7 ms·

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

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
  My problem with Battlefield 2042 is that it doesn’t feel like battlefield. It feels like some exec asked “what kind of shooters have gotten popular with the kids recently? Let’s rip those off”.
Ygg2 4y ago
Cyberpunk seems unrelated. It will probably age better than any other multiplayer title. The bugs have been patched but not game ruining (for me). T-posing was infrequent, but there were some issues.
- corbulo 4y ago
  Cyberpunk is related because at launch it was shoving crapware out the door. It actually worked mostly fine on my PC, so its not a personal thing. I love the game. It's the business practice of sending the customer their boots without the sole and toe box sewn together then telling them they get most of the experience earlier this way and theyll stitch it together in a month if they have the time. I agree it will age well, particularly with the right improvements.
  - Ygg2 4y ago
    It's caused by ability to patch game later and rushing product to reach impossible deadline on an impossible configuration. Which is only tangentially related. Greed is the true culprit.
    - corbulo 4y ago
      Greed isn't the true culprit. You don't make more money by making any % of your consumer base hate you.
      - Ygg2 4y ago
        If you don't release game by X date and for 5 year old consoles. Your stocks will definitely go down. And CDPR is a publicly traded company. For a publicly traded company, especially one with short term oriented investors, some amount of brand tarnishing is acceptable. For another similar example see Fallout 76.
        corbulo 4y ago
        Greed being the common denominator makes it not the culprit. If greed were truly the culprit then they would be focused on making the most amount of money possible without constraints. It's poor leadership and short sightedness IMO.
  - jeroenhd 4y ago
    My Cyberpunk experience was actually quite good. I didn't try it on day 1, but after a patch or two my pirated copy (wanted to see if my PC could run it before I spent 60 euros on it) ran great. Sure, my poor 1080 can't do max settings or ray tracing or even good DLSS, but the graphics are gorgeous even at mid-low settings. There were (and still are) Skyrim-level bugs, but that didn't bother me too much. I think the people that bought into the hype got severely disappointed and anyone buying the game on consoles simply got scammed, but as someone who bought the game after it had been out for a bit, I've had nothing but fun with it. In fact, one thing CP2077 allows that most other games don't, is backing up the DRM-free installer for the patched game. Steam/PS store/Xbox Online will die one day and all their online patches will disappear forerver, but the GOG versions of most games will run in 20 or 30 years as long as you remember make a backup of the installer.
oliwarner 4y ago
It's copy protection. You can't run a hacked server that ignores license state or hacking bans if you have no access to the server software. They disguise it under a claim of convenience, a feature that you match against similar-experience players, but you're right, it's ultimately an antifeature. Gamers put up with a lot of crap, between exploited ring0 DRM, platform exclusives, the loss of consumer rights (like refunds and resale) and crappy ports from consoles. I don't understand how they get away with it. I might just be old, but I've changed my entire purchasing game strategy to ignore games that fall foul of these things.
- oneplane 4y ago
  That used to be the case, now it's asset protection because the only way people will pay for skins, hats, virtual shoes, and pink guns is if you can't load arbitrary assets. If a server says: load whatever skin you want... well, why would you pay for it? This is also why modding got killed off, you can't sell people stuff if someone else will make better assets for free and just puts them up for download. Even if integrity or security was a big issue, that's been solved since quake 3 and ut99 with integrity checks and server-side load controls (ironically, the same ones that are now used in locked-down games to make selling different coloured virtual shirts a thing).
- thomastjeffery 4y ago
  That, and planned-obselescence. I'm sure that EA would love to kill Battlefield 4. But it will never die, because players can run and moderate dedicated servers. Battlefield 1 (newer than 4), on the other hand, died years ago. Battlefield 5 is practically the same game, arguably worse, yet was able to steal most of 1's player base because support (and moderation) were effectively dropped by EA during the release of 5. Anti-cheat is the newest (and deadliest) iteration of this pattern. CoD Warzone is free to play, so long as you run it on Windows, and not in a VM. Worst of all, this means the burden of moderation has been moved to anti-cheat itself, even though any experienced forum moderator can tell you that moderation itself is based on social interaction, not technical behavior.
  - Dalewyn 4y ago
iepathos 4y ago
Surprised you mention Cyberpunk as a train wreck since it was massively successful and profitable for projekt red even after refunds from low-end platform users. They've sold over 20 million copies at $60/copy. Edgerunners also super successful for them.
- tomnipotent 4y ago
  And it's recent review rating has jumped to 87%, while all-time rating has crawled to 79% from its low 70s launch.
- corbulo 4y ago
  The reason I mentioned Cyberpunk is because it demonstrates a massive change in brand awareness, same for 2042. 5-10 years ago publishers would just ignore outrage and fix the bare minimum quietly and then leave it alone. Think of all the major bugs just left in games in the 00s and 10s, Fallout New Vegas in particular comes to mind. That might be the single game with the worst long term support ive ever seen. They released it in even worse shape, then made it barely functional, released mod tools and never touched it again because the Obsidian & Bethesda relationship fell apart. Today both BF2042 and Cyberpunk are going out of their way to improve their games from launch state and make a marketing effort on behalf of it to recover their brand. Gigantic difference.
  - astrange 4y ago
    Bethesda doesn't even fix bugs in their own games even after rereleasing them 20 times, much less letting any other studio do it. Although they're both Microsoft now, so maybe it can happen.
    - account42 4y ago
      From now on, all Bethesda games will be bug-compatible with their older releases.
ynx 4y ago
Part of it is that a lot of kids who grew up in the current era of games only understand the game that they were handed, where creating servers is easy and matchmaking is table stakes, AA or AAA level production values are "good" and anything else that isn't "stylized" or "retro" is potentially disqualifying. Indies who want to do the right thing face a customer base that doesn't really get it and yells at them for spending times on things they don't understand. So they pivot - making games is already risky enough as it is. Game devs have less courage because too many are funded by publishers rather than self-publishing. Those devs that don't enjoy breakout success are safer but those that make hit games never reap the full benefit of it - publishers take too large a cut - and can't fund themselves into making something bigger, like how Half-Life set the stage for Steam. "Early access" has become a meaningless label, incentivizing the norm towards good-enough games rather than great games, and muddying the waters for truly great games to be recognized as such, because they often don't start that way, but also used as a defensive mechanism against the entitled creeps who think it's okay to harass the social media void with their complaints, not realizing that the people on the other side of it see it and sometimes emotionally react to it. I guess I'm shaking my cane too much, but it's not just the companies going down false paths, it's also people following them down. Put another way, the industry is systematically unhealthy.
- Gigachad 4y ago
  Ultimately as a consumer, I just don't care. Other than for nostalgia purposes, I don't get much enjoyment at all out of playing very old games. For pretty much every style of game, you can get newer, better games that pull off the concepts better. I see gaming like most forms of entertainment which are enjoyed in the moment and then you move on. When I got to a music concert, I don't sit there and record it for watching again 10 years later. I enjoy it in the moment and move on, there will be newer ones to enjoy later.
  - wkat4242 4y ago
    I just finished playing half-life 2 in VR with a third party VR mod and it was amazing how well this game stood up to the test of time. There's really a lot of value in retro and mods IMO. Sure it's not for everyone but what is?
jabroni_salad 4y ago
Battlefield wasn't even EA's worst trainwreck. Look what happened to Anthem. I'd rather sink time into a shoestrung indie studio than anything EA wants to publish, after that.
kehrin 4y ago
Companies have been aware of the reputation gains for over a decade now. Modern Warfare 2 got tons of backlash when it released without a server browser in 2009. The next CoD, Black Ops 1, had support for dedicated servers. So did Modern Warfare 3.
tekknik 4y ago
> Whats most tragic is it's not expensive to just allow players to host it themselves for a game thats already multiplayer. That’s hardly true for modern games. One I’m working on currently would be on the order of a few thousand US a month to run the entire infrastructure. Trimming that down does not help me launch, and only helps the very small minority trying to run a particular game after its death. Most modern games don’t run on a single server piece, it’s distributed.
sobkas 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's infinitely expensive, because older games compete with new ones(not everyone cares for looks and there are mods that can make this argument obsolete). And new ones don't always win. Especially with introduction of game as a service. There are many tactics used by modern developers to squeeze more money from players, that modern gamers don't like. And if gamers had a choice many would go retro. This is why WoW Classic exists. This is why emulation exist. This is why people develop open engines for old games. And this is why it is in developers best interest to prevent their older games from competing with new ones. Especially if people were to learn that they could get free skins for their games in past, while modern ones demand cash for even basic palette swap.

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
My problem with Battlefield 2042 is that it doesn’t feel like battlefield. It feels like some exec asked “what kind of shooters have gotten popular with the kids recently? Let’s rip those off”.

Ygg2 4y ago

Cyberpunk seems unrelated. It will probably age better than any other multiplayer title. The bugs have been patched but not game ruining (for me). T-posing was infrequent, but there were some issues.

corbulo 4y ago
Cyberpunk is related because at launch it was shoving crapware out the door. It actually worked mostly fine on my PC, so its not a personal thing. I love the game. It's the business practice of sending the customer their boots without the sole and toe box sewn together then telling them they get most of the experience earlier this way and theyll stitch it together in a month if they have the time. I agree it will age well, particularly with the right improvements.
- Ygg2 4y ago
  It's caused by ability to patch game later and rushing product to reach impossible deadline on an impossible configuration. Which is only tangentially related. Greed is the true culprit.
  - corbulo 4y ago
    Greed isn't the true culprit. You don't make more money by making any % of your consumer base hate you.
    - Ygg2 4y ago
      If you don't release game by X date and for 5 year old consoles. Your stocks will definitely go down. And CDPR is a publicly traded company. For a publicly traded company, especially one with short term oriented investors, some amount of brand tarnishing is acceptable. For another similar example see Fallout 76.
      - corbulo 4y ago
        Greed being the common denominator makes it not the culprit. If greed were truly the culprit then they would be focused on making the most amount of money possible without constraints. It's poor leadership and short sightedness IMO.
- jeroenhd 4y ago
  My Cyberpunk experience was actually quite good. I didn't try it on day 1, but after a patch or two my pirated copy (wanted to see if my PC could run it before I spent 60 euros on it) ran great. Sure, my poor 1080 can't do max settings or ray tracing or even good DLSS, but the graphics are gorgeous even at mid-low settings. There were (and still are) Skyrim-level bugs, but that didn't bother me too much. I think the people that bought into the hype got severely disappointed and anyone buying the game on consoles simply got scammed, but as someone who bought the game after it had been out for a bit, I've had nothing but fun with it. In fact, one thing CP2077 allows that most other games don't, is backing up the DRM-free installer for the patched game. Steam/PS store/Xbox Online will die one day and all their online patches will disappear forerver, but the GOG versions of most games will run in 20 or 30 years as long as you remember make a backup of the installer.

oliwarner 4y ago

It's copy protection. You can't run a hacked server that ignores license state or hacking bans if you have no access to the server software. They disguise it under a claim of convenience, a feature that you match against similar-experience players, but you're right, it's ultimately an antifeature. Gamers put up with a lot of crap, between exploited ring0 DRM, platform exclusives, the loss of consumer rights (like refunds and resale) and crappy ports from consoles. I don't understand how they get away with it. I might just be old, but I've changed my entire purchasing game strategy to ignore games that fall foul of these things.

oneplane 4y ago
That used to be the case, now it's asset protection because the only way people will pay for skins, hats, virtual shoes, and pink guns is if you can't load arbitrary assets. If a server says: load whatever skin you want... well, why would you pay for it? This is also why modding got killed off, you can't sell people stuff if someone else will make better assets for free and just puts them up for download. Even if integrity or security was a big issue, that's been solved since quake 3 and ut99 with integrity checks and server-side load controls (ironically, the same ones that are now used in locked-down games to make selling different coloured virtual shirts a thing).
thomastjeffery 4y ago
That, and planned-obselescence. I'm sure that EA would love to kill Battlefield 4. But it will never die, because players can run and moderate dedicated servers. Battlefield 1 (newer than 4), on the other hand, died years ago. Battlefield 5 is practically the same game, arguably worse, yet was able to steal most of 1's player base because support (and moderation) were effectively dropped by EA during the release of 5. Anti-cheat is the newest (and deadliest) iteration of this pattern. CoD Warzone is free to play, so long as you run it on Windows, and not in a VM. Worst of all, this means the burden of moderation has been moved to anti-cheat itself, even though any experienced forum moderator can tell you that moderation itself is based on social interaction, not technical behavior.
- Dalewyn 4y ago

iepathos 4y ago

Surprised you mention Cyberpunk as a train wreck since it was massively successful and profitable for projekt red even after refunds from low-end platform users. They've sold over 20 million copies at $60/copy. Edgerunners also super successful for them.

tomnipotent 4y ago
And it's recent review rating has jumped to 87%, while all-time rating has crawled to 79% from its low 70s launch.
corbulo 4y ago
The reason I mentioned Cyberpunk is because it demonstrates a massive change in brand awareness, same for 2042. 5-10 years ago publishers would just ignore outrage and fix the bare minimum quietly and then leave it alone. Think of all the major bugs just left in games in the 00s and 10s, Fallout New Vegas in particular comes to mind. That might be the single game with the worst long term support ive ever seen. They released it in even worse shape, then made it barely functional, released mod tools and never touched it again because the Obsidian & Bethesda relationship fell apart. Today both BF2042 and Cyberpunk are going out of their way to improve their games from launch state and make a marketing effort on behalf of it to recover their brand. Gigantic difference.
- astrange 4y ago
  Bethesda doesn't even fix bugs in their own games even after rereleasing them 20 times, much less letting any other studio do it. Although they're both Microsoft now, so maybe it can happen.
  - account42 4y ago
    From now on, all Bethesda games will be bug-compatible with their older releases.

ynx 4y ago

Part of it is that a lot of kids who grew up in the current era of games only understand the game that they were handed, where creating servers is easy and matchmaking is table stakes, AA or AAA level production values are "good" and anything else that isn't "stylized" or "retro" is potentially disqualifying. Indies who want to do the right thing face a customer base that doesn't really get it and yells at them for spending times on things they don't understand. So they pivot - making games is already risky enough as it is. Game devs have less courage because too many are funded by publishers rather than self-publishing. Those devs that don't enjoy breakout success are safer but those that make hit games never reap the full benefit of it - publishers take too large a cut - and can't fund themselves into making something bigger, like how Half-Life set the stage for Steam. "Early access" has become a meaningless label, incentivizing the norm towards good-enough games rather than great games, and muddying the waters for truly great games to be recognized as such, because they often don't start that way, but also used as a defensive mechanism against the entitled creeps who think it's okay to harass the social media void with their complaints, not realizing that the people on the other side of it see it and sometimes emotionally react to it. I guess I'm shaking my cane too much, but it's not just the companies going down false paths, it's also people following them down. Put another way, the industry is systematically unhealthy.

Gigachad 4y ago
Ultimately as a consumer, I just don't care. Other than for nostalgia purposes, I don't get much enjoyment at all out of playing very old games. For pretty much every style of game, you can get newer, better games that pull off the concepts better. I see gaming like most forms of entertainment which are enjoyed in the moment and then you move on. When I got to a music concert, I don't sit there and record it for watching again 10 years later. I enjoy it in the moment and move on, there will be newer ones to enjoy later.
- wkat4242 4y ago
  I just finished playing half-life 2 in VR with a third party VR mod and it was amazing how well this game stood up to the test of time. There's really a lot of value in retro and mods IMO. Sure it's not for everyone but what is?

jabroni_salad 4y ago

Battlefield wasn't even EA's worst trainwreck. Look what happened to Anthem. I'd rather sink time into a shoestrung indie studio than anything EA wants to publish, after that.

kehrin 4y ago

Companies have been aware of the reputation gains for over a decade now. Modern Warfare 2 got tons of backlash when it released without a server browser in 2009. The next CoD, Black Ops 1, had support for dedicated servers. So did Modern Warfare 3.

tekknik 4y ago

> Whats most tragic is it's not expensive to just allow players to host it themselves for a game thats already multiplayer. That’s hardly true for modern games. One I’m working on currently would be on the order of a few thousand US a month to run the entire infrastructure. Trimming that down does not help me launch, and only helps the very small minority trying to run a particular game after its death. Most modern games don’t run on a single server piece, it’s distributed.

sobkas 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's infinitely expensive, because older games compete with new ones(not everyone cares for looks and there are mods that can make this argument obsolete). And new ones don't always win. Especially with introduction of game as a service. There are many tactics used by modern developers to squeeze more money from players, that modern gamers don't like. And if gamers had a choice many would go retro. This is why WoW Classic exists. This is why emulation exist. This is why people develop open engines for old games. And this is why it is in developers best interest to prevent their older games from competing with new ones. Especially if people were to learn that they could get free skins for their games in past, while modern ones demand cash for even basic palette swap.