[JasonSage]

I think you’re conflating unrelated things

Servers can be community-run and centralized per league/community. See TF2 (more decentralized) and FaceIt (Counter-Strike) for examples of self-moderating communities than can exist outside of the developer-centralized model.

At no point do I assume P2P to be a requirement or even beneficial in this scenario.

[busterarm]

TF2 is overrun with bots right now to the point that the game is unplayable and the surviving community has been screaming at Valve about this for years.

As for FaceIt, that came about from the existing CS community. After 15+ years of the game being out. You can't just build something like that in a vacuum.

The whole point is that "esports" depends on centralized servers and somebody footing the bill for that. Even in fighting games that are P2P, there's still the matchmaking lobbies.

And you could say "well, there's FightCade!"...but a) that's illegal and b) I've never seen more than 150 people in a FightCade lobby and it's usually around 10-30. Esports games have > 10^4 concurrent players.

[JasonSage]

I’m optimistic that as the opportunities come along, players will take them.

Your argument sounds to me analogous to “everybody will just use Twitter/X because why would somebody want to pay to host a Mastodon instance with no participants.”

The reality is that some (but not all) people do genuinely have grief with the centralized platform (moderation, censorship, toxicity), do have the ability to pay for something better (or freeload off people who do care), and are thus willing to make a change with there’s sufficiently low resistance.

The reason this is possible at all is because people that did care in a very small minority made the decentralized platform for free while everybody else was oblivious. It doesn’t get built overnight and usage doesn’t convert overnight, but when the solution exists it can then be viable.

I do think open source games are a fair ways off, but I find it impossible to believe that people will work for decades for free on open source social media because they enjoy it, but the same will never be true of games.

It’s an eventuality, and it is one that changes dynamics for the end-consumer.

[JasonSage]

> TF2 is overrun with bots right now to the point that the game is unplayable and the surviving community has been screaming at Valve about this for years.

Perfect example. With the existence of a sufficiently-close open-source base, the community would have self-organized TF2 out of existence with a functional replacement. This just isn’t possible today, but when it is possible there will be no turning back.