this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2024
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How do you think it works for PC games?
The annoying thing about that is Xbox games on PC are free to play online but I have to pay to play the exact same game online on my £450 Series X.
I’ve often wondered how the PC community would react if Steam started charging for online gaming. That would be fun to watch.
Hits a buzzer
We'd set up unofficial servers by modding the game.
That's what happens for old games that lose dev hosted servers and matchmaking. If online playing was locked behind a subscription, it would be treated as if it was no longer available.
However, it would be a lot harder for me to get my friend group to try new games if it took any modding.
That's not true though, at least for over a year now.
F2P games do not require Xbox live to play anymore.
Games that aren’t free do though. Forza Horizon 5 and Sea and Thieves for example need Xbox Live on console to play online yet on PC online is free despite them using the exact same servers.
Traditionally, we the players paid for the servers. If it was a server browser game like counter strike, the various clans would pay for their own servers. Companies that sold gaming servers would also host some as an advertisement of how good their servers were
Peer to peer?
P2P if it's free and expected to last.
If it's a separate server, I don't see that as infinitely sustainable for most companies.
Hahaha...
GTA5 is P2P with a central component.
So if R* kills the servers, your game is done for without modding.
You need some entry point into a peer-to-peer network in order to make connections with peers. This often takes the form of a central server. In theory you can do have it be a bit more decentralized and have an initial list of peers to try to connect to who can then communicate about other peers, but you still need this initial entry point which is a potential point of failure long term, and I don’t think any games actually do this?
So… Technically speaking, in order to reliably connect peers most games are going to rely on a central server, which does technically cost some money to run, though it should be much cheaper to host than a proper game server which will actually be running the game and physics and stuff server side. With older games like quake you could easily connect to a server even without the master server (though you wouldn’t be able to use the server browser) and it was not terribly difficult to replace the master server with an alternative one.