Just to correct the record on this more reasonably sized dose of surprisingly overt strawmanning, I don’t think it’s impossible for an end user to run a dedicated server.
Well then maybe you should have actually said that.
The way Scott presents the argument, even acknowledging that he argues that server code may need a dedicated server beyond the capabilities of end users, is just not feasible.
If you wanna say things that are, you know technical, complicated… maybe… do that?
But ok so you wanna be more technical now, let’s see.
I think it’s not feasible to require a version of a modern persistent game server infrastructure, from login to matchmaking to data storage, to be converted or provided to be run or financed by end users.
Ok, well, you are just objectively wrong on all of your clauses there.
Dedicated enthusiasts can and do build home servers, all the time.
People have been emulating and running long officially dead MMOs for almost 20 years.
Login, matchmaking, storage… yep, all of that stuff still works. Sometimes you have to figure out a bit of a workaround, or run your own little side shunt thing as I described via example of Battlefield 1942 in my post you didn’t read.
These days, its easier and cheaper than ever to just rent a virtual server to host… literally whatever you want.
The only real problem that would occur is if say, OverWatch 2 suddenly died… and… a group of enthusiastic OW2 players wanted to be able to support the entire current playerbase.
Yeah, that indeed would likely be unfeasible.
But uh… all you have to do is meet the base requirements for the server binary, the now incredibly cheap compared to 10, 20 years ago storage requirements for the base system… and then you scale up to meet the actual traffic from the number of regular players you want to be able to support.
Theoretically, you could set up a nonprofit to legally finance scaling up to huge player counts, and have a subscription to this nonprofit server provider…
Or you could just have many, many, smaller independent post EoL, enthusiast servers, capable of more or less doing it out of an informal amount of charity.
The fixed costs of standing up a server are almost always so small as to be manageable by one or a few people.
The variable cost, where things can really get expensive… is from scaling up massively.
But you don’t have to do that.
Especially not in a way that still allows pre-existing commercial clients to run normally.
TitanFall 2 has been dead for a decade. No more official servers.
Its got a community made custom launcher that hooks into the community modified servers they run.
Game is literally exactly the same.
You can go play this right now, if you have a legit copy of TitanFall2.
Basically its the same withing with StarWars Galaxies, to just give two examples right off the top of my head.
I mean, for one thing, would you be running one instance or several?
Could be either, depends on what the EoL game wants to do for its final shutdown server release.
Probably it would be much, much easier to both the business and enthusiast post EoL server operators to set things up for many smaller, distinct, divergent individual instances, instead of designing a lemmy like federation system.
You know, how like every major MMO ever basically has different realms or shards or whatever? Welp, now instead of 8 or 16 or 32… theres 456 smaller ones.
Who’s handling how to point the client at the right place?
Ideally this would be a very simple and minor patch to the client to enable this right before EoL, but as with examples I’ve already given, you can wrap the game in your own launcher, essentially ‘hijacking’ it in some sense, to be able to override the now defunct, default server address, and also include a server browser in that launcher.
Then, you have that custom community launcher open source, so everyone can verify it isn’t malware.
But, there are many other possible methods and variations on this that are very specific to each exact game, that will or could work, even if the business doesn’t bother to do a final patch on the EoL client.
Who’s responsible for the legal obligations regarding data storage and personal information?
Uh, the people running the servers? The enthusiasts?
Why would they have personal information beyond a UID, login and password for the player?
The business would have to be immensely, catastrophically stupid to not scrub all other PII and financial type information out of the player db before they made a EoL final release version of it available.
How do you handle monetization hooks in games where scarcity is baked into the design?
Well there’s many possible ways you could do this.
One would be… the business just rips em out, disables them entirely on EoL release.
Yep, that’d break shitty pay to win games that were designed with so much scarcity that obtaining game currency or items through gameplay alone is uh… unfeasible.
Or, you could, just quickly modify the giant basically ini file that describes all the loot drop rates for getting things in game by… 10, 100, 1000, whatever, or let the enthusiast server operators modify these drop rates on their own.
Or maybe its something like cosmetics you would normally have to pay real money for? They’re all free now, woohoo! Just put in a little overide in the ‘checks players real world bank account’ routine to just return TRUE, basically, haha.
There are an astounding number of ways this could be handled, either by the EoL final patch/release, you could just basically rip all that out, make everyone have as much of it as they want, or give the enthusiast post EoL server admins some gui or cli access to the already existing code in the server system to allow them to do a more fine tuned and tweaking approach to this… maybe everyone just gets an automatic allowance of whatever $50 real world dollars translates into in the game currency(ies) every month, who knows.
All you have to do is say ok enthusiast server admins, you are NOT allowed to make money off of our compiled binary we are releasing to you, you have no right to do that, and we will sue you into oblivion if we think we can prove you are.
Existing computer laws and liscenses already very well cover companies going after people who decompile their proprietary code and make money off of it.
Whatever, the technicalities have been deliberated…
Yes, now they have. I made many of these points I made here, and more, in my post you didn’t read, so, uh yeah, kind of a one sided discussion here with a person who’s already made up their mind, yeah.
At least for me, they shove me over to lemmy.world. I suspect you may have clicked the autofill suggestion, which includes the instance in the link and thus forces all users who click onto your instance. If you don’t do that and just write !communityname@instancename, it will let people click the link and go to the community on their instance, so they can interact instead of just browsing. I see you’re from Emmy.world.
!videogamesuggestions should let you see from lemmy.world and interact and comment and vote and the like. !videogamesuggestions (I clicked the autofill this time, it produced [!videogamesuggestions@lemmy.zip](https://lemmy.zip/c/videogamesuggestions)) will just toss you onto my instance, lemmy.zip.
Today’s game is Tomodachi Life. My Wi-Fi was out, and i’ve spent like the last month trying to get Miis of Friends gathered so i could get them on the island. So i decided to put it all to use. To get the screenshots i had to do some stuff with FTP since my SD adapter was missing and Wi-Fi was out. Luckily it works over...
Yep! It’s missing a lot of services I used regularly, but it’s a community maintained project (and one for a Nintendo console at that so progress is definitely going to be slow) so I get it, but it’s been a lifesaver in the few instances where I can use it with friends
I love lotro. I played it for 10 years. From release, until mordor.
I was madly inlove with lotro. It was a beautiful game. the only MMO where you actually read lore and quest text and anything else, because of how immersive it was all… and the game was perfect (before mordor). Casual, relaxing, but challenging in all the right places.
and the community was just absolutely amazing. Kind, considerate, helpful, generous. Like you said, i think the average age of lotro players was over 40… Until there was there was some issue with WoW that caused a lot of WoW players to immigrate to lotro… Then chat got less friendly, and more obnoxious, and the community got less kind, and less helpful… cause all the kind helpful people got burned by the jackholes being jackholes… Still a pleasant community overall, but no where near what it was before that WoWpocalypse.
My love and faith in the game changed with Mordor, though… Mordor broke me, It was just so pointlessly difficulty spiked on even the landscape mobs were slaughtering raid-ready players, that most of my kin, myself included, ended up just quitting the game. A few people eventually got the gang back together again for southern mirkwood, but that mordor level of difficulty was still there. No one in the kin, except for the hunters and the champions, seemed able to even 1v1 the landscape mobs. that also reflected group content… no one wanted anything but healers and hunters. was the same with mordor, but even worse with southern mirkwood. Mobs were so dumbly overpowered that only the lotro character equivalent of tactical nukes were wanted in groups… I, sadly, was not a tactical nuke class.
It really breaks my heart. I loved that game. I made great real life friends in that game… I met my Ex in that game (though in retrospect that probably shouldnt be viewed as part of the happy memories lol), Spent so many evenings bullshitting in voice chat while we did instances and group content, or just ground out old content for deeds. Was such a magical fucking experience, that I’ll probably never experience again for the rest of my life. The pre-mordor game was absolute perfection. Especially with the revamps to some less ideal/polished game areas like Moria.
And killed, to me, because devs listened to a vocal minority that wanted moar harderer.
That is not a rebuttal. A rebuttal requires evidentiary support of your stance. For instance, as support for saying it costs them nothing, one might offer the following:
once released, users would distribute and maintain the file servers independently of the corporation, thus costing the company nothing.
once released, users would maintain independent game servers and pay for their upkeep, thus costing the company nothing.
once released, the modding community would take over the maintenance and development on the code base, thus costing the company nothing.
There, 3 salient points which support the position that releasing the codebase for the game when sunsetting it costs the company nothing. I could even make points about how it is actually profitable for the company, but I want to give you your turn to rebutt me now that you have a good example of how to provide a good argument.
You might have seen that I’ve been posting my interviews, or Q&A’s rather, with developers of Steam Deck/Linux projects you might know and love (with many more to come!):...
Well, it’s that time again for this last week’s interesting gaming news I’ve spotted! While this week’s is the typical variety, it is also rather text-heavy, so you’ve been warned! As ever though, there’s Steam Deck, Linux, GOG, emulation, Switch and gaming in general in here :)...
In 2004, AbleGamers was established as a nonprofit dedicated to elevating disabled voices and improving accessibility in the gaming industry. For approximately 20 years, the organization has presented talks across industry events, raised millions through annual charity events, and acted as a consistent resource for developers...
Well, it’s that time of the week where I share a roundup of all the interesting things I have spotted in gaming news. There’s a big variety this week, with a fair section of Nintendo Switch news, some GOG, some Steam Deck, Linux and just gaming in general....
There’s been quite a bit of…unsettlement (totally a word) regarding the news that Discord has a new CEO and the company is going public (typically a sign of things going shittier than before)....
For the record RetroDECK also got Matrix instance as well. But Revolt have so far been more active then Matrix (even tho we had that one for a long time).
But I do agree with that Discord is not a replacement for forums. You should not use Discord as your primary information hub.
For us our own wiki is the master of information. If something relevant is said in Revolt / Discord / Matrix we will add it to the wiki, people should not need to register various accounts to access the information.
Github is also where we handle “real” issues, while Discord / Matrix / Revolt is helpful for community members helping other with minor issues or general banter.
One reason why forums died out was the need for direct engagement and a sense of active community belonging, that they simply did not offer.
We also did not create all of these spaces from the beginning. Some community members did it, like the subreddit. Then you have a choice either you create it and own it, or a fan will.
It’s even become mandatory by communities in some games, which is something I hate with passion. For instance, many MMORPG communities are on Discord these days (e.g. Guild Wars 2, more specifically the raiding scene).
So I subscribed to these communities and started using Discord. I still don’t get the appeal, it’s a cluttered mess all over the place and it doesn’t feel intuitive to use. Maybe I’m getting old…
List more in the comments! I’ll add them if they are a community for a video game genre, and have had at least one post in the last month. Crossposted to !communitypromo here....
You’re probably right, but most of these do exist already, so I figure not why not continue trying to use them (and to direct attention from this big community there)? Also probably doesn’t help a lot of instances have general games communities. We’re pretty splintered. Now that I think about it I should probably crosspost to some of the bigger ones.
I was thinking it is weird that the generically named “RPGs” community (and RPGMemes) seems focused entirely on tabletop stuff, but I just noticed it’s literally on an instance dedicated to tabletop games so that explains that…
The developer is a cash hungry idiot, with no intention to ever listen to the community.
The community is great, battles intense, and the skill ceiling sky high. Sailing mechanisms second to none.
There’s a lot more ships than the DLC ships. But yes, it’s almost inevitable you will end up buying a couple of them, because the DLCs let you spawn a ship for free every day.
I stopped playing when the Dev decided to split the already low-populated PvP server into two separate instances, which is currently being reversed (to noones surprise).
I have been avoiding multiplayer Valve games like Counter-Strike 2 and Team Fortress 2, due to their in-game economies that have created an underage gambling gray market, which Valve has done little about. However, I am on Linux, and the choices for multiplayer shooters are few. Besides, my small boycott is not stopping...
Those projects look great! I will have to check both those out. My problem with a lot of community FPS games is that the community is just too small to play regularly (like Xonotic, for instance).
There are obviously a wide range of philosophies companies have when it comes to both intellectual property and modding communities that tend to spring up around successful video games. Some are jealous protectors of all things IP, which is generally a giant mistake that limits the reach, the fun, and the engagement these...
A few weeks ago I have found a very nice jam on itch.io called Road Trip Game Jam 2025 which was really inspiring and chill. At the time there were already a lot of really good little games and, as a racing / car games enthousiast, I decided to hop on and try to submit something nice. I am a full time developer but didn’t want...
I am not sure if this qualifies for this community or not, but I think ttrpg.network would be happy to have you if you have not posted on that instance yet.
I am still a Lemmy noob and didn’t grasp all the instance/community points yet. This community is kinda about physical games as well so I gave it a shot. But thanks for pointing out that instance, seems to be a lot of related stuff and would be more appropriate for sure!
Wow. I thought it might’ve been the community rather than my instance, but now I’m thinking not. You can see my swears and those of the guy I asked about the swears, right? Or do they appear as “removed” for you too?
Killed the greatest gamer initiative out there for content (fedia.io) angielski
Nintendo Is Already Punishing Switch 2 Users Over Piracy ‘Suspicions’ (www.techdirt.com) angielski
[META] Escape the disinformation: Find an alternative community
Leaving lemmy[.]ml...
[Announcement] The community and its future angielski
Hi everyone....
Day 318 of posting a Daily Screenshot from the games l've been playing angielski
Today’s game is Tomodachi Life. My Wi-Fi was out, and i’ve spent like the last month trying to get Miis of Friends gathered so i could get them on the island. So i decided to put it all to use. To get the screenshots i had to do some stuff with FTP since my SD adapter was missing and Wi-Fi was out. Luckily it works over...
Developer Interview: my Q&A with The RomM Project angielski
Hey everyone!...
Steam Deck / Gaming News #17 angielski
Well, it’s that time again for this last week’s interesting gaming news I’ve spotted!...
70% of games that require internet get destroyed (www.youtube.com) angielski
Interview: My Q&A with Gardiner Bryant angielski
You might have seen that I’ve been posting my interviews, or Q&A’s rather, with developers of Steam Deck/Linux projects you might know and love (with many more to come!):...
Steam Deck / Gaming News #16 angielski
Well, it’s that time again for this last week’s interesting gaming news I’ve spotted! While this week’s is the typical variety, it is also rather text-heavy, so you’ve been warned! As ever though, there’s Steam Deck, Linux, GOG, emulation, Switch and gaming in general in here :)...
Former Employees, Community Members Allege AbleGamers Founder Fostered Abuse Behind Closed Doors (www.ign.com) angielski
In 2004, AbleGamers was established as a nonprofit dedicated to elevating disabled voices and improving accessibility in the gaming industry. For approximately 20 years, the organization has presented talks across industry events, raised millions through annual charity events, and acted as a consistent resource for developers...
Steam Deck / Gaming News #14 angielski
Well, it’s that time of the week where I share a roundup of all the interesting things I have spotted in gaming news. There’s a big variety this week, with a fair section of Nintendo Switch news, some GOG, some Steam Deck, Linux and just gaming in general....
Developer interview: my Q&A with the team behind RetroDECK angielski
In case you missed it from my last gaming news round-up post, I’m conducting interviews (perhaps Q&A’s is a more apt term though) with my friends....
Reminder if you're leaving Discord for this Revolt server ( Linux + Steam Deck devs / creators) angielski
There’s been quite a bit of…unsettlement (totally a word) regarding the news that Discord has a new CEO and the company is going public (typically a sign of things going shittier than before)....
Discord confirms it's moving toward 'becoming a public company' as it hires a former Activision executive as its new CEO (www.pcgamer.com) angielski
Co-founder Jason Citron is stepping down, but will remain with the company as a member of the board of directors.
Video game genre communities on the Threadiverse angielski
List more in the comments! I’ll add them if they are a community for a video game genre, and have had at least one post in the last month. Crossposted to !communitypromo here....
What is the best Sea based game out there in your opinion? angielski
I'm talking about things like:...
Should we boycott games with loot boxes? angielski
I have been avoiding multiplayer Valve games like Counter-Strike 2 and Team Fortress 2, due to their in-game economies that have created an underage gambling gray market, which Valve has done little about. However, I am on Linux, and the choices for multiplayer shooters are few. Besides, my small boycott is not stopping...
WotC DMCAs ‘Stardew Valley’ BG3 Mod, Despite Larian’s Endorsement (www.techdirt.com)
There are obviously a wide range of philosophies companies have when it comes to both intellectual property and modding communities that tend to spring up around successful video games. Some are jealous protectors of all things IP, which is generally a giant mistake that limits the reach, the fun, and the engagement these...
My submission to the Road Trip Game Jam 2025 angielski
A few weeks ago I have found a very nice jam on itch.io called Road Trip Game Jam 2025 which was really inspiring and chill. At the time there were already a lot of really good little games and, as a racing / car games enthousiast, I decided to hop on and try to submit something nice. I am a full time developer but didn’t want...
I'm doing my part (unfortunately) angielski