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It's wild that they get away with charging for it
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this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2024
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Yeah? Who pays for the servers that run your matches?
It may be unpopular to hear, but game prices don't completely cover the cost of development and definitely don't cover server operation costs every month.
And if devs raised prices, you'd be complaining about that too.
PC games do just fine without a subscription model (for the most part).
Not always. It feels like it's pretty often I hear about an indie MP game concept I like, but due to low popularity, the servers were taken offline.
Granted, that'd be an issue anytime it's unpopular, but at least a game with 2-digit playership can still just have some friends in the last remaining server.
You don't need dedicated servers for online multiplayer. Locally hosting games used to be the norm.
You don't need them, but it's much more desirable. A lot of PC multiplayer games run dedicated servers which someone pays for.
You don't need to pay for your own dedicated server on PC either. You can do that for free, on your own computer, in your own house. Somehow game companies managed to convince people that all this has to be paid for. It's just rent seeking behavior.
Would you rather have an unstable dedicated server running on someone's home PC, or a stable paid for server that is up 24/7? It's always been possible to run your own dedicated servers, but 3rd party hosting has always been there too, for good reason.
I don't think it was the games companies that convinced people. There's always been a demand. There's a hell of a lot of games server hosting companies out there making money.
Yeah, you can host a game of CS for your friends, but do you really want to host a 200 player Rust server that needs 24/7 uptime on your home PC?
Nope. while it might be true for small independent game developers it's totally false for big company, like MS just a fifth of the profit they paid to shareholders is enough to run good server for like five years
Games from big companies, except the games that went flop, or F2P games, or the game that purposefully sell at low price in order to sell other forms of microtransactions, then most games are profitable
they don't have to rely on monthly subscription to be profitable but the problem for them is "the profit is not high enough" and that's why they do this
just a fifth of the profit they paid to shareholders is enough to run good server for like five years
Xbox doesn't make nearly that much profit compared to MS as a whole. And the cost of building and running a low latency, graphically powerfull data centre in every major region is actually massive.
Then consider that the subscription not only pays for the data centre but also pays the game devs themselves, then you'll see they're not actually money grubbing super villains for this.
The cost is minimal. There's a reason why it's still free on PC. Additionally, you could offer a free option by letting users host their own servers, but that would go against the walled garden bullshit that lets them charge so much for such a cheap service. In fact, I don't know if it's changed since the earlier days, but many console games had games hosted on user consoles anyway, it's just the initial matchmaking which uses the company's servers.
What if the game is P2P?
I believe most of the games in the early days of Online, for consoles, were P2P (flashbacks of people shouting "host advantage!")
lost connection to local host memories from black ops 2
Insecure (you get everyone's IP addresses, if you find a vulnerability you may be able to execute code on user's computers instead of just a server)
Prone to significant lag (one person's bad internet can affect everyone).
I'm sure there's quite a bit more reasons that I can't think of now though
While this is true, the chances of it happening is pretty rare. Just because you have my IP doesn't mean much. Sure you can scan for stuff like open ports and you can easily ddos in a lot of cases, but running a program on another players computer takes a lot more work.
Search news articles for "upnp".
I don't think the plethora of tweens and overworked parents are staying on top of issues like these.
What year is it for you dude
They do cover it - The only thing you're defending her are "shareholder profits".
Normalize LESS of a win for the endless growth fucks. They'll still win plenty.