[dwroberts]

Although I agree it’s more like subsidising than democratising (and the price will just go back up eventually), the “just let players host it” is overly simplistic.

There are tons of reasons to not do that - for example, companies and games that have not embraced modding do not want to be competing with modified/unofficial versions of their own games’ servers (as well as the cheating issue that can bring with it)

[gafferongames]

Companies like https://nitrado.com host community servers cheaply and support mods. Sort of a nice half-way in between truly player hosted servers (where somebody could quit mid-game, or even cheat the game), and dedicated servers run only by the devs.

[Stevvo]

I don't know if any of those "tons of reasons" are actually valid; checking the top 10 multiplayer games on Steam by player count all of them allow player hosted servers.

[gafferongames]

Well, I can give several reasons why player hosted servers (like on their own machines) can be a bad idea:

* If the server player quits, the game is over, or the game developer has to implement host migration, which generally sucks. Game developers would prefer to spend this money and time making the game more fun instead.

* If the server player cooks a burrito in the microwave and is playing over wifi, maybe everybody's connection gets really bad for 60 seconds.

* At least in the USA, internet connections are highly asymmetric. It's getting better now, but 10-20 years ago, the vast majority of players would only have enough bandwidth to send and receive one client's worth of bandwidth, and would not be able to upload bandwidth for all players, especially as player counts increased.

* Cheating. The player hosting the server on their machine (if a PC) could modify code and/or memory to cheat.

* Lag switching / network shaping. The player hosting the server could time out, lag out or ruin the experience for a player they don't like.

* Host advantage. The final one is that the player hosting the server has zero lag, so has a huge advantage over other players.

For a competitive game at least, it's much better in 2026 to host your servers somewhere secure, or to have player hosted servers in a secure provider that doesn't let players do any of the things above.

[Stevvo]

By "player hosted servers", I meant players rent a server box with Hetzner or OVH or a managed server with a provider like Nitrado. Local player hosted servers have never really worked for anything more than LAN.

[gafferongames]

Oh shit and I forgot NAT issues. Depending on NAT, some players simply cannot host a game (without a relay server), no matter what they do.