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Comment by t-sauer | Hacker News Reader

This wouldn't work with games nowadays. Or let's rephrase is: it would discourage game developers to develop these type of games. If Blizzard would make private servers for Overwatch available, that would mean people wouldn't care about buying cosmetics from Blizzard. Same goes for games like League of Legends, Fortnite and even Call of Duty nowadays. If you can have your own private servers, you just unlock everything. I see that as a consumer you would want that to be a thing, but from a developers point of view other ventures get more attractive and we wouldn't have those games anymore.

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I think this is a fallacy.

Maybe the big developers wouldn't have incentive to develop billion-dollar cosmetic-powered games anymore, but someone would make it work financially.

You'd still have hugely popular multiplayer games, and maybe they would be somewhat less ambitious in scope and features (i.e. dev cost), but they would still be fun, and have strong communities built around them.

Maybe they sell DLC map packs (which would not have the "community fragmentation" problem from today's centralized matchmaking if private servers exist), or figure out other ways to generate incremental revenue.

Or maybe they don't, and just sell the base game, and are still successful because it's not a 5,000 person team and a nine-figure budget.

Today's games don't exist because of the business model, it's the other way around.

Why is that a bad thing though? Multiplayer shooters existed before the modern rent seeking paradigm. And they can exist afterwards too. The only thing we would lose is that particular parasitic business model. Not everything should be legal.

If this parasitic business model is legally crushed, companies will just move on to the next one, and likely eliminate an entire class of games that a lot of people enjoy because they cant make as much money off of it.

TF2 lets you mod pretty much anything and by all accounts its cosmetics are still hugely profitable for Valve.

> TF2 lets you mod pretty much anything

It's not 2012 anymore, 90% of players play casual where sv_pure is always enabled so you can't mod almost anything.

And it doesn't kill TF2 to support and offer the option for both.

Depends on your definition of "kill".

The original pre-matchmaking TF2 experience is dead. Modern casual is nothing like it and often feels indistinguishable from playing vs bots.

I think there's an answer to this, which is to separate the inventory service from the game servers. Keep the same inventory service online, reuse it for all of your games. Any official servers and any vanilla servers will validate that you own the cosmetics you use, modded servers can override this but you can't use your cosmetics everywhere unless they're actually registered to you. (Or possibly the clients validate it too in which case even a modded server couldn't override it for every player.)

And (as with several other things being discussed in the comments) of course Valve has already done this, and offers it as a service: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/inventory

Curious if there is an open source generic "game server backend" that indie devs can code to that would allow smaller devs to host online games?

I suppose not — to the degree that the backend doesn't just act as message/traffic coordinator but also has game logic. (Although I can imagine an architecture where the back end indeed just manages message sending ... and one of those recipients is the host app that handles the game logic.)

There's a few things out there, several game focused backend as a service. Most of them are focused on mobile games because that's where the easy money is.

Funny enough, there's a Google for Games github org that has some good open source projects for things like matchmaking, cloud saves, etc https://github.com/googleforgames

It’s interesting to me that entire genres of games were created because private dedicated servers were available and bored teenagers could create a TC and play with their friends. Also the technology was such that assets and game scripting were accessible Team fortress, counter strike, Dota, plenty of examples. You bought half-life so you could download and play the mods. I guess that niche is filled by Roblox now? Or maybe Minecraft?

One recent genre is auto-battlers from Dota 2 custom game tools. To my eyes that’s been the only large genre grown from in game tools in a decade which has life beyond original game itself.

Tower defenses and AoS/Dota/ARPG/Mobas as examples of the above from 90s and early 2000s. Maybe “gliding” is a genre too from counterstrike now seen outside in games like trackmania, and probably Gary’s mod is it’s own genre too. Then only genres and modes which live within the original games since (though amazing and well done).

I really think Blizzard had an opportunity with StarCraft 2 to rewrite gaming history if it’s modding tools were up to par. Instead we got custom games less sophisticated than ones 20 years younger from it. I don’t think the modding community ever really recovered being left empty handed in that era. Maybe it’s recovered, modders were left without adequate tools for a while. Modders really did produce hundred million to billion dollar genres in the past, I’m not sure if that is still happening.

Why would that be a problem once they decide to no longer support overwatch? When you turn off your servers, release one last patch that adds running your own server to the game as part of your game shutdown.

No skin off your back other than "cutting into sales of thatsamegame, butnextversion", which people are going to buy anyway.

you can just disable cosmetic drops/leveling/whatever else on private servers since it's sadly such a massive part of multiplayer games nowadays, problem solved.

Oh no, then we're stuck having fun modding old games on our private servers.

I see this as an advantage.

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