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Comment by sofixa | Hacker News Reader

> caused by the game companies that took away the standard method of playing multiplayer -- players running their own servers

Let's be real, what % people among those who game are interested in running their own game server? I'm definitely one of them, and one of my earliest tech memories was setting up a CS 1.6 game server for a bunch of classmates (and being unable to play myself because the computer had nowhere near enough capacity for both the server and the actual game running at the same time); but it's a minuscule percentage.

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This isn't a problem because any given server can support hundreds or thousands of weekly players, so only 0.1% of your playerbase needs to run a server.

We had this, it worked, for years. I'm baffled by all the posters saying it won't, because it did.

There are games I play were one of the players' machines becomes the server. In some it's transparent to them, you just join their world or lobby, in others it's explicit and you even have to input the host's IP to enter.

Standalone servers you need to run separately and care for are much more rare.

> Let's be real, what % people among those who game are interested in running their own game server?

Let's put it differently: What % of people among those who program are interested in maintaining open source software?

A very low %, and yet it's a thriving ecosystem.

To bring it back to gaming: How many people who game are interested in modding, or creating models/maps/etc? Again, a very low %, and yet...

Running/renting hardware and connectivity and administrating a service and development are slightly different.

It's not the 2000s anymore - you don't have to run/rent "hardware" and worry about "connectivity" and whatnot. For most games that offer dedicated servers, there are services with easy to use panels with fancy colored buttons and everything.

As another example: how about hosting a website?

I never ran a server back in the day but I still benefitted from community run servers where decisions about banning were done by volunteer admins. These days with centralized servers it has to be automated.

For a casual CS server the ratio could perfectly be 1:50 and that'd be fine. That's how it used to be with, i.e., CS:Source.

Then, there are companies that ran a bunch of them, which lowered the ratio even further.

IMO, it's more effective, cheaper and easier to mod smaller forums (be it web communities or game server communities) than to do for huge ones.

We used to run these servers on machines that today aren't even 20% of the M1 in my MacBook air.

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