Game companies took this away so that they could sell season passes, hats, shirts, and other cosmetic garbage.
This is a problem your industry created. So please spare us all the woe is me charade.
But go back 10-12 years; lets see what's available;
2008:
Battlefield: bad company. - no self-host option
GTA IV. - no self host option
Fallout 3 - no self host option.
Left for Dead 2 - downloadable server option, no official servers
--
I think your interpretation is very uncharitable.
The cost of making games has increased in a near exponential rate, regardless of if there's servers or not.
On a more personal note: I don't understand why everyone wants to eat the fancy cake but hate the baker for telling you what it took to make it.
You see... we didn't ask for you all to ban dedicated servers and take on the cost of official servers. You did that to us against our objections so that you could extract more money from us. PC gamers would be perfectly happy playing Modern Warfare on dedicated servers. We don't have that option. We are forced to play on official servers and then you whine about the cost of doing that. That was YOUR decision!
You can't force players to play on official servers and also whine about the cost of official servers. You have created this problem! If it is too expensive to host official servers then let the community host them like we used to.
>I did warn you that you wouldn't like it.
We don't like being patronized. It is peak irony for game developers to lament the cost of official servers when official servers were something they forced on the community so that they could sell more hats.
Everyone complains that the game companies are ivory towers and that their voices aren't heard: we hear you. But you don't want what you think you want and I'm not trying to patronise you by saying that.
Additionally, I didn't cherry pick the list I intentionally grabbed the first ones that had networking, almost no cross platform games from 2008 were heavily networked. (Fallout 3 was an oversight, I meant far-cry 3).
As I've stated repeatedly in this thread: Self-hosting servers only works for session based games.
Even then, those sessions can leave players with a very mixed experience (weird rules, mods, someone might have made themselves "god", it opens up the client to be exploited by the server). Weird latency issues and connection drops not withstanding.
If it's dedicated servers that you rent from us as a company then: it can be expensive for you, if it's too expensive, less people do it, less people do it, the more expensive it becomes to maintain the provisioning/admin tools and it's amortised across much less players so the price goes _even higher_.
Then there's the server list fiasco. Where do you connect?
* XxXxBubBas-BayxxXx--freelootlvl25OnlY!?1
* 174.255.121.2:5543
* bit.ly/free-nudes
We listened to the community before, many times, sometimes people are so outspoken that we really believe we'll have competitive edge if we're the ones to "listen" and every fucking time we get burned by it. So I don't blame anyone in the industry for listening to their CMK department more than the hardcore PC Master Race.
The Hardcore PC Master Race do not represent all gamers.
But then you present us that the reason for only official servers is because community servers might have mods/weird rules, or ,dear god, funny names? How exactly is that a problem? Currently I spend some time in Rust. It has official servers as well as community ones. And let me tell you, the community servers are whats keeping the game afloat. Funny names in server list virtually doesn't exist. Its like people in general have a certain level of taste and it just so happens that servers with cringe names are left empty. Mods are great. Different people enjoy different mechanics, and thank god for different rules on some server, like "solo only", because it's actively sought out by people that don't want to combat 20 men teams on official servers.
Your statement that community servers are only working for session based games couldn't be more diverged from reality. Some of those servers are hosted for years continuously, only restarted to apply updates. And for many other games this is the case.
You say that we don't want what we want and Hardcore PC Master Race ain't representing all gamers, but frankly, if anyone knows what they want, wouldn't you agree Hardcore PC gave it more thought than your "average gamer"?
The issues you described ain't problem of community, which you heroically solve by taking our toys away, but are exaggerated, misunderstood, almost nonexistent issues that mainly come from skewed views of you as game developers and yours personally.
Maybe you are burned out of people hating while proclaiming "Im only the messenger" because it touches you personally, correctly, because you also believe the wrong message we Hardcore PC Master Race gamers so hate to hear.
EDIT: And the fact that multiplayer game becomes unprofitable once player spends more time in it is horrifying. So you telling me the studios are actually incentivized to make games we stop playing almost immediately after purchase? And you use this to defend your point why servers cant afford basic anti-cheat?
I still play some Battlefield 4 from time to time. Custom servers are awful.
You'll randomly get kicked because you didn't pay for a VIP slot, randomly killed because only 5 snipers per team are allowed and randomly kicked because the admin didn't like the particular gun you're using.
I can see why game developers would (and should) prevent that.
The only thing that may dissuade game creators from creating openly available dedicated server software is that they will need to let everyone access the list of servers(like Valve), so they would get traffic without any kind of ROI.
You can't have your cake and eat it too here, everything costs, and player experience is king.
Cheating happens, we don't want it to, but we do the best we can with what we have, and if it's not enough: play on a platform that does not allow memory modification and injection. It's damn impossible to "secure" a client, and when we do people cry about DRM. (I'm not saying that some DRM isn't to "prevent piracy" and I'm a free software advocate so I hate DRM, I'm just saying that if we included DRM in our game people would go nuts about it- but it would help solve the issue here).
Consider the widely acknowledged fact tat the working hours are brutal, the pay is quite low for C/C++ programmers, the average experience in the industry before burnout is 5 years.
Nobody would do this if the passion wasn't there. This industry basically couldn't exist without the passion for making games.
And, every time we fail we're yelled at for being incompetent. Every trade off we make is derided by people who never actually tried to make something like this.
Every time we try to increase the amount we're paid, or set a decent working schedule (longer development times mean more salaries because working on a project longer) we're told that we're "sleazy business men" trying to make a profit.
Like I said in another comment, the only way for you to get "better" games is to set your expectations for games lower than AAA (IE: stop buying AAA's), make us slaves or pay more.
And people (in aggregate) do not want to pay more.
Who's this "we"? The workers or the shareholders? Is there any unionizing effort on the videogame industry?
But, I’m hiring. If you think you can do better. I’ll put in a good word.
https://www.massive.se/job/gameplay-programmer-7439997104051...
https://www.massive.se/job/senior-system-programmer-74399969...
I think this explains why you are having trouble understanding the users point.
I was playing games like Half-Life off of user provided servers in 1998 and can't recall ever having any issues. Others on here seem to have fond memories of doing the same with other games.
> Even then, those sessions can leave players with a very mixed experience (weird rules, mods, someone might have made themselves "god", it opens up the client to be exploited by the server).
This is an odd concern to bring up considering the linked article.
It’s like some engineers are forgetting that most problems faced when programming are not technical.
I started my career developing on a real time OS, learning from people in industry for 20-30 years. I’ve since transitioned you something “higher level” and more web/server focused and a lot of the foo spat out like this is complete BS.
When developing on a real-time OS the only problems I faced was a simple product story (we are building this to solve X problem), and a simple technical problem (build a system which uses under 1% CPU to do X).
When developing these other products though suddenly there are many other considerations to take into place. I appreciate that you bring up latency concerns in multiplayer games, it can be the biggest downer to play a competitive FPS game where players have wildly different pings.
There is truth that we’ve coded ourselves into a corner of complexity and that we there are much efficiency gains to have in terms of output and program efficiency. But it’s willful ignorance to think that is the only problem or that it is trivial to solve, or even that the people involved in a project don’t think about this all the time.
Aren't you forgetting something? Like every MMORPG in existence? Almost every player hosted multiplayer game like Warcraft 3 that were released in 2002? (the host can cheat because he is running the server but the other clients can't which is the important part)
Seriously. I don't understand how hard it is to just run the security sensitive parts on the server. It's not like running things on the client removes the need to communicate with a server. The amount of time the hacky solution wastes is significantly worse than doing it correctly and kills the game when it finally launches.
I'm getting very tired, and irritated so my responses are coming off as unreasonable now, so with a final hopeful breath let me say the following: I hear what you're saying.
Truly I understand that you think that it's super easy and we have so much money that it should be solved.
We don't have the money you think we do, we run on very thin margins, in both time and resources.
Others have mentioned that we should shift the burden of running servers to users, but that has many tradeoffs and doesn't work for many games- especially not on consoles. Especially not in the sheer numbers of users we have.
The issue is also understanding what 'security sensitive parts' are, because what is that? Everything is sensitive, movement, bullets, health, what you see, what you hear, what you can interact with, what loot you picked up, what gun you have equipped and how fast it's equipped, how fast you reload, how many bullets are in the clip.
If you were to stall a client so that the server verified you could do those things then your game is running 1 frame every 20 seconds. That's even if you had infinite performance on the server to make those calculations for the 24 players that can see each other.
It's a hard problem, one I genuinely invite you to solve for yourself, maybe the answer is to make much simpler games like CS:GO or Minecraft.
Or maybe the answer is simple and everyone I work with, both in my office and in the industry of AAA gaming, is malignantly incompetent like the commenters here keep suggesting.
As a relative novice when it comes to multiplayer game programming, your comments have been enlightening to me.
I’ve grown my experience over the years in other fields to a point where “don’t trust the client” is nearly second nature to me. So whenever I’d dip my toes into programming a game, and look at multiplayer server side stuff with puzzlement, trying in vain to work our where or how I’m supposed to be validating the legitimacy of the clients incoming game events. It never before occurred to me that doing this kind of server side validation might be too burdensome. The notion that the backend code I was trying to understand had been written with minimising cost per player hour as a positive metric is now so face-palmingly obvious that I am still stunned at how I never realised and literally having a string of “oh and that’s why that bit there..,” as I write this.
So thank you very much for your comments.
Step down from your high horse. You're just parroting PR talking points that are totally nonsensical. If game studios could save money by offering dedicated servers they would do it. They switched to official servers not because they care about the experience but because it allowed them to monetize online play better. You can't sell hats when players can host their own servers and mod it however they wish. Why would I buy a hat from Infinity Ward when I can just mod myself a hat on my dedicated server?
>If it's dedicated servers that you rent from us as a company then: it can be expensive for you, if it's too expensive, less people do it, less people do it, the more expensive it becomes to maintain the provisioning/admin tools and it's amortised across much less players so the price goes _even higher_.
Again, if it were possible for game studios to make more money by offering dedicated servers, they would do it. You are inventing problems with dedicated servers so that you can ride in and be the hero when you solve them. These aren't actual, real, problems. These are just PR talking points to justify forcing official servers so that game studio have better monetization paths.
>As I've stated repeatedly in this thread: Self-hosting servers only works for session based games.
No, it doesn't. That is a limitation you (game studios) have invented. There are dedicated servers for World of Warcraft.
>But you don't want what you think you want and I'm not trying to patronise you by saying that.
Ah yes the ole "I know best." The final landing spot of ridiculous arguments.
Well, "our investors demand more monetization then what's possible when first-party servers don't have a monopoly" is a actual, real, problem; the problem is that the investors have too much control over the software design.
> There are dedicated servers for World of Warcraft.
There were dedicated (third-party, ie potentially self-hosted) servers; last I checked (when I wanted to give WoW another try) Blizzard has been agressively C&Ding them whenever it can.
Turns out you can have AAA with dedicated servers as long as you arent planning to nickle and dime your userbase selling macrotransaction first day DLCs or pretend your limited instancing game is an MMO.
This is a completely manufactured problem. The best part is they could've kept their money making cosmetics but still let people self host servers.
Because nobody asked for the fucking fancy cake! Why do people in the industry not get this simple fact?
We were all very happy with the cookies we had before. Which is why we kept coming back to the bakery and telling all our friends how awesome the bakery is. Then the baker says, "hey, those cookies suck, what you really want is the fancy cake! No more cookies, only cake" and despite the customers screaming at the baker, pleading with him to bring back the cookies, he just won't and is surprised that customers are frustrated that they can't get what they want. We eat the fancy cake now because it's the only thing available. But we want the cookies we had before.
As I remember playing in a self-hosted world was one where there were hundreds of barren servers, servers that disconnected mid-game, servers that randomly lagged due to bad internet and unknown server hardware (often shared with the game client) and hacked server galore. If you were in the 'in-crowd' you had the passwords to servers where the hardcore players hung out and had fun - and you were in the 1%.
The market wants free to play. No really. For every player that claims they want to put down $60 before even playing a game there are 1000 that won't even glance at your game if it isn't free. I can't even recommend $5 iOS games to friends and family without them turning up their nose because they only play 'free' games.
There is a vocal minority of games who feel like the games industry isn't listening to them and not giving them what they want. And they are correct, but the games industry isn't conspiring internally to screw those people, they are just trying to price games in a way that maximizes their potential to pay down development costs and pays for ongoing development and devops costs.
Your second paragraph is your memory, but its not what it is now. Empty servers? what about "hide empty" checkbox in serverlist? Or your praised Join Now button finding server with high pop?
Server lagging-disconnecting? Are we in 1995? Most current servers are on par with official. In fact, I more often encounter connection issues in games that only sport Official servers, and the fact that I just cant join different server sucks.
Hacked server galore: Thats the issue with official servers too. Frankly, people devoting time and resources to host a server for their favorite game dont do so so they can hack on it.
"If you were in the 'in-crowd' you had the passwords to servers where the hardcore players hung out and had fun - and you were in the 1%." --- wwwwwwwwwhat? What planet you from?
Citation needed.
An honest test would be to release a game with both options. Might be hard tot count the decentralized players though.
There was a big backlash in the community when matchmaking became the norm. I actually "boycotted" Call of Duty MW2 when it launched because of the lack of server support.
A lot of people say they want the cookies.
But the people will actually pay more for the cake.
It's not that game developers aren't listening. They are listening very closely, and being extremely responsive to where money is being spent.
Maybe most people don't care about, say, the existence of servers that will put their desires above those of the game company (which is one of the things self-hosted software practically provides; no one disputes that running the server on your PC just because is a niche scenario), but the fact that they fail to effectively strategise their spending toward that goal is not evidence in favor of that conclusion, because it's much more easily explained by the known fact that people (note I didn't say "most") are short-sighted, impulsive, technologically-illiterate (okay, that one's most) hypocrites in most of their decision making.
"if I have a factory that can make either cookies or cake, and it operates under capitalism, it seems self-evident that I should make cake."
The system has evolutionary pressures towards financial reward. The game companies that make "cake" are rewarded and gain market share and power. The companies that make "cookies" are financially punished and lose market share and wither.
In the system that we have, with the financial systems at play, it's inevitable that you'll get "cakes".
> > nobody asked for the fucking fancy cake! [...] We were all very happy with the cookies we had before.
> No, [...] you're wrong.
Clearly the the profit-maximizing action is to manufacture cake, 'free'-to-play games, and heroin, rather than cookies, well-designed games, and nothing; no one in this thread (that I've noticed at least) is actually disputing that; we're saying that we don't want cake, as far as we can tell no one actually wants cake, and it's axiologically bad that production is focused on cake rather than cookies.
Some people are then (rightly or wrongly) blaming the baker, but the only thing I was asserting was that no, the fact that people pay money for cake does not mean they want cake. (In the absence of any other evidence it suggests that people want cake - which is the reason capitalism ever works at all for anything - but we have multiple people saying cake is terrible, so there is not a absence of other evidence.)
If they want cookies, but the only option the baker gives is cake or go hungry, of course they're going to pay for the cake. It's their only option!
Doesn't necessarily mean they don't prefer the cookies just because they're spending on cake...
Let's say there are thousands of bakers. There are bakers making cookies and cakes all the time.
Some of those bakers are financially rewarded for their choices, and thus gain power. Others are financially punished for their choices, and slowly are pushed to the margins or die (as a business. The person just moves to a non-baking field).
Over time, you will see an evolutionary pressure toward the baker's baking cakes. You will see fewer and fewer baker's baking cookies.
This is what happened in the gaming industry. There were options for cookies, but they weren't financially rewarded and those options have been drastically diminished because of it.
I will say that, in this now-stretched analogy, I also prefer "cookies". Those games are out there. They're being made by indie developers. Go spend money on them if you want more of them.
Call of Duty games come to mind and afaik Battlefield games used to have that option too until EA changed it to “You can rent servers from us!”.
Which doesn’t even go into other issues this had solved but then came back, like toxic communities resulting from the random nature of match making.
In that context I still have very fond memories of the late 90s and early 2000s PC multiplayer scene: Whole communities grew around servers, who would usually self-moderate not just for cheating but also toxic behavior.
2 decades later this has been replaced with catch all bad word lists that warn and ban people for simply writing a wrong combination of letters, regardless of context, and media blasting gaming companies for their out of control toxic communities.
I was responding to the parents assertion that server software shipped with games 10-12 years ago, I did a google search for "games shipped in 2008" (to be charitable and check the oldest games) and I took the first online capable games that were available on PC with no cherry picking.
Whether they got flack or not is irrelevant, the vocal minority, especially in PC gaming is very dangerous. To give an example we got a lot of feedback on our game that we needed a dedicated PVP mode, so we spent a year (and many multiple millions of euros) making it, and never achieved anything over 100 concurrent players. It was well marketed, and you could say it's "not good", but our evidence shows that nobody even tried it enough to determine it's not good.
> Call of Duty games come to mind and afaik Battlefield games used to have that option too until EA changed it to “You can rent servers from us!”.
renting servers from us(tm) is decidedly _not_ a server package that you host yourself, although it's paid for, I'm not sure if it covers the costs of running. I think it probably doesn't given the fact that this isn't an option anymore.
There's a small irony here because if it's expensive, less people will buy it, which means maintaining the software that lets you do it becomes more expensive because it's not amortised among lots of people and so it gets even more expensive. (in a death spiral kind of way).
Regardless; your comment talks exclusively about PC titles, but the majority of AAA titles that have server backends are cross platform. I think this is part of the problem when talking about games in general. The PC guys like games tailored to their platform and really despise (or generally dislike) console players and how they interact with games.
I can't say it's unfair but if we were to sell only on PC, releasing a server package and making directory services, we would not have covered the cost of making the game by even a third. And I know that because we have pretty decent consumer market knowledge, it's a requisite.
In 2008, I was playing (typical example among others) Warcraft 3, which shipped in 2004 (and FWIW supports LAN play, without any server at all, as the third item on the main menu). I suspect this may explain some of your confusion (ie, at any given point in time, most software in use shipped before that point in time). No comment on the object-level argument though; I don't like online play in the first place.
EDIT: I see a typo in my above post, I meant to say games that can play on PC and PS4 (as in, cross platform games)
PC-only games have UX that players are much more forgiving of.
Okay... that's a thing you can talk about, I guess, but it's not what cwhiz was talking about:
> Go back 10-12 years ago and most PC games had server software [emphasis added]
Also that doesn't really address my point at all; did console games released in 2004 have closed servers, or did they not support network play at all?
> as in, cross platform games
If you can give me examples of games that run on linux I'll be happy to discuss them at length. :)
Parent said that "if we go back 10-12 years and games had dedicated server software", tried to find some examples games that are of similar deployment to mine (IE; multi-platform AAA games with network play) to see if that assertion held true.
It seems like, aside from Valves games (which exist on XBox afaik) most do not offer a dedicated server software.
If we go far enough back (2004) then there's only the Xbox which had network capability, meaning that there's not so many networked games that work multi-platform.
I think it's inferred but when I say "cross platform" I mean Windows and whatever the presiding consoles are.
I think so, yes.
> "if we go back 10-12 years and games had dedicated server software"
Assertion was specifically PC games, and I read it to mean games that people (PC users) 10-12 years ago were playing (regardless of whether console ports existed, or when they came out), which I think was the intended interpretation.
From what you've said, it sounds like the addition of network functionality to consoles was contemporaneous with PC games losing working peer/private-server functionality, which seems in line with cwhiz's position, if not their timeline.
> I think it's inferred but when I say "cross platform" I mean Windows and whatever the presiding consoles are.
I vehemently disagree with this, but I think it's mostly a difference of terminology, so I'm disinclined to argue it versus just ad-hocing around the problem[0].
0: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GKfPL6LQFgB49FEnv/replace-th...
> I couldn't think of a better terminology though.
Well "games that run on both PC and console" works, but it's a bit unwieldy.
I think at times things we think were "10 years ago" were actually more like 15-20.
Fair enough, I guess the 10-12 year timeframe isn't far enough in the past. Tho I do remember official servers for L4D2 being a thing, in addition to the ability for players to run their own, on their own hardware.
> Whether they got flack or not is irrelevant, the vocal minority, especially in PC gaming is very dangerous.
It wasn't a "vocal minority" when the change happened because the community hosting servers themselves used to be the norm before companies stopped shipping dedicated server software with their games.
In that context, the flack was well deserved as we can now see the impact it had on the overall gaming landscape, namely: Taking away the players ability to run their own servers, which means players are now at the mercy of the company to decide when a multiplayer-only game will stop being playable.
That wasn't an issue when dedicated server software was commonly shipped with games, back then players could just set up a server on their own hardware, extending the life of the game way past official support, and allowing them to keep playing the game they paid money for.
> renting servers from us(tm) is decidedly _not_ a server package that you host yourself, although it's paid for, I'm not sure if it covers the costs of running.
But that wasn't the point, the point there is that while technically players can now still get "their own servers" these are not actually "their own servers", they are still at the mercy of the company supporting the game and actually offering that option, while at the same time giving players zero ability to customize the hardware and more advanced server settings.
It's the gaming equivalent of "outsourcing into the cloud instead of running your own hardware".
> Regardless; your comment talks exclusively about PC titles, but the majority of AAA titles that have server backends are cross platform.
My comment is specifically talking about the time when games would still ship with their own dedicated server software so players could set them up on their own hardware.
Which has by now pretty much died out because the closest thing to that which still exists is the EA variant of "We can rent you the server, but you still can't use your own hardware".
> I can't say it's unfair but if we were to sell only on PC, releasing a server package and making directory services, we would not have covered the cost of making the game by even a third.
As a consumer I consider it very unfair, particularly in the context that for quite a while it worked quite well, it was the de-facto way how multiplayer was facilitated.
Which by now has been completely replaced with "games as a service" and P2P based matchmaking, where publishers have the ultimate say how long you are allowed to play the game, even when players would be willing to pay for the server and the bandwidth themselves.
Why take that option away? Why put these artificial expiration dates on the games? It's just a very extreme change, particularly considering that to this day one can still find privately hosted servers for all kinds of games from 20 years ago.
This works because the dedicated server software wasn't "locked away", as such these games had their life extended by decades. Something that will be utterly impossible with the vast majority of modern releases where the dedicated servers are pretty much in their own little "walled garden" as to best facilitate MTX and have the ability to just shut the game down once it ain't considered profitable anymore or the publisher wants to force the player base into the newest release of the franchise.
Nobody is arguing that companies should pay for servers indefinitely, all that people are asking for is the ability to run their own servers as not to have their games artificially made obsolete when the publisher decides to shut down all the official servers.
Fallout 3 is single player, so that’s an uncharitable choice.
You don't seem to get the game industry has been stealing PC games since 1997 with ultima online.
Buying any client-server game or piece of software means you're getting robbed.
Almost every game in the 90's had the ability to host locally, Doom, duke 3d, descent, quake 1+2+3, we used IPX emlulators like kali/kahn to play games like warcraft 2 over the internet.
So you need to go back further buddy, from 1992 to roughly 2004, all games had dedicated server functionality until the game industry realized the public was stupid with the rise of utlima online, everquest, guild wars 1 and wow, which lead to steam.
Steam is basically corporately hacked software, why would you need to login to someones remote PC at valves HQ to play a game?
Up until 2004, every PC game had dedicated server functionality built into it. Just go look at the FPS released from 1995 to 2004 roughly.
This stopped because the public bought into the MMO scam o the late 90's, mmo's were just rebranded PC RPG's to get the public to take up corporately hacked software.
So no.
GTA 4, fallout 3, battlefield BC and LEft 4 dead 2 are POST STEAM and POST MMO games, after they'd figured out you were too stupid to realize you were being robbed and were oblivious.
So go back to quake 3 engine based games and earlier PC games you'll notice they were complete DRM free pieces of software. You don't get the STEAM is unnatural corproate malware that was forced into half-life 2 because of what they learned about the public from 1997's ultima online.
UO was what spawned the great game theft of the last 20 years.
To have games that can be shut down remotely and who's servers can go offline means youre getting fraudulently coded software.
Actually, they seem to have a conspiracy theory, that software companies are secretly... doing the things that they're openly and obviously doing.
In other news, [the democratic and republican parties] have always hated [democracy]'s power to [pass laws that harm campaign contributors]. Anyone who has any idea of the history of [the US] and isn't a retard, knows [a bipartisan system] has been in the cards for a long time going back to pre [mass-media] days when [candidates] were trying to screw other [candidates].
Sure, but that's not a conspiracy theory; that's a obvious malice theory.
It is, since Silicon valley and big media companies have always hated the PC's power to copy files. Anyone who has any idea of the history of silicon valley and isn't a retard, knows this has been in the cards for a long time going back to pre internet days when businesses were trying to screw other businesses.
https://tifca.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/ClienttoCloud_V...
So they openly state they want to undermine local executable files and make every piece of software client server.
> they openly state they want to undermine local executable files and make every piece of software client server. [emphasis added]
The only 'effort' software companies have put into keeping this a secret is that they they don't usually publicly announce what they're trying to do.
> Because the public is so stupid they can operate in broad daylight. You don't seem to get that the vast majority of the population is computer illiterate.
No, I get that just fine - you're not actually arguing that they have a conspiracy; you're arguing that they don't need one.
> why would you go from having quake 3 with level editing, mods, free maps skins, etc, in big budget AAA games, to not getting that, and having the game client server locked to company PC's like diablo 3 and overwatch?
I wouldn't, partly because I'm not a moron, but mostly because I prefer Warcraft 3; the last good FPS[0] I played was Wolfenstein.
0: unless you completely ignore the "shooting" part and count minetest.
And console games did not have server software 10-12 years ago so I think it's a bit unfair to claim that the move away from player-hosted servers was only done for monetary reasons.
It was a fairly effective system, IMHO.
I only play Valve games (CSGO, TF2, L4D2), so I don't know how true it is of other companies, but you can still run your own game servers. If anything, it's easier to do so now than it used to be. Few people do it, because the Valve-run servers are easier to interact with and they're good enough for what most people want.
The community tried to handle cheaters before, but they weren't good at it. It relied on admins being present, and put the onus on them to identify and kick/ban cheaters. In a large-enough active gaming community, admins were around often enough, but the best they could do was guess at who was cheating. Sure, the egregious cases were obvious, but there was rarely definitive proof, and people who were subtle could cheat without getting caught. Good players who didn't cheat were also the victim of constant accusations. I was banned from plenty of servers just for having a good night and winning.
I'm glad that anti-cheat software has gotten good enough that it works for casual play. It's rare that I see anything in CSGO these days that looks like cheating. Sure, it's out there, but it's not very common. On busy weekends as a server admin, I used to kick and ban dozens of people. On the public servers now, I might run into a couple suspicious people all weekend.
I don't see companies running servers as directly related. At least in these Valve games, I still get the marketing spam through the Steam client and in the games themselves, and I can still use all the cosmetic junk whether I'm playing on an official server or a private server.
It's better now.
The cost of making games has ballooned, which provides a context for the monetizing behaviour of publishers.