Just Bring Back Dedicated Servers - Fri, Oct 20, 2023
It's not that complicated. You won't keep your service online forever.
For the past couple of years, gaming companies seem to embrace the SaaS methodology. The idea that everything should be a service, not a product. You don’t own the program. You just own* the licence to use that product. And that licence can be revoked, or can become useless.
You can see this alot in recent online games. Dedicated servers are being replaced (or are not being updated) by Company-owned “Matchmaking” or Official servers. You have to hope that the game owners decided to host theirs servers close to where you live, otherwise you just bought a game that you cannot enjoy, mostly due to latency issues.
But what if that game is no longer profitable?
Not all games are meant to live forever. Chances are your MMORPG game is not the new EVE Online, or the new(old?) Runescape. Sooner or later the sales or playerbase might decline, and the costs of keeping multiple servers across multiple continents will be bigger than the games revenue.
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You won't and you can't keep your service online forever.
Once you stop your service, pretty much every user that ever bought your game now owns a bunch of gb of unusable code and assets. Yet another abandonware, but this time with the posibility of playing it.
Your only hope is to have your game popular enough for a bunch of ner– ughh… IT guys to gather around, reverse engineer your game and recreate the server files from scratch. SoapBox Race World is one example of such projects.
Blocking access to the files doesn’t help it either.
Deadside is a game that I like. It’s more or less a Arma3 Exile-inspired game. You have the classic DayZ gameplay loop: walk, hide, loot, eat, fight, repeat. You can sell the loot at a vendor, and buy other stuff with the provided currency. There are no zombies, but there are roaming AI that will attack you on sight (something like Tarkov’s scavs.)
It has a serverlist… but you don’t have access to the server files. Why, you ask?
Because GPortal.com has the rights to hosting Deadside servers.
You want to host your own deadside server? Buy the server from GPortal. There is literally no other way.
- Self host? No.
- Use other gameserver providers? Not on my watch.
- Server modding? Think again.
This type of gatekeeping is just bad for the community. Devs usually invoke “anti-piracy” or “anti-hacker” reasons for doing this. But, just like intrusive DRMs, it ends up impacting the regular game buyer more than the hacker or the pirate.
Hiding the serverlist is also a bad practice.
Counter Strike is guilty of this. Ever since CS:GO, they started pushing their matchmaking instead of the good ol’ community serverlist. The serverlist is also just the Steam integrated serverlist, which is easily abusable by bad hosts submitting fake jsons to the masterlist.
This, combined with tucking the serverlist deep into the UI, even with a “warning” label that make community servers seem “scary”, made old players loose interest into finding new servers, and also made new players not even aware that CS has community servers.
Surf, Jailbreak or Deathrun communities are slowly fading out, due to developer’s hostile actions towards their own part of the game. For Counter-Strike 2, I can’t even find the dedicated server files!
But there is some hope left.
There are still games that provide community server support. ARK, DayZ and Arma some games that I can think of, that are still flurishing because the community servers are still open.
FiveM (which I often talk about on my blog) is also a great example of adding community server support to games that usually don’t have it. Server hosts can modify the base game using scripts and mods, creating a gaming environment that the community can enjoy.
Anyway, I already ranted too much. Later, skater.
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