“Imagine paying for the internet twice.” -PC Gamers
Yeah, with the Steam Deck being as good and cheap as it is, consoles hardly even have the “cheaper” justification anymore. Now it’s just the artificial exclusives.
Both Microsoft and Sony have started releasing their stuff on PC (DRM-free in Sony’s case.) Even the exclusives are becoming less of an issue now.
Truth. I’ve been enjoying those.
Removed by mod
I did exactly this and now I’m addicted to two new games that have no fees!
Now I’m addicted to drugs and alcohol!
Some people have friends they wanna play with. Or so I hear.
PC, steam deck
There’s a lot of gamers in this thread too young to remember how overloaded and miserable the free console game servers were.
Microsoft was like “chuck us like ~$5 per month and we will put up enough servers so the games are actually playable”. At the time, it was the best deal available for console gaming.
Honestly an argument could be made it was the most economical way to play online, in general, at the time. The console cost was subsidized, and the online servers were arguably at-cost, and you really only needed to buy one copy of Halo to join the fun.
Yeah but they don’t run the servers anymore. So I don’t know what I’m paying for really.
Some (Nintendo) even like using P2P instead of dedicated servers. Which makes it even crazier to pay for online.
When I pay for a game access to the whole game should be included and it is on PC (don’t bring up DLCs and all that).
Access to a router somewhere, apparently.
Idk. I was always a PC gamer, and think the old, often modded, independently run servers were much more fun than the soul-less matchmaking I see on most modern games. It was fun to play UT2004, and join a server where the arena was someone’s bedroom and all the sound effects were ripped from The Simpsons; or to jump into a clan’s open server and shit-talk them while they dominate me, or to join a server run by Beyond Unreal’s community, where the mods used were voted on by the community beforehand, IIRC. Good times.
I was always a PC gamer, and think the old, often modded, independently run servers were much more fun than the soul-less matchmaking I see on most modern games.
Absolutely. If one was lucky enough to have a buddy with a server setup, that was by far the coolest option.
There’s still yet another side to it. Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory is still around today. Boot it up, and try joining a game. Five hours later, the mods finish loading, and you get a splash screen full of ads before you begin playing with bots.
At the time, it felt like there were a lot of hobbyists willing to shell out cash to run their servers, but ensuring you got a fair game low on mods was often more trouble than it was worth. I’m even a little bit grateful that Team Fortress 2 started hosting their own, even if they failed to fix the bot situations.
Very true. These things do still exist for a lot of games. It lost popularity a lot on CS due to the incessant need for “competitive” matchmaking, but they are still out there. Rust is a good game for heavily modded servers (if you like the game concept in the first place) and I think Arma (which a bit more niche) is basically all community servers, ranging from in depth military reality to role playing much more mundane stuff.
It’s not a matter of age. You can play for free on PC now and it’s a better experience in many regards. There are also older games (even on console) where you could connect directly to a user through IP address or phone number and those will work to this day. Consoles are the domain of companies that want to have their little walled garden so they can overcharge for things like this.
It’s totally a matter of age. Kids these days have no idea how good they have it, and don’t realize they need to get off my lawn. Shakes cain in the air /s
And this is why it was successful and still exists to this day.
excuse the fist shaking at the cloud
Kids these days literally want everything for free and don’t care that microtransactions and other monetization has pervaded every aspect of games.
Horse armour, man. Never forget the horse armour. Kids these days love horse armour.
I’ma be the devil’s advocate - even if they were free, eventually someone would have made it a subscription-based model since PSN servers cost money. Sure, it’s not a lot of money, but it’s money.
I’m not so sure. Steam servers also cost money. They make way more money from their cut of sales. On console the same thing happens. If not requiring the subscription gets more users, then you make more money by not having it.
They aren’t charging because it costs money to run. They’re charging because it’s more profitable.
I agree, and I think we’re actually just saying the same thing - the managers and stuff at (insert big name console manufacturer here) saw the loss by server money (which is, yes, very little money in the grand scheme) and then decided “let’s purge that cost too and get 500000% profit on that section as well”. Hence, the current state of affairs.
I really don’t think the cost of running it was even considered. It’s just an excuse some people make to justify paying for it. I’ve never seen anything from MS or Sony saying it. It has nothing to do with it. It’s just an extra thing they can charge for. The fact some people do try to justify it with “server costs” is sad. Every multiplayer game should be a subscription if that were the case, since they need to pay for their servers, but people wouldn’t make an excuse for them. The fact the console users want to justify using a console sucks.
excuse some people make to justify paying for it
…
console users want to justify using a console
Well that escalated quickly.
I should clarify: console users want to justify paying for a service that shouldn’t be required to pay for (a second time). It’s just that using a console requires it (unless you play single-player only), so it ruins the whole console, in my opinion.
I think it’s simply a side-effect of the current state of gaming, which sucks more than people generally consider. We’ve been getting nudged here slowly over a generation, so it doesnt feel hot to most of us. I’m bitter though and i hold grudges. im old too, so listen to me while i shake my cane!
Everything the game companies currently do with their IPs (locking games to their own servers and charging us for the privilege for example) is all about maintaining complete control of their IP. Remember that fucking lawyer-ese we all have to check-off so we can play the game we paid for? the part where they call what we’re getting a ‘licence’? Yeah, this is what it looks like when we don’t own the things we buy.
If the subscription costs were truly about the cost of running the servers then another option for companies would be to allow for us to make and host our own servers. The fact that a precious few game companies even allow us to host servers long after a game’s natural lifetime is over means that they prefer this outcome. When they have control over the servers they get to control the game’s lifetime.
Could them cats running Modern Warfare 29 or whatever we’re on now keep releasing the same fucking game every year if players were allowed to host their own private servers for the games they bought? No way, right? That’s the reason they do private servers, it is more profitable for them to do so.
Now if you made it this far, you’re thinking
Hey old-head!! That doesn’t really answer the question of why we pay for the privilege of paying twice, the thread you’re responding to! did all that leaded gasoline go to your boomerbrain?
first of all kiddo the newspaper that i still read says i’m a xennial or some bullshit so get off the lawn i’ll never own and second is i actually don’t know. I suspect we pay for it because we can get fucked. The fact we pay is ancillary to the whole control thing. they just do it because now that we’re locked in, they can and thats all there is to it
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?
game prices don’t completely cover the cost of development and definitely don’t cover server operation costs every month.
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.
I love paying for nintendo online so I can play splatoon 3 which runs on fucking p2p
Nintendo really did decide to jump on the Xbox Live band- wagon without really implementing any of the perks.
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?
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Hits a buzzer
We’d set up unofficial servers by modding the game.
That’s what happens for old games that lose dev hosted servers and matchmaking. If online playing was locked behind a subscription, it would be treated as if it was no longer available.
However, it would be a lot harder for me to get my friend group to try new games if it took any modding.
The annoying thing about that is Xbox games on PC are free to play online but I have to pay to play the exact same game online on my £450 Series X.
That’s not true though, at least for over a year now.
F2P games do not require Xbox live to play anymore.
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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.
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Even in P2P you’ll still need someone to go tell you what other IP addresses are in the group that you’re trying to join. And you have to know the IP address of that someone. You’re not going to scan the entire Internet to figure out who all else is attempting to play the exact same game as you, that would take literal days every time (assuming you rule out anyone IPv6, if you include them that suddenly becomes millions of years).
Even in P2P you will need to hit a commonly known and trusted resource to tell you what other IP addresses you need to go talk to.
Yeah, P2P is not free because you need an entry point to the network… It is vastly cheaper to host a peer discovery server than a game server, so it’s not completely unreasonable to expect it to be covered by the cost of the game… But it is technically unsustainable in the long run as it is an ongoing cost. Per user, especially across a platforms like Xbox live and PSN I suspect it’s like… ridiculously cheap to run per year?
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.
Marketplaces are always a game of chicken. If a company thinks they can charge more for less they will; they just need another company to do it first
Stop preordering, support Indi games.
This isn’t hard guys.
And raise the flag ⚓
How are the high seas for gaming nowadays? I know it used to be pretty hit and miss before since many titles didn’t work properly, crashed and had no support for updates without downloading a new copy.
Updates are still not worked out but most games work fine if you get a nice repack like dodi or fitgirl. Never had issues with those
I’ve never seen piracy as doing a lot to support indie games.
Generally, your principles should be more about who you’d like to build up than tear down.
Generally, your principles should be more about who you’d like to build up than tear down.
Why not both? Also, piracy isn’t really so much about tearing down, it’s more about the freedom to share.
I’m not sure what Xbox Live has to do with pre-ordering. These days if you have Game Pass you’re technically supporting a whole host of indies.
Problem is many indi games just don’t have the same appeal as AAA games. There are a few gems but I need to be in the mood.
I feel like it’s two separate markets that are forced to share the same big tent known as “gaming”.
I never play AAA games. I’m not on some moral crusade, they just don’t appeal. I do not have the twitch reflexes for FPS, but smaller devs tend to make the sort of gameplay I like.
Right now the only indy game I can think of that’s truly competitive is Battlebit, and that’s only because everyone hates what became of Battlefield. Otherwise it’s just me and what feels like a half dozen other weirdos out here trying to build a bakery so we can feed pie to harpies, while 90% of the world is playing COD like it’s their job. It’s two vastly different people who do not have the same needs, is what I’m saying.
So maybe people need to deal with that and stop honking the “play indy” horn so much. If that was the solution, people would already be on it.
Yea I don’t play FPS games either. I enjoy the narrative story experiences like Horizon Dawn, The Last Of Us, Alan Wake, etc.
personally AAA games don’t appeal to me most of the time. Spare for a few titles that are on my wishlist like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Elden Ring (for the reasons explained below) I don’t plan on buying any in the foreseeable future.
Most AAA games are plagued by the money curse - devs don’t get the freedom to do what they want to do, they are made to create what will make money. Innovation is a risk and will be shut down by the money men unless your name is big enough to sell copies on its own. Sure not all triple A will turn out to be bad or meh, but they are pricey and often so, so, bloated. I was on the fence with Starfield, DIYed myself a demo and that thing was like 95GB with nothing to show for it.
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Yeah, well this is partly why PCs don’t get all the games. Uniform hardware of the consoles and subscriptions to access online play makes them a lot more attractive. Less dev cost, more $. E: plus consoles cost less than a good gaming PC, so that means more players to buy more games.
The publishers/Developers never see that online subscription money. They have to host their own servers anyways.
Yeah, well this is partly why PCs don’t get all the AAA games
Ftfy.
PC gets a fuckton more games than consoles, very few games are actually console exclusive and especially exclusive to all consoles but not PC.
I don’t remember the last AAA I played. They’re just not good anymore
They’re just rehashed and reskinned SOSDD. Same franchises been around forever, it’s too much of a gamble to risk big on something new. Starfield, for example, is proof enough.
I think this is getting less true, and especially with Game Pass and now Sony putting a lot of first party titles on PC, I’m hard pressed to think of a AAA game that isn’t available, or won’t be if I don’t mind waiting a 6 months.
Makes sense, they need a carrot to lure people into their walled garden.
So glad I bought a Steam Deck. Playing games on the couch with friends who each brought their own controller, easily connecting and combining PS4, PS5, Xbox and Nintendo controllers to play together feels surreal and like living in the future of gaming. Never buying another console or their subscriptions ever again.
Microsoft didn’t invent the subscription model though lol
If they weren’t the first to add it to games, other companies would have done it anyway
It says “popularized”
And I’m saying it was already popular
You started your comment with “Microsoft didn’t invent the subscription model though lol” which sounds a lot like you’re trying to disprove something that nobody said. I don’t know how you meant it, but that’s how it sounds.
In 2002? What other major online network was popular at the time? I remember failed attempts in the PC space (TEN comes to mind), PS2 was free to play online, as was Battle.net. Sega and Nintendo didn’t have any major presence here, either.
It’s entirely fair and accurate to say Microsoft popularized online gaming subscription services. It just wasn’t a big thing before XBox Live came along.
I remember the Xbox 360 being the only gaming platform in that generation that charged an online subscription fee. Who else was doing it?
If by popular you mean others had attempted it and failed, sure.
Ever heard of World of Warcraft?
You mean the popular MMO that launched 2 years after Xbox live? But yes, subscription based games did exist but there were no successful general online services yet, live was literally the first one.
Damn, you’re right. I could have sworn wow came out earlier than that and xbox live was late 00s, but it was on the first one.
Also having a pain finding the date of the original wow stress test (I was sure I participated in that in fall 2002, but that doesn’t seem realistic given the release date a year and a half later, though now that I think if it, that does line up with some other memories). All I get when searching are references to the more recent wow classic stress test dates.
Starting before March 2004, Blizzard started signing up Closed Beta Test testers from an unknown pool of people using an undisclosed method of selection. The Closed Beta Trial ran for about 7 months ending in more widely available stress test and then an open beta before final release around the end of November 2004.
This has always been my sole reason for never buying a console.
I mean subscription gaming properly started on the PC with MMOs
-and I say this as a mainly PC gamer. I remember thinking how insane it was that my friend paid monthly to play the new Warcraft game…this of course before I understood what server costs were
To be fair, running servers for MMOs wasn’t cheap. Network cost alone could be quite high, not to mention the storage and backup they’d have to keep rolling in order to ensure small blackouts or crashes didn’t doom months of player progress.
That’s completely different from what microsoft offered with the xbox, which was effectively a master lobby server to find matches. Little processing and networking needed.
This.
I have no problem subscribing for a (good) MMO. The extreme development times, investments and high performance servers as well as (somewhat) frequent content updates as well as long lifespan makes the subscription worth it.
But when a subscription provides nothing else than access to simple features or low-performnace/unoptimized servers then I cannot understand why it would be needed. Sure there are operating costs but today you can literally just do peer to peer hosting. No need for devs to host anything. And with full control of their consoles they could even validate the clients creating the lobbies. The added cost for online gaming is the worst scam Microsoft invented.
And you think it’s cheap to run cloud computing data centres?
Yes, especially for a simple lobby server. Not much “computing” in that “cloud data center”.
Yeah my bad. I’m dyslexic and read the “could” in the meme as “cloud” and thought it was talking about Microsoft gamepass cloud stuff.
They provided years of content, dedicated support and actively stopped glitches and hacking. Paying for solid service and no hackers can be beneficial.
Doesn’t matter where it started the point is that most pc gaming can be done without a subscription
Steam has your back
Bless Gabe. I just got a Deck and it’s just chef kiss
