l0 4y ago

All I can say is that I love this man.

WalterBright 4y ago

I've had two internet ratio players that were bricked because they'd phone home to the server, and the company running the server would go bust.

nsteel 4y ago

But leaving things out to slowly die is maybe just as bad. I spent hours and hours playing TF2, and while I can still play it, last time I did it was full of hackers. It has ruined the memory for me.

NathanFlurry 4y ago

I've worked at a few small studios that have shut down games with ~200 CCU peak because the cost/benefit of maintaining the ops for these games was not worth it. > Another alternative would be spinning off the project: Meta letting it go and allowing team members to leave, take over the rights for a nominal fee of $10,000, and maintain it. In my experience, studios have a contradictory FOMO mindset of letting other people run the game: * If someone else makes money off it, they want to be part of it * At the same time, they don't want to run it themself * It's not worth the effort to open source it, also see argument #1 What usually ends up happening is the community reverse engineers the protocol and writes their own OSS backend. Shameless plug: I founded Rivet (W23, https://rivet.gg https://rivet.gg) to simplify multiplayer game server ops. We talk to a lot of studios with hard-to-manage old games (i.e. 3+ years old can be ancient in gaming). We often help studios move these to our standardized ops so they don't have to worry about it anymore. We also help lower the server cost for old games by auto-scaling their servers based on player demand.

lkrubner 4y ago

This is a very good article. The bit at the end was especially strong: ----------------------- "Be disciplined about your build processes and what you put in your source tree, so there is at least the possibility of making the project open source," said Carmack. "Think twice before adding dependencies that you can’t redistribute, and consider testing with stubbed out versions of the things you do use. Don’t do things in your code that wouldn’t be acceptable for the whole world to see. "Most of game development is a panicky rush to make things stop falling apart long enough to ship, so it can be hard to dedicate time to fundamental software engineering, but there is a satisfaction to it, and it can pay off with less problematic late stage development." The last phrase is quite the euphemism for "the game disappearing entirely, forever" and through Carmack's repeated exhortations and examples you get a sense of someone who's very frustrated at seeing things built on foundations that can ultimately prove self-defeating. We've entered an era where even many singleplayer games require some sort of server ping, while other games don't work at all if you're offline (which outside of MMOs has sometimes felt like industry overreach).

jwmcq 4y ago
I'd say it even makes a difference for single player games that don't "phone home" - I was actually thinking about this the other day in relation to the recent (and mostly welcome) trend of remastering older games, and how these releases seem to vary so widely in quality. Obviously I don't know for sure, and there will be other factors like money / time spent on remastering, but I'd still wager that e.g. the fact that the Metroid Prime remaster was able to add in a (seemingly) whole new lighting system and control scheme whereas the the GTA trilogy remaster couldn't even get half of its weather effects working probably speaks volumes to the respective code quality of their originals. Either way, I'm certain that I'd much rather work on porting / patching / remastering a game from a studio that's following the advice Carmack gives here.

cjbgkagh 4y ago

Microsoft would say their biggest competition is previous versions of Windows. I assume the same could apply to games, especially networked games with high replay ability. Given the choice between supporting the ‘competitor’ or killing it I can understand why studios would kill it.

bennysonething 4y ago

"The default today may be a distributed mess of spaghetti, but that is a choice." I'd like to hear more of his thoughts on this. The distributed and service orientated the stuff I work in gets, the less we ship. It's glacial.

deleted 4y ago

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thomastjeffery 4y ago

John Carmack is a strange character. Ideologically, he sees the failure of Oculus' business model; but practically, he has ignored it from the word, "go". Let the business-obsessed people deal with that.. spoiler: they did. He's the one who made the whole thing viable in the first place! I would hate to stand in his shoes, to watch the fruits of my labor rot on the ground below, begging someone to simply reach down and pick them up: someone whose entire business model forbids them. Was it worth it? Sure, he got to work on something really cool, and get paid lots of money... Yet it seems obvious from where I'm standing that this story could have been written with much more satisfying goals, and still played out with most of the same benefits reached. Just look at the valve index! Huge success without any of this walled-garden bullshit or compromise, and it's still king 4 years in. The only advantage Oculus has had is affordability, but I'm still not convinced walled-garden paths are the only ones that lead to cheap.

satvikpendem 4y ago
> he sees the failure of Oculus' business model Huh? Oculus is the best selling VR headset available, it sold way more than the Index. > The only advantage Oculus has had is affordability ...yes, this is how consumer sales works. People buy what is affordable.
- thomastjeffery 4y ago
  Moral failure. The whole thing this article is about. For example: > Carmack goes on to say that Bosworth greenlit the release of the Oculus Go root build (an unlocked OS allowing full access (opens in new tab)) that he had long pushed-for, but "after seeing how much internal effort was involved to make it happen, I almost felt bad about it," said Carmack. "The constraints are just different in a company the size of Meta." The "constraints" are their business model: underprice the hardware and overprice the software. It's not a new model, this is what consoles have done since Carmack made Doom!
  - satvikpendem 4y ago
    I don't see how that's a moral failure, it's just how console businesses operate, as you noted.

pipeline_peak 4y ago

To me Meta was always a big PR stunt to steer people away from all the negative press FB was getting. I really don’t think the creator of Quakes opinion is all that important, sorry.

vood 4y ago

Not related to the content, the amount of ads in this website makes the article barely readable, especially on mobile.

Waterluvian 4y ago

Warcraft 2 and 3 both got illegitimate Battle.net servers. It seems to work very well. Not sure it’s legal but it’s a model that I could see a sensible game company adopting: give out the server code as part of abandoning support.

effingwewt 4y ago
Indeed and have been running for quite a while, even wow had the classic servers up until blizzard came after them when blizz decided to make their own. They also afforded options blizzard had been too lazy to bother with, such as playing on a favorite patch, etc.

steelframe 4y ago

I've heard people in the Interwebs ask why anyone cares so much about "old" games, since game tech advances so much. In one forum there were a couple of people referring to some five-year-old game as an "ancient relic." Meanwhile my kids are literally playing Super Mario Bros right now while I'm typing this comment. That's a 38-year-old game. Every time Mario falls down a hole or gets nailed by a ricocheting turtle shell, I hear squeals of delight and frustration, and then they hit the "continue" option to try the level again for the 15th time. It's not really "angry mad," but "happy frustrated." There's far more quality interaction going on with Super Mario Bros than with whatever random "modern" FPS they sometimes play, where they are mostly zoned out and are getting more "angry mad" rather than "happy frustrated" when they are killed in those games.

effingwewt 4y ago
Social manipulation works far better on children and they figured that out some time ago. I heard my girlfriend's then 10 year old son complaining 5 years ago now about fortnite players being garbage because they had no skins and were called 'noskins'. I didn't play it so I asked if they gave stat increases or anything and he said no, just cosmetic. I asked what a skin had to do with playing ability and was told 'Tch, you just don't get it' -replete with eyeroll. A few months ago heard the same thing from a friend's kid (~same age) who'd just gotten his first xbox. 'Eww noskins', with the added cherry of him complaining about using a controller as it was so much harder than using a phone screen. YouTube was the cause of it back 5 years ago, idk about now, but the companies get their messages in no matter what. It all works far too often and worries me about where we are headed. I often wonder how I'd have turned out if watching GI Joe and Transformers as a kid had beaten me upside the head with more than 'dont steal, drugs bad, police good, buy toys' messages of the 80s.

travisporter 4y ago

Thank Microsoft they didn’t abandon age of empires 2