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this post was submitted on 01 Dec 2023
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Online gaming requires servers to run, and servers require money. Either the game is more expensive, the online is a subscription, or you have to run the server yourself. There are games that do each of these.
Edit: or microtransactions. Fuck microtransactions.
Normalizing needless online servers is part of the issue here (only with AAA titles). These companies set up servers and say shit like "well it has to be paid for somehow!"
Games like Diablo 4 where you need internet to play single player. Diablo 2 resurrection removed all the LAN/Self hosting features of original D2.
Blizzard isn't the only company doing this either.
Fuck that noise.
That said, with the prices being where they are, a single subscriber basically funds the entire cost of running the server.
Not exactly. Electricity aside, servers also require maintenance. That requires server admins. Those don't come cheap.
Edit: also network costs. With the requirement of handling high user numbers at stupidly low latency levels, they'll need a seperate internet connection from corp and the data service will also not be cheap.
Then solve the problem the same way the PC industry did by allowing anyone to host the server.
Which has its own drawbacks. Community servers are great for something like Battlefield/Battlebit where a single server covers 30-128 players. Less so for smaller groups and as games "die". Time has no meaning, but I want to say it was mid 00s Unreal Tournament (so after 2k3/2k4 came out, but while UT was still alive) where it increasingly became nigh impossible to find servers not running instagib or "pro" mods. Which made sense since it was mostly the various clans making their servers public when they weren't practicing.
But also? Look at a live game like Destiny or Warframe. For the purely PVE content, you can get away with users running listen servers. And just ask any Warframe player about how much we just LOVE host migration. But once you add any form of competitive aspect, that is no longer viable. And community hosted servers for eight players in a matchmaking queue are just not going to be a thing.
On the console side of things? That monthly fee covers (some) game servers but also the content servers to download all the patches and games.
On the PC side? Generally you are either dependent on a major publisher/studio that can afford to leave a few racks running in a closet while they make new games. And you are fucked when they realize that and shut down the game. Or you hope that it is subsidized by DLC and microtransactions.
And, if it is your primary platform, I think the multiplayer fees on consoles (other than switch) are handled pretty well these days. You aren't paying for halo matchmaking. You are paying for an instant game collection every month and gamepass. Which is more or less exactly what sony did after clowning on MS for charging money.
Bruh, peer to peer is a thing.
To be fair though peer to peer has some fairly big flaws like giving other people your IP and in some implementations the connection speed for everyone is set by the weakest link.
True but you are still at the end of the day giving the host your IP still, it just can't be seen by the other players by normal means.
That just falls under host it yourself to me.
If I had it my way this is exactly how it would work.
Alas, even non-Valve PC games are moving away from that model unfortunately.
There is also peer to peer which is basically the same way torrents work
It's too bad every dev runs their own (often piss-poor) servers instead of giving us dedicated server hosting software to run our own. Can't go back to those days even if we wanted!
GameSpy was such dog shit tho
You got some hella rose tinted glasses on my guy.
GameSpy was a bloated piece of garbage that is only fondly remembered because the other options were worse. It crashed constantly which ripped you out of your game and it performed this trick especially often right when the game launched.
Ping was always wrong, lobbies displayed as full when they weren't, server filtering was non-existent, required login every time you disconnected...
I was thrilled to move off of it to basically anything else
Bloated? It literally did 1 thing, and that was give you a list of servers that you could filter, despite your attestation it had no filtering.
All Seeing Eye was often considered better; though I remember it being exactly the same program just with a different name.
All it did with the game was connect you to the server you selected using the game's own commands. If GameSpy itself crashed after you've connected to the server, the game wouldn't be affected.
You sure you're thinking about GameSpy?
That was probably just your connection
I’m not sure what you mean. PC games usually run on your PC, unless you’re streaming. It’s the multiplayer server software that run on servers. And the servers are paid for by the company that makes the game, usually. Or the publisher. The actual server hardware is rented from cloud providers, if that’s what you mean. Servers aren’t free, that’s my point. If you want multiplayer online functionality, someone has to pay for the server. And ultimately that cost gets passed on to you, the end user.
I wish more games would let us run the servers ourselves these days. Too many of them won’t even let you if you want to.
Dont grt it twisted the main thing a subscription is funding is shareholder value.
Most modern games do not have server software to run your own. And yet they don't cost extra to play online on PC. Hm. 🤔
Most companies aren’t in the business of giving away free services, and it’s wild to expect them to be. You wouldn’t expect a landscaping business to do all your landscaping for free after you pay for the first time.
I don't expect to have to pay another company to walk across my own lawn
Alright, then play games where you can host your own server. There are plenty. That doesn’t work for all games though (particularly ranked games where the server software has to be verified or people could easily cheat), so you’ll be limited in what you can play.
I'm not super familiar with current console allowances, but are you suggesting that people can just "host their own server" and not pay the psn or Xbox live fees that are forced onto them? I just don't think that's true. You have to pay the fee to connect to any server, even your own.
The problem is that there aren’t plenty. Every year number of online games that allow you to host your own server decreases.
First of all, this is wrong. Free to play is an insanely profitable business model.
But also it's wrong because non-F2P multiplayer games aren't a free service. You paid $60/$70 for the game, and whatever the cost of the servers is would have been factored into the sale price. The per-unit cost of hosting an online game is nowhere near the cost of the game, especially back in the day when most "servers" were just a matchmaking service for P2P game clients.
Nowadays, the cost of running a multiplayer game is lower than ever. Cloud hosting gives a ton of flexibility to design an online service that is affordable to run, not to mention the money printing machine that are microtransactions (often sold in non-F2P games that also require a subscription to play).
Online subscriptions are not meant to cover server/hosting costs. They're a monopoly tax from the platform holder, who can charge you money to connect to the internet simply because they can, and they know you have no other option.
tell me more about how landscaping with physical labor and materials is just like having a server turned on
What do you know, all three happened because of the unrelenting pursuit of profit.
All three happened because servers actually cost money. Do you give away things for free to strangers on the internet?
There’s no profit in letting users run their own servers, btw.
Yes, there is. They make the game more expensive, charge a subscription, and then cut all the cost of hosting. That is where the industry is heading.
How much money do you pay to login to Mozilla/Chrome/Edge to make this post?
Various PC games before and after Xbox do not charge anything just to be online. it's not an outright requirement. To add consoles usually restrict internet entirely, which is a completely different thing from hosting rounds.
Your second sentence is closer to what the actual reason is, and goes more in line with rockslayer's post.
edit: I will concede that browsers aren't locked anymore behind the payment models it seems. But I will still stand by that everyone is arguing as if individual games don't have to do this, but i'm fairly certain still that no P2P or just outright free online games exist on consoles, which makes the argument moot.
Hperrin your getting continuously downvoted here, perhaps that should be a good wakeup call to step back and look at why you are being downvoted
This is basically an argument for itemizing any and all things that can be articulated tbh. I don't pay a "kitchen" fee or an "electrical" fee or a "dishwasher" fee when I go to a restaurant. They calculate what things cost on the whole then price accordingly. That's how 95% of non-single-item transactions occur.
I'm not even necessarily against the concept of paying for the service on consoles (I kind of go back and forth on it personally) but this argument simply doesn't hold water.
Peer To Peer
Look it up
Your comment is exactly the same type I'd see from toxic users on reddit arguing that people should pay because Microsoft hosts servers for multiplayer and that the commenter gladly pays for it whenever I'd go to look at reddit posts calling out bullshit on pay walled multiplayer on consoles