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I'm all for free online console gaming, but servers and maintenance needs to get paid.
How do you think it works for PC games?
Traditionally, we the players paid for the servers. If it was a server browser game like counter strike, the various clans would pay for their own servers. Companies that sold gaming servers would also host some as an advertisement of how good their servers were
Peer to peer?
P2P if it's free and expected to last.
If it's a separate server, I don't see that as infinitely sustainable for most companies.
Hahaha...
GTA5 is P2P with a central component.
So if R* kills the servers, your game is done for without modding.You need some entry point into a peer-to-peer network in order to make connections with peers. This often takes the form of a central server. In theory you can do have it be a bit more decentralized and have an initial list of peers to try to connect to who can then communicate about other peers, but you still need this initial entry point which is a potential point of failure long term, and I don’t think any games actually do this?
So… Technically speaking, in order to reliably connect peers most games are going to rely on a central server, which does technically cost some money to run, though it should be much cheaper to host than a proper game server which will actually be running the game and physics and stuff server side. With older games like quake you could easily connect to a server even without the master server (though you wouldn’t be able to use the server browser) and it was not terribly difficult to replace the master server with an alternative one.
Such a lame argument. 1) so you're suggesting they don't make money by selling the game? 2) you don't think gamers wouldn't prefer to host servers themselves if they had the option?
Big mistake. Seriously, Lemmy has this weird thing about not paying for anything. From music, movies to games. From being a massive open source community you'd expect them to understand things are not free.
Imagine buying a game, then buying a subscription to play it online, only for the company to drop support for the game and because they never released the server software, you just own dead software now. I'm fine with buying software to support the devs, but it sucks that you can't play disconnected games because some suit wanted to maximize profits.
Yep. I’ve noticed a lot of people on this site find the tiniest reason to try and justify their pirating and why they’re totally not stealing (or, if they are, it’s always morally justified, somehow). Not saying there aren’t times where piracy is justified (DRM, anyone?), but it’s certainly a lot less than this site would have you believe.
Then let us run private servers. It use to be that I could buy a copy of Unreal Tournament or Quake and the server hosting software would either come with the game or could be downloaded elsewhere for free. I could then run the server on my own computer and internet connect or buy server space from a third party.
Unless you pay them for internet bandwidth, there's no servers needed for internet access on the side of Microsoft
I know you're getting down voted into oblivion (or at least as much as one can on Lemmy), but you're 100% correct. For a social media platform dominated by nerds who worship Linux, there are a lot of people here who seemingly don't understand how networking and servers actually work.
I feel bad for the people running the instances
For someone so confident, you don't seem to know how business works. They aren't charging a subscription to pay for servers exactly, that's just an excuse. They charge because it's the most profitable option. They take a cut of game sales, which more than makes up for server costs.
Game companies have to pay to host the servers for their games and they usually don't charge a subscription. If they did people would avoid their games. Console developers can because (they think) you don't have a choice. If the subscription cost them customers, they'd stop doing it.
Steam has to host the same servers they do. Steam doesn't have a subscription though. They just take a portion of sales, like console manufacturers also do, to pay for it. If that's possible, clearly a subscription isn't required.
Just recently Microsoft lifted the need to have a subscription to play free games though, it was always just a block.