Video games could have had a single version for the entire world which contains every localization that the user can freely choose between (you know, like every other software with an international market), but Nintendo popularized the geolocking model that other competitors also started using. (And no it’s not because it would take too much space, that might have been true in the ROM cartridge days but now most game cards are just overpriced proprietary SD cards with hundreds of gigabytes of storage, and it’s not like game studios are particularly conservative with file sizes nowadays.)
Phones also could have had removable batteries and could be disassembled, but Apple popularized the throw it in a dumpster and get a new one model that other competitors also started using.
The tech industry is especially brazen because two thirds of the users literally value convenience and “polish” above data ownership and device repair rights and literally anything else and the other third is just ignored and everyone calls them stuck in the past, paranoid, amish, etc.
OK. I’ve been browsing through the Lemmy comments here, and I’m drucking funk, fuck you.
Once there was a utopia. YOU Killed it. Fuck you. Um not really a utopia, but whatever, fuck you.
The beginning of the end was Gears of War or Halo. It wasn’t that they were particularly good, but they were easy. Anybody could just hop into a game. WOOOO! Game time. Then in came the corporations.
I need to give Epic a little bit of credit here. They’ve always been fighting against the establishment. So none of you remember the days of Unreal Tournament. You fucking mewling little pukes. The name Cliffy B means nothing to you. Once upon a time a game company made a FPS arena shooter game called Unreal Tournament. It was the sequel to their story based FPS called Unreal. It was amazing for its time, but who cares. They defined game engines in ways that are rippling to this day.
Blah blah blah, stuff, then they released a game called Gears of War. Ok, you’re new here. Epic was used to releasing amazing games and then engaging with their players. I know the name CliffyB for a reason. Oh, but Microsoft is a Company. They are serious business. This is a store. Epic would release MapPacks for the UT games, and they would contain some serious work, and they were available for free. Nope said MS. This is a Store. You buy things here. Fight fight fight. Don’t worry. The good guys (investment brokers) will win. Right.
But MS had Halo. Nobody here remembers the early source of Halo. The game that came before. I never played it myself, I just remember a high-school acquaintance talking about it. Something about Marathon. Yeah. Marathon, that seems like it was important. Hah ha ha ha, nothing.
Marathon becomes halo. Fuck. That’s a lot of shit to contain to one sentence. Oh Well, you’re dumb as fuck. Fuck you and your fucking modern ignorance.
“I can play Halo with my friends on my Xbos with such ease. I don’t need to smart.”
Begin the world of Consoles. This is way betterer. No brain need. Just two thumbs and some money.
“Oh, there is money here.” said the people who have MBAs and not much else to speak of. (So do you know what MBA is for? It’s for people who are fucking useless, but went to school anyways lol)
At this point, we need to lambaste Epic, because they took their success at game development and tried to turn it into power. “Fortnight FTW makes us have a store makes us infinite money!”
Ok, so now here we are. All the shitstains are in place, (including you lol, cough cough).
So now the people who are making decisions about games don’t actually know the first fuck about anything. Not about storytelling, not about non-linear storytelling, not about emergent gameplay, not about basic gameplay. They don’t understand what compels instrumental play vs free play. What they understand is that things “NAMES” sell, and you will buy.
And you’re buying. Look at all the dollars you’re spending on…
The beginning of the end was Gears of War or Halo.
Hey now I have many fond memories of playing user made maps in Halo CE on PC. For me it was when Duke Nukem Forever flopped. Everyone preordered it and it started a long line of games being delivered buggy and incomplete.
Ah right, good point. Perhaps the cost calculations work differently then. Consoles are much cheaper to buy than PCs because the manufacturers expect to make money on their subscription services. I’m pretty sure neither Microsoft nor Sony make any profit on selling the hardware, but they have to make profit somewhere.
They profit through the 30% cut on any software sale. The cost equation for online subscriptions is as follows:
“Can we get away with it?” “Yes we can” The end.
On PC they can’t get away with it because there’s no single company controlling everything, so you either get every single company asking for an online subscription, you find other ways to monetize. Closest so far is Microsoft’s game subscription thingy and others like that. It’s not the same, but I’m pretty sure that’s the only way they’ve managed to convince enough people to pay a subscription on PC for now.
Gates had a point. Everyone was spending thousands on hardware but wouldn’t spend a little more for Basic. There were free options, they weren’t poor ( computer hardware was very expensive in the 70’s), but everyone was using Basic without buying it.
It’s like today where people will spend thousands for a gaming PC, then complain about Windows when they should be using Linux.
If MS didn’t do it, someone else would have and it would have become the trend anyway. The problem isn’t the particular sins of a specific company (though to be clear, MS is heinous), the problem is the profit motive.
Not just that. People wonder why online games are so toxic, overly competitive and filled with cheaters. Matchmaking is the reason.
You don’t have to be nice because chances are you’re never going to play with those people again. All other matchmade players are just glorified bots, they’re completely dehumanized. That means shitheads can act like shitheads without any repercussions. Compare that to community servers where the admin will ban you if you’re an asshole. You even end up making friends because the same people will visit the same server.
And what’s your purpose for playing when everyone you’re playing with are glorified bots? Well your focus turns on you which in turn means your main metric of fun becomes your own skill. Since you can directly measure your own skill you look a things like wins/losses and kdr. You start to focus on things that correlate to competitive play and if the matchmaking is skill-based the game actually pushes you into sweats as the goal is to get you to a statistical 50% winrate. Now compare that to community servers where you’re not pushed into sweats, the overall skill of players stays largely the same and because you’ll be playing with people you know there no need to focus on being the best you can be, you can just mess around with others.
And of course cheating is a huge issue, but again it’s one of those things where having an admin to vet sus players make a huge difference. The admin isn’t infallible but cheating is less of an issue if you’re playing with people you know.
But people would much rather give it all up and deal with toxicity, sweats and cheating because the server admin could be a badmin. But maybe I’m just old and am remembering the good old days when you could make friends playing on the same server.
I posted this above, but I really want to emphasize the point. The is not new, it’s not rare, but we need to demand it and be angry when we don’t get it. Dedicated servers should be the norm.
Sometimes even cheaters could be dealt with without an admin in those days. Servers would have fun game settings and odd maps that would break cheating gameplay.
My brother and I often played CS in the same room, on opposing teams because we didn’t like being cheated and didn’t want to be cheaters. We found an empty server with a sniping-only map. Made for great fun and someone joined in about 15 minutes later. They seemed really good, so we joined together to see if we could make it challenging. The new guy was just too good, so we decided to swap back and forth with the new guy to see if one of us could make a 1v2 miracle happen. That’s when we figured out he was impossibly aim hacking. Bummer, our fun game was toasted.
Then we realized the map settings had friendly fire on and a 5 second start delay. Aim hacks don’t target your own teammates. A perfect trap was available: we’d headshot TK the cheater at game start and then 1v1 each other. The cheater tried swapping to the other team only to find my brother using the same TK tactic. Our cheating friend found himself without a chance to grift. Needless to say, he didn’t hang around for long.
I never make friends in games these days. I just drone around and quit when I get tired of it. I don’t even like multiplayer anymore. This is why.
Back in Counter-Strike/CS: Source days I made a ton of real friends. I knew what was going on in their lives. I congratulated them when they got married and had kids.
My clan server was always full of regulars just laughing and telling jokes and making changes to the server to see what worked for us. We had it perfect. Vote for knife fights, fun sounds like “gotchya bitch” for a knife kill. We built it together and we all stumbled into the server by accident and it just fit who were so we stayed. We had a rotation of maps that we all agreed on.
They’re still on my friends list. Last online 11 years ago, 7 years ago, 13 years ago, 12 years ago.
Damn, looking at that hurt a little bit.
It’s sad just how fast time goes. I have no idea where they are now or what they’re doing. That sucks.
The last time I talked to the one dude he had overdosed on heroin and was trying to get his life together. He might not even be alive anymore.
For nearly 5 years I hung out with those dudes every night.
I meet people now that I could see myself being friends with, but there’s no incentive to talk to them again. Random lobby, play game, the end.
I was hoping GO (now 2) would have an active user base in the servers. Nope. No gungame, no endless custom maps, no fun sounds, just base shit.
As sad as it was, I’m glad you made me think about this tonight.
To me personally it isn’t about meeting people to play with is more of getting long life friends from playing games, it’s pretty much just play a couple of games and be done without much reconnect after, being an introverted person also doesn’t help.
AKA dedicated servers. They exist now for games now, but are… well not rare, but very specific. Factorio has a dedicated server. Ark has a dedicated server. Valheim, Space Engineers (windows only), Satisfactory, to name a few that I’ve dealt with myself. Demand them. Punish devs who don’t accommodate them with your wallets. No user dedicated servers, no purchase. Fuck you and the distributed info-scraping service you rode in on.
I have a list of games I will never buy because they have succumbed to the lure of hosted services with no user control, no dedicated server support. Those devs want control; they want to control you, how you play and how you interact with those you play with.
I don’t doubt this this is generally the case, but most of the games I enjoy playing with friends offer their own servers. Which got me thinking about it, and they tend to be indie games.
I miss the days of opening Steam and being able to search a million servers to find the specific niche type of game I wanted in CS. Warcraft, custom maps, zombie… So fun
There’s people actively working on bringing those to cs2, but you wouldn’t know by the massive shitshow that the server browser is with thousands of redirects currently, which is why the community also built a server browser if you search CS2Browser you’ll find it, you can go back to enjoying it ^^
It was never going to be free forever, because that would be leaving free money on the table, which is unacceptable to any evil megacorp (which is to say, all of the big three). I imagine PSN initially being free was mostly a result of trying to bridge the gap between PS3 and 360 sales, given the multi-year delay and huge price difference.
The biggest threat to gaming is Gabe Newell’s eventual death. I really hope he figures out the whole brain connected interface thing so he can upload himself to the internet and become immortal.
They don’t have a monopoly. They don’t even have a natural monopoly like they did when it first launched and was the only digital store front for games.
Instead of trying to make the one good service shitty, how about the shitty services step up their game and stop being shitty?
I remember hearing it was originally gonna be paid, but Sony messed something up in their servers that made people angry and were forced to keep it free.
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