Hacker News Reader

Comment by corbulo | Hacker News Reader

Whats most tragic is it's not expensive to just allow players to host it themselves for a game thats already multiplayer. It would do a lot for brand reputation. For some reason it seems like only in the last 2 years have publishers been just barely waking up to reputation actually mattering.

Really bizarre era of consumer behavior. 'You're gonna buy my crapware games and you're gonna like it! You're gonna read my articles shitting on you and you're gonna like it!'

Cyberpunk (as much as I love it) and Battlefield 2042 were inevitable symbolic trainwrecks. <10k daily players for the latest Battlefield title? Time to wake up.

View on HN

It's copy protection.

You can't run a hacked server that ignores license state or hacking bans if you have no access to the server software. They disguise it under a claim of convenience, a feature that you match against similar-experience players, but you're right, it's ultimately an antifeature.

Gamers put up with a lot of crap, between exploited ring0 DRM, platform exclusives, the loss of consumer rights (like refunds and resale) and crappy ports from consoles. I don't understand how they get away with it. I might just be old, but I've changed my entire purchasing game strategy to ignore games that fall foul of these things.

That used to be the case, now it's asset protection because the only way people will pay for skins, hats, virtual shoes, and pink guns is if you can't load arbitrary assets.

If a server says: load whatever skin you want... well, why would you pay for it?

This is also why modding got killed off, you can't sell people stuff if someone else will make better assets for free and just puts them up for download. Even if integrity or security was a big issue, that's been solved since quake 3 and ut99 with integrity checks and server-side load controls (ironically, the same ones that are now used in locked-down games to make selling different coloured virtual shirts a thing).

That, and planned-obselescence.

I'm sure that EA would love to kill Battlefield 4. But it will never die, because players can run and moderate dedicated servers.

Battlefield 1 (newer than 4), on the other hand, died years ago. Battlefield 5 is practically the same game, arguably worse, yet was able to steal most of 1's player base because support (and moderation) were effectively dropped by EA during the release of 5.

Anti-cheat is the newest (and deadliest) iteration of this pattern. CoD Warzone is free to play, so long as you run it on Windows, and not in a VM.

Worst of all, this means the burden of moderation has been moved to anti-cheat itself, even though any experienced forum moderator can tell you that moderation itself is based on social interaction, not technical behavior.

While I'm sure both copy protection and planned obsolescence are considerations, I think most of us neglect the bigger elephant in the room:

Gamers aren't tinkerers anymore.

Times change, gamers might have been tinkerers and hobbyists who accepted needing to mess with their software and perhaps even hardware (memory address allocations, anyone?!), but that was 30 to 40 years ago. We're in the 21st century now, more than 1/5th of the way to the 22nd, and gaming has become mainstream.

Gamers today just want to play games, messing with the computer (what's a computer?) is above their pay grade. Games today route multiplayer through their own matchmaking servers because Player-2-Player matchmaking /fucking sucks/, it's janky under ideal circumstances let alone normal. Gamers today don't want to deal with network shenanigans, they just want to play; so devs and publishers oblige by handling more things on their end simplifying the experience.

Gamers aren't tinkerers anymore.

The gamers of 30 to 40 years ago have moved on to messing with "home labs" and Raspberry Pis and 3D printing and shitposting on HN.

You say that but for games that allow self-hosting there is a rich tinkerer community. Look at Minecraft for example.

Tinkering gamers aren't the audience anymore.

More importantly, their audience isn't the audience anymore.

After all, it was never a hugely significant number of tinkerers that were important, it was the audience each tinkerer brought with them.

That just isn't the business model anymore.

> it was the audience each tinkerer brought with them.

Could it be that said audience depended on the tinkerers to help with settings things up, but since games "just work" now, the middleman has been cut?

> Tinkering gamers aren't the audience anymore.

With gaming becoming popular I'd say tinkering gamers are the same number as before, just not the same proportion of the overall gamers pool.

I think tinkerable games causes tinkerers.

I'm not sure that's true. The games that allow or encourage tinkering have pretty decent modding communities. What were we doing 30 years ago that we aren't today? The only mainstream thing I can think of are devices like Game Genie.

Completely with you on matchmaking. The pathetic limits on these things. You've not lived until you've had a dozen friends all try to climb in/on a drop ship in Tribes 2 in a 64v64 match. That was worth carting a CRT to a lan gaming convention alone. But I don't believe players prefer this, they just don't have a choice. I much prefer the old server-list model.

The only online game I play right now is DayZ which has mostly player-hosted servers and most of those have mods.

>What were we doing 30 years ago that we aren't today?

Messing with computers.

PC gaming today is as simple as going out to Best Buy or Costco, buying a "gaming" desktop, come home, unbox it, plug everything in, initialize (note: not install) Windows, install Steam, and Bob's your uncle.

Most of us hailing from the 20th century learned how computers worked because we kind of had to to run the games we wanted to play. Memory address allocations, DLL hell, driver hell, registry tricks, picking out parts and putting it all together; all stuff gamers today simply don't have to deal with. Windows Update will even figure out most if not all the drivers for you.

And before anyone says it: Yes yes, I know buying a "gaming" desktop from Best Buy or Costco isn't ideal. But guess what? We are outdated oldtimers. We definitely know how to get the best stuff, but gamers simply don't need the best anymore. Computers have become household appliances, not tinkerers' toys to be handled by wizards. So what if that desktop from Best Buy craps out? They just go and buy another one like you would buy another Playstation and Bob's your uncle.

Gamers aren't tinkerers anymore, most people don't mess with computers anymore.

If we only allow "tinkering" to mean fixing things that should work, sure: Stuff works better today. But I include hardware tuning and software modding in that too, and both are vastly more powerful and present than they were in the 90s.

My experience ~30 years ago involves a 386, big-box computer, Window 3.1 pre-installed. My options for tinkering (outside the battle for HIMEM) were pressing a turbo button and hex-editing File Manager to File Mangler. There was no hardware modding scene at that level, just a choice of massively expensive storage and RAM. I'm sure there was more that you could describe as maintenance but I don't consider myself any less of a hacker because I don't have to run "hdsit" before I shut down.

Did I do more stuff? Sure. I didn't have a huge number of games so writing your own, playing with tools was pretty much your only option, and I would agree with a characterisation that people fiddle with computers less because they have less contact time with an actual desktop environment outside of the browser. We are spoilt for choice.

But PC gamers still tinker. The have hardware options unimaginable in the 90s and the scale of game modding scenes for things like The Witcher 3, GTA5, Fallout 4, Skyrim, Minecraft, Souls and Rimworld eclipse those efforts in the 90s, many times over. Shader beautifiers weren't even possible. Is it niche? Probably, but PC gaming has always been niche.

> Battlefield 1 (newer than 4), on the other hand, died years ago

Hm? Not quite, there's a solid player base still playing.

It was even on a sale on Steam a couple of months ago which brought in a lot of new players

It's probably healed a fair bit since I last tried, but when 5 came out, it was rough.

Gamers are a "special" target market that regularly purchases products from companies with contempt for them. The top examples are EA and Blizzard. I'm unsure whether to attribute it to simple addiction, misplaced brand loyalty, or something else. With regard to the DRM and anti-cheats that ironically make your system even less secure, a lot of gamers are so scared of cheaters that they'll put up with anything.

> Gamers are a "special" target market that regularly purchases products from companies with contempt for them.

How does that make gamers special - aren't most mainstream products optimized for profit at the expense of quality?

> It's copy protection.

This is always the official explanation.

It is just pure greed.

instead of shitty, addictive and expensive trash i play chess

Part of it is that a lot of kids who grew up in the current era of games only understand the game that they were handed, where creating servers is easy and matchmaking is table stakes, AA or AAA level production values are "good" and anything else that isn't "stylized" or "retro" is potentially disqualifying.

Indies who want to do the right thing face a customer base that doesn't really get it and yells at them for spending times on things they don't understand. So they pivot - making games is already risky enough as it is.

Game devs have less courage because too many are funded by publishers rather than self-publishing. Those devs that don't enjoy breakout success are safer but those that make hit games never reap the full benefit of it - publishers take too large a cut - and can't fund themselves into making something bigger, like how Half-Life set the stage for Steam.

"Early access" has become a meaningless label, incentivizing the norm towards good-enough games rather than great games, and muddying the waters for truly great games to be recognized as such, because they often don't start that way, but also used as a defensive mechanism against the entitled creeps who think it's okay to harass the social media void with their complaints, not realizing that the people on the other side of it see it and sometimes emotionally react to it.

I guess I'm shaking my cane too much, but it's not just the companies going down false paths, it's also people following them down. Put another way, the industry is systematically unhealthy.

Ultimately as a consumer, I just don't care. Other than for nostalgia purposes, I don't get much enjoyment at all out of playing very old games. For pretty much every style of game, you can get newer, better games that pull off the concepts better.

I see gaming like most forms of entertainment which are enjoyed in the moment and then you move on. When I got to a music concert, I don't sit there and record it for watching again 10 years later. I enjoy it in the moment and move on, there will be newer ones to enjoy later.

I just finished playing half-life 2 in VR with a third party VR mod and it was amazing how well this game stood up to the test of time.

There's really a lot of value in retro and mods IMO. Sure it's not for everyone but what is?

I never played HL originally so I had no nostalgia from it, but when I tried it a few years ago it just felt very dated. Sure, the mechanics and story probably hold up. But the visuals, ui, modern niceties, etc are all absent. Just doesn’t seem worth playing when you could pick up a newer similar game instead.

HN is always telling us to be outraged when an online game is shut down, but by the time they get shut down, hardly anyone cares about playing them anyway, they moved on to newer stuff.

The visuals aren't absent, that's what I was trying to say. They hold up surprisingly well, though a high-res texture pack would obviously help.

And in the VR realm there aren't a ton of large story FPSes now. Especially not of this caliber.

> For pretty much every style of game, you can get newer, better games that pull off the concepts better.

Hard disagree here. Some subgenres don't even have any newer games at all.

And even for genres that have been embraced by the mainstream, often they are all polished into the same shape. Yeah, there are plenty of conveniences now that older games might not have but a lot uniqueness is also lost in the process. How many modern games still expect you to navigate an environment yourself instead of feeding you questmarkers and triply-redundant messages and reminders of what you need to be doing next? How many shooters that just focus on the shooting instead of feeling the need to add some skinner-box-inducing RPG-lite mechanics. How many Point & Click adventures that even come close to scope or engrossing art styles of the classics? Why is Planescape: Torment still considered one of the best (C)RPG stories by many when writers had almost 25 years to surpass it?

Yeah, if you pick a random game from the 90s and a random game from today, then the latter will perhaps be more playable. Many old games have plenty of jank that wouln't fly today. Because today's games are designed for just that: so that anyone with half a braincell can complete them. That means ecessive hints. It means refusal to provide challenges that might limit your market. It means limiting the amount of text because everything needs to be voiced which costs a lot. It means repeating mechanics that "work" instead of daring to try something unique.

> I see gaming like most forms of entertainment which are enjoyed in the moment and then you move on. When I got to a music concert, I don't sit there and record it for watching again 10 years later. I enjoy it in the moment and move on, there will be newer ones to enjoy later.

Yet people still listen to classical music and everything in between then and now. Some even mainting their own collection. Are you really going to say that for every Mozart or The Beetles or Black Sabbath or whatever there is a 2020s group that pulls of the concepts better? Does the warm fuzzy sound from old analog recordings prevent you from enjoying them as much as older graphics do?

Of course the answer to what is better also depends a lot of taste. Just like with music, the predominant styles of games shifts over time.

Off-topic, but I see this strange pattern on HN a lot: You say it's hard to disagree with something, then you spend paragraphs disagreeing. What is hard disagree? Why not just say I strongly disagree?

They didn’t say it’s hard to disagree, they said it’s a hard disagree, as in they don’t agree with them at all.

I don't think any RTS pulls off the concepts in Dawn of War even half as good as Dawn of War does.

Cyberpunk seems unrelated. It will probably age better than any other multiplayer title.

The bugs have been patched but not game ruining (for me). T-posing was infrequent, but there were some issues.

Cyberpunk is related because at launch it was shoving crapware out the door. It actually worked mostly fine on my PC, so its not a personal thing. I love the game.

It's the business practice of sending the customer their boots without the sole and toe box sewn together then telling them they get most of the experience earlier this way and theyll stitch it together in a month if they have the time.

I agree it will age well, particularly with the right improvements.

My Cyberpunk experience was actually quite good. I didn't try it on day 1, but after a patch or two my pirated copy (wanted to see if my PC could run it before I spent 60 euros on it) ran great. Sure, my poor 1080 can't do max settings or ray tracing or even good DLSS, but the graphics are gorgeous even at mid-low settings. There were (and still are) Skyrim-level bugs, but that didn't bother me too much.

I think the people that bought into the hype got severely disappointed and anyone buying the game on consoles simply got scammed, but as someone who bought the game after it had been out for a bit, I've had nothing but fun with it.

In fact, one thing CP2077 allows that most other games don't, is backing up the DRM-free installer for the patched game. Steam/PS store/Xbox Online will die one day and all their online patches will disappear forerver, but the GOG versions of most games will run in 20 or 30 years as long as you remember make a backup of the installer.

>wanted to see if my PC could run it before I spent 60 euros on it

steam usually allows refunds in the first few hours of playtime, which supports this usecase as well.

Good to know. There's a big fat warning that you forfeit your right to return the game as soon as you click download.

This is in France, where there's a mandatory 14-day return window for online purchases. But there are restrictions on some items, such as media must be "unopened", and I guess downloading is considered as "opening".

It's caused by ability to patch game later and rushing product to reach impossible deadline on an impossible configuration.

Which is only tangentially related. Greed is the true culprit.

Greed isn't the true culprit. You don't make more money by making any % of your consumer base hate you.

If you don't release game by X date and for 5 year old consoles. Your stocks will definitely go down. And CDPR is a publicly traded company.

For a publicly traded company, especially one with short term oriented investors, some amount of brand tarnishing is acceptable.

For another similar example see Fallout 76.

Greed being the common denominator makes it not the culprit. If greed were truly the culprit then they would be focused on making the most amount of money possible without constraints.

It's poor leadership and short sightedness IMO.

I tried Battlefield 2042 and it was really cool to see such large open fighting spaces, but they're also so large they're boring. People are so spread out a large portion of the time can be spent playing just finding an enemy to shoot at...

By comparison Battlefield: Bad Company 2 was clear the best Battlefield game of all time. And the graphics to this day still hold up.

My problem with Battlefield 2042 is that it doesn’t feel like battlefield. It feels like some exec asked “what kind of shooters have gotten popular with the kids recently? Let’s rip those off”.

> Whats most tragic is it's not expensive to just allow players to host it themselves for a game thats already multiplayer.

It's infinitely expensive, because older games compete with new ones(not everyone cares for looks and there are mods that can make this argument obsolete). And new ones don't always win. Especially with introduction of game as a service. There are many tactics used by modern developers to squeeze more money from players, that modern gamers don't like. And if gamers had a choice many would go retro. This is why WoW Classic exists. This is why emulation exist. This is why people develop open engines for old games. And this is why it is in developers best interest to prevent their older games from competing with new ones. Especially if people were to learn that they could get free skins for their games in past, while modern ones demand cash for even basic palette swap.

Surprised you mention Cyberpunk as a train wreck since it was massively successful and profitable for projekt red even after refunds from low-end platform users. They've sold over 20 million copies at $60/copy. Edgerunners also super successful for them.

And it's recent review rating has jumped to 87%, while all-time rating has crawled to 79% from its low 70s launch.

The reason I mentioned Cyberpunk is because it demonstrates a massive change in brand awareness, same for 2042.

5-10 years ago publishers would just ignore outrage and fix the bare minimum quietly and then leave it alone. Think of all the major bugs just left in games in the 00s and 10s, Fallout New Vegas in particular comes to mind. That might be the single game with the worst long term support ive ever seen. They released it in even worse shape, then made it barely functional, released mod tools and never touched it again because the Obsidian & Bethesda relationship fell apart.

Today both BF2042 and Cyberpunk are going out of their way to improve their games from launch state and make a marketing effort on behalf of it to recover their brand. Gigantic difference.

Bethesda doesn't even fix bugs in their own games even after rereleasing them 20 times, much less letting any other studio do it.

Although they're both Microsoft now, so maybe it can happen.

From now on, all Bethesda games will be bug-compatible with their older releases.

Companies have been aware of the reputation gains for over a decade now. Modern Warfare 2 got tons of backlash when it released without a server browser in 2009. The next CoD, Black Ops 1, had support for dedicated servers. So did Modern Warfare 3.

> Whats most tragic is it's not expensive to just allow players to host it themselves for a game thats already multiplayer.

That’s hardly true for modern games. One I’m working on currently would be on the order of a few thousand US a month to run the entire infrastructure. Trimming that down does not help me launch, and only helps the very small minority trying to run a particular game after its death.

Most modern games don’t run on a single server piece, it’s distributed.

Battlefield wasn't even EA's worst trainwreck. Look what happened to Anthem.

I'd rather sink time into a shoestrung indie studio than anything EA wants to publish, after that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com