[Dalewyn]

>Companies don't want to, because they make more money out of lock-in live service games.

Operating servers paid with company budget makes more money than offloading the compute to customers' computers paid on customers' dimes? What?

No, the reason multiplayer games have moved away from peer-to-peer to hub-and-spoke is because it's easier for the customers. Most people frankly cannot and moreover do not want to be sysadmins when they just want to play their vidja gaemz. This becomes even more of a poignant issue with more "normies" and "casuals" becoming gamers.

Hub-and-spoke Just Works(tm) Out Of The Box(tm) so long as the hub exists, and that's something the majority of people desire and appreciate.

I'm obviously not speaking with regards to games that must be hub-and-spoke (eg: MMOs) or games that do so for no good reason (eg: Hitman World of Assassination).

[phone[phone]]

> Most people frankly cannot and moreover do not want to be sysadmins when they just want to play their vidja gaemz. This becomes even more of a poignant issue with more "normies" and "casuals" becoming gamers.

Normies don't self-host - they go to a game hosting service provider and pay a few bucks a month to have hosting done for them.

[ToucanLoucan]

> Operating servers paid with company budget makes more money than offloading the compute to customers' computers paid on customers' dimes? What?

There's no reason to invest in in-game monetization if you can unlock it all via changing the server you play on, and have access to all of that content without paying. That's a huge part of how live service games are monetized and if people can change how their server works to just unlock it all and be done, the company loses revenue. Or at least, that's what they're going to say.

> No, the reason multiplayer games have moved away from peer-to-peer to hub-and-spoke is because it's easier for the customers. Most people frankly cannot and moreover do not want to be sysadmins when they just want to play their vidja gaemz.

Literally no one in this discussion is saying companies can't run their own servers. The obvious choice would be hosting their own servers with the server binaries they distribute, or perhaps more tuned versions for their hosting arrangements. We're just saying, if at such time a company shuts their servers down, there should be a way to make new ones so people can still play the game they bought.

> I'm obviously not speaking with regards to games that must be hub-and-spoke (eg: MMOs)

Any sufficiently powerful server could host an MMO. This is not black magic, it's computing.

> or games that do so for no good reason (eg: Hitman World of Assassination).

Yes. That's literally what this is attempting to address.

[Dalewyn]

>There's no reason to invest in in-game monetization if you can unlock it all via changing the server you play on, and have access to all of that content without paying.

Choosing servers generally depends on two things: Gameplay quality (eg: latency), and the people playing on the server.

In-game monetizations are done because the market-at-large refuses and continues to refuse hiking up prices despite rising costs and inflation.

>Literally no one in this discussion is saying companies can't run their own servers.

That is not what I said at all.

>We're just saying, if at such time a company shuts their servers down, there should be a way to make new ones so people can still play the game they bought.

That potentially conflicts with safeguarding trade secrets, licensing, and so on. Would it be nice? Yes. But reality is seldom easy or ideal.

>Any sufficiently powerful server could host an MMO. This is not black magic, it's computing.

Hell no. An MMO usually has one world or environment that is consistent, one set of data that is universal to the game. The very nature of MMOs requires that someone central and singular operates the server(s), which almost always is either the devs or publishers so-concerned.

It's dead cheap and easy for anyone to run servers capable of running entire MMOs, it's practically impossible to share the pre-requisite singular data and then also process it identically between innumerable servers owned and ran by independent entities.

You cannot address social challenges with technological solutions (read: more compute).

>Yes. That's literally what this is attempting to address.

And I did not speak as to those games, what are you contesting with me?