Remember the days when the server component was included with the base game? Anyone could launch a server and play with friends and strangers online. I miss those days.
Now we get a company deciding it is not worth maintaining the infrastructure and an entire part of a game is gone forever.
Private servers were so much better than matchmaking in my opinion, there was a sense of community to the game and you would make friends. Now playing with randoms (all of them in their own private discord parties) feels like playing with NPCs.
What always pissed me off is when they didn't have private servers and in fact charged you a monthly fee for multiplayer and still made one of the players act as host, giving that person a massive latency advantage.
Agreed. I played TF2 for a while, found the No Heroes servers, liked the community, paid the $4/month for an account. You got guaranteed slots and they had over a dozen servers for different maps. They used their own sound effects so if someone was stacking kills or whatever it would play announcer or musical clips. It was fun and added a bit of excitement. Of course you get to know the regulars, say hello and even make friends and chat on Steam. I've lost contact with all of them but its okay, what we had during the time it existed was nice.
After a while, like everything else I moved on and didn't play for years. One day I decided to install TF2 for kicks and in its place was a different game. I played for maybe 15 minutes, lost interest and uninstalled the game. I wanted to see what happened to No Heroes and found that they had closed up shop a year prior. I was saddened and honestly very turned off to the game which is why it was uninstalled.
Its because of this loss of community that I have ZERO interest in modern multiplayer gaming. Now its all about ranking so its just an Ego/dopamine boosting machine. I just wanna play a game and have fun. I could care less about rankings, they mean nothing.
Also you would have some shared values about how you enjoy playing the game from hardcore competitive to just goofing around, instead of throwing everyone into one or two queues and letting them rage at each other for ruining each other's fun.
A lot of private servers are actually reverse engineered from game binaries. It takes a lot of dedication and a lot of time in IDA/Ghidra to accomplish. You basically run your own copy of the backend and a patched client that connects to your backend.
When I was a teenager I remember playing on MapleStory private servers, and the backend was reverse engineered from the client. GTA private servers are also popular nowadays.
I don't really know where I'm going with this comment but you can always develop your own private server for a game if you have a team that's dedicated enough.
Team Fortress matchmaking will match you to their official servers, and sometimes even on third party servers. TF also has a server browser where you can select which third or first party servers to join. You can also join directly via IP, if the matchmaking service ever goes offline.
I always said Starcraft Broodwar Got big in spite of Blizzard. The way they locked Starcraft 2 made it clear it'll die sooner than later, now the moment they decide to plug the plug on the SC2 servers it's gone.
Private/Community servers don't require self-hosting. E.g. in the Battlefield franchise the community for BF3 and BF4 is still going quite strong despite there being 3 successors since. And the reason is that people can play with the same people every night. The successors (BFI, BFV, BF20something) are completely uninteresting to me since there is simply no sense of community. I don't get the point in "matchmaking" even for casual gaming.
It doesn't get much easier to get quickly into a game with people ready to play than matchmaking usually.
However, consistently playing with and against the same people is not as much a thing of course.
The upside of matchmaking hence is no scheduling and waiting, the downside is playing with whoever is online anywhere instead of a familiar group.
When WoW added cross realms to PvP battlegrounds it was an eye opener as to how good our realm's community was. Queue times got better, but the enjoyment dropped through the floor.
I remember, but I also remember the downside - that as the game got older joining a server became a shit-show.
By the end there was literally one CS server I trusted to be friendly and busy and not running "rpg-mod" or "zombie-mod" or a thousand other adjustments I didn't like, such as "no-awp", "price adjusted" etc.
Just finding a vanilla experience became difficult, doubly so if you wanted more than "dust/dust2 only".
Add in the fact that these servers could send your computer files (in theory just maps, sounds and decals, but difficult to secure of course), and you can see why companies shy away, not just to have greater control of the experience.
> Add in the fact that these servers could send your computer files (in theory just maps, sounds and decals, but difficult to secure of course), and you can see why companies shy away, not just to have greater control of the experience.
Oh please. That's corporate apologia.
I mean, yeah, those concerns are real but 99.9% of the reasons they aren't doing it anymore is that having a monopoly over servers give them better control over monetization.
Back when you could mod counter strike locally, skin packs etc.. (I'm sure that even before that when you could mod how others saw you.., but that may be rose tinted glasses).. so much fun.
It's obvious why they stopped it eventually (pldecal.wad pretty much became obligatory porn sprays everywhere), but those were the days.
I think they should be legally required to provide it honestly. The support period for games is getting shorter every year. I mean Unreal Tournament is from 1999, so 23 years old, hats off they were still running servers for it, that's honestly very good. But take Overwatch for example instead, people paid what, $50 for it? That's a game that's online only and is no longer possible to play since Overwatch 2 was released. It was only 6 years old and I'm sure many people prefer it over Overwatch 2, but they can't play it even though they paid for it.
I honestly think it's kinda fucked up that this is legal. It shouldn't be.
The release of Overwatch 2 wasn't the end of the original Overwatch. The Overwatch game that came out in 2016 hasn't existed in a long time. That game had 12 playable characters. The game was changed and that 12 character version stopped existing less than a year after the game came out. Now there's 32 characters with vastly different skills and play styles, really changing the game. The maps are different. Even the original 12 characters have had some changes.
Should it have been illegal for them to add characters to the game? It's not what I originally paid for. They took away the original Overwatch the second they rebalanced or added characters.
This wouldn't work with games nowadays. Or let's rephrase is: it would discourage game developers to develop these type of games. If Blizzard would make private servers for Overwatch available, that would mean people wouldn't care about buying cosmetics from Blizzard. Same goes for games like League of Legends, Fortnite and even Call of Duty nowadays. If you can have your own private servers, you just unlock everything. I see that as a consumer you would want that to be a thing, but from a developers point of view other ventures get more attractive and we wouldn't have those games anymore.
It’s honestly difficult to imagine a bigger waste of governmental resources and time than legislating that computer game developers must legally provide server software for their multi-player games.
They still are sometimes - I was fiddling around with Steam and in my "Library" I accidentally clicked a dropdown which displayed "GAMES" and "TOOLS" as options - clicking "TOOLS" filtered on a bunch of interesting SDKs and Dedicated Servers (DayZ, Arma 3, Half-Life, Just Cause 2, and such - loads of which I don't even own or play). It's not perfect and it's far from comprehensive, but there are some games which offer this still
If it were only games. I remember an assistive technology product, roughly 6 years ago, which was a barcode reader plus online DB. Until the company went bust, and the device magically transformed into a brick.
A lot of the lightbulbs in my house have a similar model: they are basically controlled by a remote server somewhere, not owned by me. I ask the server to please turn my lights on.
This may be the one of the few true benefits of Web3/decentralization. As long as people see value in the network, it will stay online. Even if it's just a few people.
These days aren't gone for good though. Look on Steam how many games offer LAN support or dedicated servers for instance (server browsers are a different topic unfortunately)
It's just that gamers in the past have voted too weakly against the managed MP infrastructure in some subgenres and triple A moats... Don't know whether anyone is still protesting this or whether newer generations don't even know what's happened here.
I don't really buy that "vote with your wallet" argument. It's not like you really have a choice. People can't decide to buy their favorite game with our without an open infrastructure. For example of you want to play StarCraft 2 on LAN with your friends or even only a similar game you just can't. It does not exist. If there is only one candidate then it's not really a vote, is it?
I think battlefield 4 (pc) has the best of both worlds: official servers and community hosted ones. It had its drawbacks, however: community servers often spoofed player count and you would end up joining almost empty lobbies when you thought it was a full server.
Also, when the playerbase was declining, it felt harder to find servers that you enjoyed to play on.
Overall I felt it was a great experience. I hope more games take this approach in the future.
> Remember the days when the server component was included with the base game? Anyone could launch a server and play with friends and strangers online. I miss those days.
I hear you, but several of the games in this particular announcement seem like they're from that era:
* Unreal Gold
* Unreal II: The Awakening
* Unreal Tournament 2003
* Unreal Tournament 2004
* Unreal Tournament 3
* Unreal Tournament: Game of the Year Edition
IIRC, back then the games usually shipped with the server component and all servers were run by players, and the publisher only ran a simple directory server.
Since those directory servers were so simple, I think I seen cases where someone cloned them, then batched the binary to just to go a different address for the directory.
Honestly the saddest part is how you could have both the private servers and matchmaking almost seamlessly, have official servers flagged for matchmaking and allow for a server browser like csgo, team fortress 2, etc, and yet so many act as if it was exclusively one or the other. As a big titanfall2 fan this is just infuriating since the game has been unplayable pretty much due to years long dos attacks on the servers that the company doesn't give a shit to fix, nor releases some form of dedicated servers for players to host themselves. The game is even in a modified source engine iirc.
> Honestly the saddest part is how you could have both the private servers and matchmaking almost seamlessly
Not true, having to pick a server to join by yourself out of a list was an essential part of the classic online experience and the existence of any kind of matchmaking system harms it.
Team Fortress 2 is a prime example of this, originally it only had a server browser and the community felt most "alive" during this time. Then they added a basic matchmaking system that could place you on community servers, but only if they ran stock maps and settings, which heavily discouraged running any kind of modded or customized server, and significantly harmed any servers with a strong sense of community since you had random players, often fresh F2P installs that were barely distinguishable from bots, joining servers with no intention of ever playing on them more than once. Then they replaced that with the full official-only matchmaking we have today, which killed most of the remaining servers and associated communities.
I miss days where gaming magazines had CDs filled with demos which you could test before the purchase - tho it was more possible that friend of friend had pirated full version you could borrow.
Worser still, some actively patch_destroy their own older games that have a more active community (due to superior game balance, less monetization etc.) to drive growth towards the new game.
I still (mostly) limit my multiplayer gaming to games with that available via Steam.
ARK, Valheim, etc. If games come out and I have to rely on their server or rent one, it's a pass for me, especially if I can't play privately with my group of friends.
I've been using Battle.net though... for about 15 years, I'd only do LAN, or LAN over VPN (Hamachi), but the ease of use was, of course, much better on Battle.net.
yeah, lazy devs or they're just herding everyone to their own servers where they can mine data for more profits? Either way, looks like a prime business opportunity to test out a recent addition to DMCA exemptions to allow supporting "abandoned" servers. If the users are there and willing to pay.
Yeah, I made multiplayer games in those days. Very few people played relative today and you had so much lag. You really had to build your game to accept 0.5 sec lag. There is a lot to be said for today.
OpenSpy has similar options for the other Unreal games. Some require patching. Their code is open source and on Github.
https://github.com/chc/openspy-core-v2
The latest Unreal Tournament will soon be gone however, it may never return as it was never finished.
Its strange that Unreal Tournament was kind of abandoned by Epic. It was such a great game in every way- so far ahead of its time. Even today Unreal Engine is probably the best off the shelf 3D game engine available.
I am surprised that they dont make more of the franchise. If they repackaged UT2004 with the new engine (UT2023) I would play the hell out of it.
The Unreal franchise was Epic's flagship product for many years. UT is a natural platform for esports (cf. CS:GO). Sure, UT might not be casual enough for everyone, and Epic was right to focus on Fortnite when it blew up, but why Epic hasn't marketed UT as an "elite" gaming product and put it at the top of its esports food chain is beyond me. I would expect it to provide a halo effect for the rest of their products. (And besides, there is so much untapped IP in the Unreal universe)
I think Epic have been looking at ID’s various attempts at making a modernised or esports friendly Quake (arguably UT’s prime competitor at the time), and believe there’s no market or demand for it.
They were working on it when fortnite got big, in fact it was kind of a cool experiment where they involved the community in the process and development, halfway crowdsourced in a way. But when fortnite got big the team got moved to that, so here we are.
We need legislation/conventions/culture of opensourcing server software if a game/service is abandoned, to easily self-host or if a third party platform wants to take over stewardship of hosting a specific service. Just update a url in your game config to point to the new provider/server.
That probably will never happen because the a lot of developers don't even own 100% of the server software. The original Doom's open source release stripped out the audio library they used and removed calls to it in the source code. Software has gotten a lot more complicated since then.
Like Half-Life 1 is based on idTech, so they would need id/Bethesda/Microsoft's permission. Maybe they could release it under GPL, because idTech grants that license, but that would required everything else in the game would have to be released under GPL too. That would be pretty hard if they used anyone else's proprietary libraries.
Moving onto Half-Life 2, it uses Havok IIRC. A license for that starts at 5 figures.
Thats true of the client code, but the backend servers? I think its far less likely to not be as open, and honestly even if they release a version of the backend servers that's just close sourced, I dont think anyone would care. It doesnt stop people from enjoying Counter-Strike or G-Mod in 2022.
100%, even at the very least they should release some docs on how one might re-implement a backend. I get it might not be possible to release the server code especially if there's other services involved but that could be up to the community preserving the game if they want to re-implement everything.
Just add a requirement to declare for how long the online part of the game will continue to work. With the loophole of it being "infinite" if you allow community servers.
While not that unexpected, I'm curious to see if this will start a trend that other game publishers might follow. I'm mainly curious about when Blizzard will deem the cost-benefit analysis to swing in favor of shutting down their old battle.net service which hosts games like StarCraft 1, Diablo 2, and WarCraft 3.
For StarCraft 1 specifically (and its Remastered version), a few us have been building a custom server/launcher[0] which should at least ensure that the game/community doesn't completely die out. However, we still rely on Blizzard's online services to verify the in-game purchases, like HD graphics (the game will automatically stop rendering the HD graphics if you didn't log into Blizzard's services in the last 30 days).
It remains to be seen how this will be handled by Blizzard if (when?) the time comes.
I'm no fan of Craptivision, but to their credit, Blizzard has maintained their old games for a VERY long time and continued to provide updates for years and years and years, much longer than most MMOs survive, all without a monthly fee. And once in a while they'll remake old titles with more modern engines.
I've never seen a company turn a game around like Blizzard did with Diablo 3 -- from the shitty real money auction house to probably the gaming world's single best loot system.
If we want to talk user-hostile, many EA games like Mass Effect don't even let you play different classes without spending hundreds of dollars in lootboxes. It's ridiculous.
Diablo 2 resurrected is supposed to use the old code with a “graphics” uplift. When it first hit they were having some battle.net issues, on the blog they spoke about dealing with legacy code and challenges.
Fear not, it has already started. Blizzard shut down Overwatch 1 (a paid game) a few days before the launch of Overwatch 2 (a free game AFAIK) so the games wouldn't compete with each other.
>>I'm mainly curious about when Blizzard will deem the cost-benefit analysis
3-6mos after the MS deals closes will be my prediction, or 2mos after the deal is blown up by the US Government and Activision starts massive cost-cutting
I don't see epic being a better alternative to Steam.
Steam sucks, is anti consumer but Epic is even worse.
They don't even allow communication or rating.
Isn't Epic also mayorly Chinese owned?
And their constant pushing that I should install and run their service all the time, even try to trick me into installing it is also very suspicious.
I will not run some game selling platform's service in the background all the time, even if it's just on a gaming machine.
Bad enough my graphics drivers run harmful spyware in the background (nvidia).
Then their return policy is the same as Valve's 2h and I have to waive my 14 day right of withdrawal from the purchase.
Replace shit with more smelly shit.
Agreed. I haven't come across a store/library system in any ecosystem that I'd prefer. In fact, I feel like Steam is a model for other places like e-books, movies & tv streaming, etc.
Is Steam perfect? No. But Amazon Prime gives me the shivers after they arbitrarily pulled movies from libraries after purchase intentionally and without refund. Audible/Kindle tries selling me while I'm in my library, etc.
Either developers are locking their users into Epic/Steam/Apple/PlayStation in exchange for services/users, or they're rolling your own solution with PlayFab/Nakama/Pragma and are stuck footing the bill once their game fades away. Both business models are bad for developers and gamers.
Now for the sameless self plug: we wanted to solve these problems but with a business model that primarily serves developers at Rivet (W23).
Instead, we offer cross-platform console-like services as a REST API for free (friends, parties, leaderboards) and only charge for services that help developers build/grow their games (multiplayer servers, matchmaking, CDN, database). Our #1 priority is providing the best services possible to developers. There's no incentive to rent-seek or lock in your users since we're a services company, not a platform company. Any data your users generate is yours to keep.
Regarding operating legacy multiplayer servers: We plan to let users pay for their own game servers instead of developers fronting the cost. This way, developers can operate legacy games at no cost by letting users "own" their servers and easily enable custom game servers. It's like allowing users to self-host games but without having to open-source your software. Plus, many games can't run as a standalone binary and need the supporting infrastructure.
It's a host DRM, and many games also integrate with steamworks, making it an embedded DRM that can prevent your games from launching without a connection even if they otherwise wouldn't need one. As others have said, this is inferior to both GOG, and physical media, except a large percentage of physical media now also does not function without the aid of online DRM.
Valve will refund games past the 2h window if you have a reasonable reason. I had to the other day when I just couldn't get a game running despite following all of the community suggestions. Ended up going over the 2h window without realizing it and they approved the refund without issue.
Valve's refund policy before they made it better was probably the closest to anti-consumer you could call them. In many countries it was straight up illegal and had to get put through court before they would give you the rights you had as an australian citizen for example.
Epic Games gives a free game every single week and has done so for the past couple years at least. Many of these are fairly big titles. Around Christmas they have done a free game every day.
They’re very pro indie dev on the unreal side. I don’t mind steam but epic is clearly the better choice for me.
This is sad. I would love that every company running multiplayer game servers publish the server code / binary so anyone can host it. Some of those games still have big communities and now they will be unusable.
Also, this issue is even worse with game updates. You cannot even play single-player games when critical updates are no longer available. Now that games are sold without finishing them, game updates are required unfortunately.
Who breaks it though? For example Hatoful Boyfriend haven't been updated for years, Macs moved to 64bit only so it was essentially unplayable on modern Macs.
Is it the devs fault, are you obliged to update your game forever?
Is it Apple's fault for the lack of backwards compatibility?
Epic was selling a broken game so they must remove it.
Btw that happened on Steam too now they only sell the Windows version.
That's a different issue. These games are written to require an online component that Epic are rescinding access to. This isn't about what Epic is selling either, it's about them effectively bricking what they've already sold.
Assuming Hatoful still works for the users who bought it on the hardware/OS that they bought it for then it's not a good comparison.
It feels different when a game has a server and a client component. I can choose to airgap my ancient Macbook and never update it if I want to keep playing that particular game on that particular computer.
I can also play it on Linux, and Linux can run on Mac hardware.
All of that sounds like a pain in the ass, and if the game is not worth the trouble I'll just not go through the trouble. But I am the one who makes the choice, not the owner of some proprietary server.
I can play the game in the hardware that it was advertised to work at the time, 32bit(?) macs, the same way I can play a ps2 game on a ps2 but not a ps5.
Removing official servers when there is no alternative means I can't use the product on the platform it was listed to work at.
The problem is they offered you a service that was unsustainable in the first place. You can't offer a one time sale for a product that requires continual maintenance.
In all cases where this is being offered with a product, for example, a game with developer maintained multiplayer servers/lookup services, all app portals like the apple app store, steam, etc. There is either a runway of funds built in that will expire in so many years or it's propped up by other people buying the game like a kind of a Ponzi scheme.
Eventually, somehow the bill to run these services becomes an issue and there are only a few ways to maintain it: ads, buyout with more runway, cutting access or charging for it again.
So I wouldn't say it's theft, it's a business run by people who have no clue how to run a long term business plan. Or fraud if they know all of this and do it anyway.
Well, some hosting costs also go down over time. If the backend server doesn't need a GPU and is just there to facilitate matchmaking for example, what used to be very difficult and required dedicated companies (like Gamespy) can now just be trivially and cheaply/freely rolled into Steamworks or similar matchmaking APIs.
Ongoing patches and updates are another story though, especially if new Windowses or DirectX versions have breaking changes.
I guaranteed whatever license you never agreed to doesn’t actually say you bought the game. More like a license to play the game as long as parent company sees fit.
I don't think it would count as theft, but if the original advertising/product information included the online components as a feature, then they could be sued for that. I remember when Sony pulled the Linux support from PS3 as that was a similar situation although even more anti-consumer.
If you pay $20 for a game on sale and it works for half a decade and has multiplayer and updates throughout, is it really necessary to complain about it...?
What exactly are they stealing from you? If you bought a car in the 1970's and the company doesn't make parts for it anymore is that theft? What obligation do they have to maintain?
That is a poor analogy as you could still pull parts from other cars and repair and continue to use the car after the manufacturer stops creating replacements.
A better analogy would be: If you bought a car in 1970 and the company stopped making the super special fuel blend that they have a patent on and no one else is allowed to produce, making your car unusable. Is that theft?
I think yours is a good analogy. Original creators have no obligations whatsoever, they have to maintain the server part for a time, and that's it. People might be up about it, but they should realize that this is part of the original deal. Closed source and software as service models naturally work like this, and it's not entirely the manufacturer's fault that people get the short end like this. They had the short end to begin with. And it's not like it's unreasonable to sunset a game from the early 2000s, with server and other features right in the open. People can and do run the stuff themselves just fine.
More like, they decide to stop supporting the car, so they come to your house and take the distributor cap (ECU would be a better analogy) and there response is "well you should have known we only license the distributor cap".
Readit News
Now we get a company deciding it is not worth maintaining the infrastructure and an entire part of a game is gone forever.
"Have you opened the right ports on your router? Okay, what kind of router do you have? Who provides your internet? Okay, go to http://192.168..."
After a while, like everything else I moved on and didn't play for years. One day I decided to install TF2 for kicks and in its place was a different game. I played for maybe 15 minutes, lost interest and uninstalled the game. I wanted to see what happened to No Heroes and found that they had closed up shop a year prior. I was saddened and honestly very turned off to the game which is why it was uninstalled.
Its because of this loss of community that I have ZERO interest in modern multiplayer gaming. Now its all about ranking so its just an Ego/dopamine boosting machine. I just wanna play a game and have fun. I could care less about rankings, they mean nothing.
When I was a teenager I remember playing on MapleStory private servers, and the backend was reverse engineered from the client. GTA private servers are also popular nowadays.
I don't really know where I'm going with this comment but you can always develop your own private server for a game if you have a team that's dedicated enough.
Team Fortress matchmaking will match you to their official servers, and sometimes even on third party servers. TF also has a server browser where you can select which third or first party servers to join. You can also join directly via IP, if the matchmaking service ever goes offline.
Still getting those vibes with some games like Hell Let Loose but it's a dying breed!
It doesn't get much easier to get quickly into a game with people ready to play than matchmaking usually. However, consistently playing with and against the same people is not as much a thing of course.
The upside of matchmaking hence is no scheduling and waiting, the downside is playing with whoever is online anywhere instead of a familiar group.
By the end there was literally one CS server I trusted to be friendly and busy and not running "rpg-mod" or "zombie-mod" or a thousand other adjustments I didn't like, such as "no-awp", "price adjusted" etc.
Just finding a vanilla experience became difficult, doubly so if you wanted more than "dust/dust2 only".
Add in the fact that these servers could send your computer files (in theory just maps, sounds and decals, but difficult to secure of course), and you can see why companies shy away, not just to have greater control of the experience.
Oh please. That's corporate apologia.
I mean, yeah, those concerns are real but 99.9% of the reasons they aren't doing it anymore is that having a monopoly over servers give them better control over monetization.
It's obvious why they stopped it eventually (pldecal.wad pretty much became obligatory porn sprays everywhere), but those were the days.
Dusty Dunes in Holland FTW :)
I honestly think it's kinda fucked up that this is legal. It shouldn't be.
Should it have been illegal for them to add characters to the game? It's not what I originally paid for. They took away the original Overwatch the second they rebalanced or added characters.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat
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It's just that gamers in the past have voted too weakly against the managed MP infrastructure in some subgenres and triple A moats... Don't know whether anyone is still protesting this or whether newer generations don't even know what's happened here.
Also, when the playerbase was declining, it felt harder to find servers that you enjoyed to play on.
Overall I felt it was a great experience. I hope more games take this approach in the future.
I hear you, but several of the games in this particular announcement seem like they're from that era:
IIRC, back then the games usually shipped with the server component and all servers were run by players, and the publisher only ran a simple directory server.Since those directory servers were so simple, I think I seen cases where someone cloned them, then batched the binary to just to go a different address for the directory.
Not true, having to pick a server to join by yourself out of a list was an essential part of the classic online experience and the existence of any kind of matchmaking system harms it.
Team Fortress 2 is a prime example of this, originally it only had a server browser and the community felt most "alive" during this time. Then they added a basic matchmaking system that could place you on community servers, but only if they ran stock maps and settings, which heavily discouraged running any kind of modded or customized server, and significantly harmed any servers with a strong sense of community since you had random players, often fresh F2P installs that were barely distinguishable from bots, joining servers with no intention of ever playing on them more than once. Then they replaced that with the full official-only matchmaking we have today, which killed most of the remaining servers and associated communities.
ARK, Valheim, etc. If games come out and I have to rely on their server or rent one, it's a pass for me, especially if I can't play privately with my group of friends.
I've been using Battle.net though... for about 15 years, I'd only do LAN, or LAN over VPN (Hamachi), but the ease of use was, of course, much better on Battle.net.
yeah, lazy devs or they're just herding everyone to their own servers where they can mine data for more profits? Either way, looks like a prime business opportunity to test out a recent addition to DMCA exemptions to allow supporting "abandoned" servers. If the users are there and willing to pay.
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~~You can only buy from DRM-free suppliers, like GOG.com.~~
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http://beta.openspy.net/en/howto/ut2k-engine/ut2004
OpenSpy has similar options for the other Unreal games. Some require patching. Their code is open source and on Github. https://github.com/chc/openspy-core-v2
The latest Unreal Tournament will soon be gone however, it may never return as it was never finished.
I am surprised that they dont make more of the franchise. If they repackaged UT2004 with the new engine (UT2023) I would play the hell out of it.
Like Half-Life 1 is based on idTech, so they would need id/Bethesda/Microsoft's permission. Maybe they could release it under GPL, because idTech grants that license, but that would required everything else in the game would have to be released under GPL too. That would be pretty hard if they used anyone else's proprietary libraries.
Moving onto Half-Life 2, it uses Havok IIRC. A license for that starts at 5 figures.
It's not even an option in most of the developed world, it's equivalent to property expropriation.
For StarCraft 1 specifically (and its Remastered version), a few us have been building a custom server/launcher[0] which should at least ensure that the game/community doesn't completely die out. However, we still rely on Blizzard's online services to verify the in-game purchases, like HD graphics (the game will automatically stop rendering the HD graphics if you didn't log into Blizzard's services in the last 30 days).
It remains to be seen how this will be handled by Blizzard if (when?) the time comes.
[0] - https://github.com/ShieldBattery/ShieldBattery
I'm going to guess 'in the most used hostile way possible'.
I've never seen a company turn a game around like Blizzard did with Diablo 3 -- from the shitty real money auction house to probably the gaming world's single best loot system.
If we want to talk user-hostile, many EA games like Mass Effect don't even let you play different classes without spending hundreds of dollars in lootboxes. It's ridiculous.
Hopefully, for D2 this means a lot longer life.
Disclaimer: I hate Blizzard Activision
3-6mos after the MS deals closes will be my prediction, or 2mos after the deal is blown up by the US Government and Activision starts massive cost-cutting
What about GOG? Their client is optional, you can download full installers for offline archiving, no DRM.
First option that comes to mind that is clearly superior.
Is Steam perfect? No. But Amazon Prime gives me the shivers after they arbitrarily pulled movies from libraries after purchase intentionally and without refund. Audible/Kindle tries selling me while I'm in my library, etc.
Now for the sameless self plug: we wanted to solve these problems but with a business model that primarily serves developers at Rivet (W23).
Instead, we offer cross-platform console-like services as a REST API for free (friends, parties, leaderboards) and only charge for services that help developers build/grow their games (multiplayer servers, matchmaking, CDN, database). Our #1 priority is providing the best services possible to developers. There's no incentive to rent-seek or lock in your users since we're a services company, not a platform company. Any data your users generate is yours to keep.
Regarding operating legacy multiplayer servers: We plan to let users pay for their own game servers instead of developers fronting the cost. This way, developers can operate legacy games at no cost by letting users "own" their servers and easily enable custom game servers. It's like allowing users to self-host games but without having to open-source your software. Plus, many games can't run as a standalone binary and need the supporting infrastructure.
We're still in closed beta, but there's more info here if you're curious: https://rivet.gg/developer/
Steam is the best content delivery platform for games. Developers have spoken with their content and users have spoken with their accounts.
It's not as good as it could be, sure... But, what is?
Even EA brought back titles they'd removed from Steam, as it hurt their bottom line.
Players prefer Steam over all other CDNs. The numbers assure us of this.
They’re very pro indie dev on the unreal side. I don’t mind steam but epic is clearly the better choice for me.
By Chinese you mean Tencent? Tencent is south-african owned.
> Founded in 1998 with its headquarters in Shenzhen, China,...
> ...Tencent has been listed on the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong since 2004.
> https://www.tencent.com/en-us/about.html#about-con-1
Also, this issue is even worse with game updates. You cannot even play single-player games when critical updates are no longer available. Now that games are sold without finishing them, game updates are required unfortunately.
Who breaks it though? For example Hatoful Boyfriend haven't been updated for years, Macs moved to 64bit only so it was essentially unplayable on modern Macs.
Is it the devs fault, are you obliged to update your game forever?
Is it Apple's fault for the lack of backwards compatibility?
Epic was selling a broken game so they must remove it.
Btw that happened on Steam too now they only sell the Windows version.
Assuming Hatoful still works for the users who bought it on the hardware/OS that they bought it for then it's not a good comparison.
I can also play it on Linux, and Linux can run on Mac hardware.
All of that sounds like a pain in the ass, and if the game is not worth the trouble I'll just not go through the trouble. But I am the one who makes the choice, not the owner of some proprietary server.
The fault would be whoever designed it so a single player (or local multiplayer) game wouldn't run on said system in perpetuity.
Mind you, some time in the future an AI will be able to watch Let's Play-style footage and generate the game for you.
Removing official servers when there is no alternative means I can't use the product on the platform it was listed to work at.
In all cases where this is being offered with a product, for example, a game with developer maintained multiplayer servers/lookup services, all app portals like the apple app store, steam, etc. There is either a runway of funds built in that will expire in so many years or it's propped up by other people buying the game like a kind of a Ponzi scheme.
Eventually, somehow the bill to run these services becomes an issue and there are only a few ways to maintain it: ads, buyout with more runway, cutting access or charging for it again.
So I wouldn't say it's theft, it's a business run by people who have no clue how to run a long term business plan. Or fraud if they know all of this and do it anyway.
Ongoing patches and updates are another story though, especially if new Windowses or DirectX versions have breaking changes.
In any case, you can't commit fraud in your marketing then 'correct' it in obscure clickwrap license terms.
What if I like those games? What if I barely have a choice because 95% of multiplayer games released today work like that?
Not sure how you're supposed to know a game has been designed to be remotely deactivated?
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A better analogy would be: If you bought a car in 1970 and the company stopped making the super special fuel blend that they have a patent on and no one else is allowed to produce, making your car unusable. Is that theft?
Yes, doesn't make sense, then again not less than your analogy.
It's a wishlist of the company.