[HN Gopher] John Carmack goes off about online-only games being ...
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John Carmack goes off about online-only games being abandoned
Author : Michelangelo11
Score : 193 points
Date : 2023-02-12 20:13 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.pcgamer.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.pcgamer.com)
| turtleyacht wrote:
| _Hello, I am GameGPT and I create games. Drag-and-drop assets or
| use the prompt to generate a game!_
|
| "Hey, there was this multiplayer game my friends and I loved to
| play called ___ and it had the following mechanics. Here are some
| maps and the instruction manual. You can even check out some
| examples from the following YouTube links." Etc.
|
| _Reverse engineering. Please wait..._
| somethoughts wrote:
| To me it seems confounding that Meta doesn't just figure out a
| long term strategy to do the opposite of acquihire. Basically
| while forming a highly experimental group like EchoVR and/or
| acquire hiring like EchoVR, prepare to have the optionality to do
| a micro-spin off where the team gets some equity and Meta
| maintains a 50% stake, which enables a future spin-in.
|
| I could see how EchoVR might not make much of a dent in Meta's
| earnings, but that'd be a significant customer base to start off
| with.
|
| This applies to other FAANG companies too - like Google. Why not
| take a handful of Fuschia engineers, group them together and then
| have them partner with say, Framework.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| Where should that strategy come from? In the end of the day,
| Meta is just the company of one huge and profitable product
| (Facebook) that just happened to be successful, not the result
| of a great strategy. There is no history of a great strategy to
| support the expectation of having one now. But they have a lot
| of money, so acquisitions are easy.
| somethoughts wrote:
| Probably the better way to structure the deal would have been
| to do a partnership where the smaller company uses the SSO of
| the FAANG company and future profit sharing in exchange for
| cash, equity and server infrastructure.
| sosodev wrote:
| I think there's a huge opportunity for indie developers to clone
| popular games and make them more consumer friendly.
|
| It seems like a lot of huge corporations will blindly chase
| profits with zero consideration of what their fans want.
|
| I've been building a company (https://hyperspacelogistics.com/)
| where we believe that doing what's best for the fans is actually
| best for the company. In fact, we state "We strive to support
| actively used products for as long as possible" as one of our
| core values.
|
| Our upcoming game GunZone will even include a dedicated server so
| players can still play even if the company dies out. Funny that
| this standard of old games is now considered a big feature.
| pathartl wrote:
| I've been going through a bunch of old games recently for a
| project involving a regular LAN party some friends and I hold.
| If I can make a suggestion, bundle as much documentation as you
| can with the dedicated server.
|
| It's infuriating how many times I've run into games where the
| potential commands/switches have been documented online across
| 30 websites, but every site is incomplete. Tons of games don't
| even document how to set the listen address or port, or even
| what runtimes might be needed in order to run.
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| John Carmack is a strange character. Ideologically, he sees the
| failure of Oculus' business model; but practically, he has
| ignored it from the word, "go". Let the business-obsessed people
| deal with that.. spoiler: they did.
|
| He's the one who made the whole thing viable in the first place!
| I would hate to stand in his shoes, to watch the fruits of my
| labor rot on the ground below, begging someone to simply reach
| down and pick them up: someone whose entire business model
| forbids them.
|
| Was it worth it? Sure, he got to work on something really cool,
| and get paid lots of money... Yet it seems obvious from where I'm
| standing that this story could have been written with much more
| satisfying goals, and still played out with most of the same
| benefits reached.
|
| Just look at the valve index! Huge success without any of this
| walled-garden bullshit or compromise, and it's still king 4 years
| in. The only advantage Oculus has had is affordability, but I'm
| still not convinced walled-garden paths are the only ones that
| lead to cheap.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| > _he sees the failure of Oculus ' business model_
|
| Huh? Oculus is the best selling VR headset available, it sold
| way more than the Index.
|
| > _The only advantage Oculus has had is affordability_
|
| ...yes, this is how consumer sales works. People buy what is
| affordable.
| Lev1a wrote:
| > Oculus is the best selling VR headset available, it sold
| way more than the Index
|
| Release date of Valve Index: 2019-06-28
|
| Release date of first Oculus1: 2016-03-28
|
| There were about three years of tech adoption by consumers
| between these releases, Oculus was, before their first
| commercial HMD release, was acquired by Facebook for US$2
| Billion, FB which could also use its near monopoly in social
| networks to place ads and thus influence billions of people
| to buy the product(s) of one of its subsidiaries.
|
| In contrast:
|
| > It sold an estimated 149,000 sets in 2019, 103,000 of which
| were in the fourth quarter due to the announcement of Half-
| Life: Alyx, which buyers received for free. The sudden demand
| caused the unit to be sold out in all 31 countries except
| Japan in January 2020. As of December 2019, 6.67% of the VR
| units connected to Steam are Valve Index sets. While Valve
| had anticipated supply for many of those that had ordered the
| Index in time for the March 2020 release of Half-Life: Alyx,
| _the COVID-19 pandemic impacted production of the Index which
| left Valve with a reduced number of units available on the
| release date_.
|
| - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valve_Index#Release (emphasis
| mine)
|
| 1: since you didn't specify which of _the range_ of Oculus
| HMDs you 're referring to
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| Moral failure. The whole thing this article is about. For
| example:
|
| > Carmack goes on to say that Bosworth greenlit the release
| of the Oculus Go root build (an unlocked OS allowing full
| access (opens in new tab)) that he had long pushed-for, but
| "after seeing how much internal effort was involved to make
| it happen, I almost felt bad about it," said Carmack. "The
| constraints are just different in a company the size of
| Meta."
|
| The "constraints" are their business model: underprice the
| hardware and overprice the software. It's not a new model,
| this is what consoles have done since Carmack made Doom!
| satvikpendem wrote:
| I don't see how that's a moral failure, it's just how
| console businesses operate, as you noted.
| dumbotron wrote:
| Rather than criticize from the sidelines, Carmack should take
| some of his sweet Meta money, buy the rights from them, and
| fund the indefinite maintenance of these things himself. Or he
| should start a new game company that holds to these values.
| He'll either find himself agreeing with the business people or
| broke.
| botverse wrote:
| > Or he should start a new game company that holds to these
| values. He'll either find himself agreeing with the business
| people or broke.
|
| He's done it already with id software, he didn't end broke.
| Feels like you don't know who this guy is
| dumbotron wrote:
| He started id when he was 21 right as tech got good enough
| for first-person shoorters. It launched all its famous IP
| in its first 5 years. He _left_ the job of maintaining
| legacy IP and a declining game engine to work on something
| new. There are different type of leaders. His strength is
| in building, not maintaining. His track record shows this.
| He 's just hurt that the platform outgrew him.
| bitwize wrote:
| Knowing what I do about Carmack, if Facebook burns through
| billions trying to create a sad, failed VR utopia, he'd say
| it'd have been worth it for the opportunity to advance the tech
| via blue-sky development on such issues as non-cumbersome,
| accurate tracking hardware and high-resolution, low-latency
| displays.
| rektide wrote:
| Two of my truly-beloved games are gone or about to go.
|
| Titanfall: Assault was a great 5 minute mobile auto-battle-arena
| game, shut down in 2018. I've never had a game that built &
| escalated into such a fun little conflict before or since.
|
| Dreadnought is a lovely paced spaceship brawler, a great slugest,
| and is shutting down end of the month.
|
| Neither of these games had anywhere near 10,000 active users, I'd
| guess. I still there was a chance for the really excellent niche
| things to do more than fizzle over time & disappear.
| Icathian wrote:
| Dreadnought and Fractured Space both deserved better than they
| got. Makes me sad I can't just go hop on games anymore, they
| were a lot of fun.
| strictnein wrote:
| On the topic of Titanfall ... Titanfall 2 is probably my
| favorite online FPS (in addition to having some really great
| single player) and Respawn has been letting it slowly degrade
| for years now. It'll be really sad when it's completely
| unplayable. Calling down Titans in it and the original
| Titanfall was such an experience. So fresh and different, in
| addition to the really sharp and refined player movement.
|
| EA did them no favors by launching Titanfall 2 at the same time
| as a CoD and Battlefield title (EA was competing with itself
| which makes no sense). Had they launched in the spring, away
| from those two behemoth titles, the game would have had a much
| better life.
| oneplane wrote:
| Thankfully, Northstar makes Titanfall 2 completely
| independent of EA if need be. Right now they still check the
| EA client ID against EA's servers to get around
| copyright/legal issues, so you have to own the assets
| according to EA in order to play a modded private hosted
| version, but there is no reason the EA-check couldn't be
| removed. The loader is open source, so anyone who wants to
| could fork it and do that.
|
| I suspect, however, that this time people got lucky: the
| Titanfall 1 and 2 games contained most, almost all of the
| server-side requirements/assets, so hosting a server was
| mostly a matter of breaking in to one DLL file and a few game
| script modifications to get access to the entire source
| engine and game features. As far as I understand, the main
| missing content were the navigation meshes for the AI, a few
| scenario scripts, and some party/lobby features. Most, if not
| all of those have been reverse-engineered or created by the
| community, so that's not even an issue anymore.
|
| But the more games get individually specialised engines, less
| and less server features included in the client-side game
| releases, the harder it becomes to do this type of stuff. In
| the case of idTech, unreal engine and Source, most things
| outside of the main menu and settings panel are 'maps' and
| those are either 'hosted' by your own game client, or by a
| remote server. That means that due to the architecture, the
| client package has to have at least some server features. If
| games have training modes, or explore/tryout/singleplayer
| modes, there has got to be more server-logic/code/assets in
| the client package to enable that.
| johnnymorgan wrote:
| Microsoft Allegiance is a good example of a company opening the
| source to the community to keep it alive after they closed their
| doors.
|
| It's a model I'd like to see included down the road when we can
| abstract the compute costs
| kvark wrote:
| John have strong beliefs about how a business should operate. I
| bet he also has strong beliefs about politics, music, you name
| it. I love the act of software preservation, playing old games,
| seeing longer product cycles, but what ground do we have to
| criticize Meta's business decision here? None.
| eropple wrote:
| _> what ground do we have to criticize Meta's business decision
| here_
|
| We are people in the world. The reality that our public square
| --which includes the ways in which we play--is being controlled
| by businesses who do not answer to us and do not care about
| that public square except in the way that value can be
| extracted from it is _well_ within our rights to criticize.
| And, frankly, legislate.
| npteljes wrote:
| I guess the thing is to distinguish when the private park
| turns into a public square. Ideally, I'd like them either to
| be supported, or open sourced. Then the community could
| really pick it up if they want to, or if the publisher
| doesn't want that, they could just support it for longer.
| amrb wrote:
| > what ground do we have to criticize Meta's business decision
| here? The expensive hardware would be my first, second lock in
| to their store and third why should people stop playing a video
| game they like.
| smt88 wrote:
| Carmack successfully co-founded one of the most legendary game
| studios of all time, and then he had a leadership role at Meta.
| Meta is pivoting to being a game company (in the sense that the
| "Metaverse" is a shitty game).
|
| Carmack's strong views on politics and certain other topics are
| indeed silly and uninformed, but his commentary in this case is
| interesting and valuable. He may be wrong in the end, but he's
| also not speculating like other business pundits.
| LegitShady wrote:
| >but what ground do we have to criticize Meta's business
| decision here? None.
|
| I don't get it. What qualifications or grounds does anyone need
| to criticize a large corporations anti consumer actions? None
| needed, so not having special permission or be pre-qualified
| for some random person's satisfaction literally doesn't matter.
|
| Anyone can criticize meta and no one needs a grounds aside from
| their criticism existing.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| I love Carmack's general message here, but this part is not
| something a lot of developers have the luxury to do:
|
| > "Most of game development is a panicky rush to make things stop
| falling apart long enough to ship, so it can be hard to dedicate
| time to fundamental software engineering, but there is a
| satisfaction to it, and it can pay off with less problematic late
| stage development."
|
| When you're at id Software and don't have to answer to anyone
| with regards to deadlines or funding, it's fine to think like
| this. Unfortunately a lot of developers have a lot more
| constraints than Carmack did when he made his best games.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > When you're at id Software and don't have to answer to anyone
| with regards to deadlines or funding
|
| actually Id Software people worked in much harder conditions
| than game devs of today.
|
| https://preview.redd.it/iehd38ucuuz71.jpg?width=450&format=p...
| [deleted]
| dumbotron wrote:
| Didn't id software lose a lot of relevancy in the early 2000s?
| They stopped producing new, interesting IP, and their engines
| lost popularity.
| progman32 wrote:
| I took it as an appeal to management to consider the trade offs
| they're forcing.
| FartyMcFarter wrote:
| That might be the case, but in games development you often
| have a company (studio) answering to another (publisher), and
| it's the publisher's management that decides the deadlines
| and funding. The people managing the engineers would have no
| control over those.
|
| Carmack's company didn't have this problem when they made the
| games they eventually open-sourced. When they did get bought
| by a publisher, they no longer open sourced their games as
| far as I know, so who knows what the engineering practices
| were like at that point.
| pathartl wrote:
| Games are this interesting medium of art where they're
| really not easily replicated, but very easy duplicated.
| There's practically no equivalent to a cover for a song
| that exists for a game. You can distribute a ROM, maybe
| swap some assets, but the code only exists in the binary it
| was compiled to. It was only up until recently (with
| decompilations) that a game was effectively set in stone
| unless it was open-sourced.
|
| I don't know. I think it's silly for decades-old-games to
| run into licensing issues when trying to go open source.
| The tech is effectively obsolete except in the instance of
| that specific game.
| enneff wrote:
| Look up "video game demake".
| pimlottc wrote:
| I don't really understand what distinction you're making
| between "replicating" and "duplicating"
| enneff wrote:
| And let's not pretend that Doom and Quake didn't have
| several point releases after the fact. And that the team at
| id didn't pull all-nighters to ship the games.
|
| Those games are far simpler (by at least an order of
| magnitude, maybe two or three) than most of the modern AAA
| titles.
|
| What was the last AAA game Carmack shipped? Rage? Hardly a
| smashing success, even if it was technically impressive.
|
| I have a huge amount of respect for Carmack's skills and
| work ethic and track record, but I wonder if he really has
| a good handle on the sheer amount of work that goes into a
| modern game. With often dozens of programmers, and hundreds
| or thousands of contributors, the coordination overhead is
| just massive. I think that's why overall quality control is
| harder to maintain.
| abraxas wrote:
| It should be self evident to everyone that with all those "cloud"
| services you don't own shit. Even if you are more of a prosumer
| say, hosting your app in a cloud account or your digital assets
| there is always enough EULA wiggle room there for the vendor to
| wash their hands if your data goes in a puff of smoke. Your
| interest is secondary to profit maximization. I'm sure most count
| on you getting over the inconvenience or outright data loss. I
| bet they run game theory scenarios to figure out what they can
| get away with and still see profits rise.
|
| Caveat emptor.
| neilv wrote:
| > _It should be self evident to everyone that with all those
| "cloud" services you don't own shit._
|
| No, it shouldn't be, and isn't.
|
| And claiming it is sounds like an argument by megacorp lawyers,
| when there's finally a huge class-action suit led by someone
| who is out for precedent-setting blood:
|
| "It should've been self-evident that we rigged this in such a
| way that it would suddenly stop working, at a time of our
| choosing."
|
| When that wasn't what they said in the marketing when they sold
| it, nor when customers invested many hours creating artifacts
| within it.
|
| Like it's not self-evident that when you buy a bicycle, the
| shop will later come steal it back.
|
| Or, when you buy canvas and oil paint, the art supply store
| won't break into your house and destroy your paintings.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Then may I ask after a decade of this behavior, why have we
| not seen a successful lawsuit against said megacorporations?
| At least in US law I don't think there is a chance of the
| consumer winning in our current legal environment.
| vood wrote:
| Not related to the content, the amount of ads in this website
| makes the article barely readable, especially on mobile.
| [deleted]
| rileymat2 wrote:
| I would like online tools that are purchased for a onetime fee
| have significantly more regulations.
|
| Give people either a defined time period that their purchase will
| be supported for or open source the server side so it can be run
| after the company decides to discontinue support.
|
| IMO, if you charge a one time fee, and stop supporting something
| for economic reasons, users should be entitled to a refund. Or,
| more specifically, don't sell an infinite commitment for a fixed
| price.
| jmyeet wrote:
| I can't help but think of SimCity 5.
|
| I've always loved the SimCity series and at various times have
| spent a large number of hours tinkering with a large city. It's
| relazing. SimCity 4 was a great entry to the series. it had some
| oddities (eg regions allowed you to just send trash into the
| void) but it's a single player game so who cares? Much like No
| Man's Sky and "balance", as an aside.
|
| But EA decided SimCity 5 had to be played online. Why? Because
| reasons. Often there's hand-waving about "piracy" but really it's
| just about control and "encouraging" micro-transactions as a
| future revenue source. Being able to flaunt your city to other
| players is a prime driver for people buying digital cosmetics.
|
| But this meant SimCity 5 was vastly more complicated as software.
| The city size was a lot smaller. They wasted time on multiplayer
| features nobody cared about. Basically they had zero
| understanding of who their target market was and what theye
| liked. As long as some VP can put up a graph in PowerPoint
| showing projections on micro-transaction revenues and get a fat
| bonus, who really cares about what the players want.
|
| So what happened/ SimCity 5 was a flop nobody even talks about
| anymore and it caused Cities Skylines to come into existence.
|
| Fallout 76 [1] is another big example of turning something people
| loved (ie Fallout 3 and New Vegas) into something despised just
| because you, the publisher, can't get out of your mind that
| "online = more revenue".
|
| Old games are loved, so much so that people build software
| emulators of hardware that is no longer made just to play them.
|
| As for two of John's points:
|
| Why not allocate a single developer at Meta to maintaining the
| game? Because that's career suicide for that developer. You'll
| never get promoted for that. You'll probably be viewed as non-
| essential and gently shown your way to the door with a subpar
| performance review when some director later needs a better rating
| for someone they care about and the ratings have to fit a bell
| curve.
|
| Why not sell it off? Because then it's gone. if you hold
| ownership you might be able to sell it for a lot in the future.
| Sell it for $10,000 now and you've gained money that is
| immaterial and lost any future potential. It just doesn't make
| sense. You'll spend more than that on lawyers just reviewing the
| contract.
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kjyeCdd-dl8&t=1s
| duxup wrote:
| Sim City 5 was so strange to me.
|
| It was going to be an instant buy for me but then as I read the
| developer statements before release ... it started getting
| really weird. It was clear it wasn't going to be Sim City, or
| at least a lot of design decisions had nothing to do with what
| I thought of as Sim City.
|
| Such a sad waste.
|
| Really strange too because if there was an obvious formula to
| make a ton of money there it was and they still screwed it up.
| justinpombrio wrote:
| His actual statement here. It's very realistic and well thought
| out.
|
| https://web.archive.org/web/20230206155610/https://uploadvr....
| c0l0 wrote:
| All I can say is that I love this man.
| NathanFlurry wrote:
| I've worked at a few small studios that have shut down games with
| ~200 CCU peak because the cost/benefit of maintaining the ops for
| these games was not worth it.
|
| > Another alternative would be spinning off the project: Meta
| letting it go and allowing team members to leave, take over the
| rights for a nominal fee of $10,000, and maintain it.
|
| In my experience, studios have a contradictory FOMO mindset of
| letting other people run the game:
|
| * If someone else makes money off it, they want to be part of it
|
| * At the same time, they don't want to run it themself
|
| * It's not worth the effort to open source it, also see argument
| #1
|
| What usually ends up happening is the community reverse engineers
| the protocol and writes their own OSS backend.
|
| Shameless plug: I founded Rivet (W23, https://rivet.gg) to
| simplify multiplayer game server ops. We talk to a lot of studios
| with hard-to-manage old games (i.e. 3+ years old can be ancient
| in gaming). We often help studios move these to our standardized
| ops so they don't have to worry about it anymore. We also help
| lower the server cost for old games by auto-scaling their servers
| based on player demand.
| lkrubner wrote:
| This is a very good article. The bit at the end was especially
| strong:
|
| -----------------------
|
| "Be disciplined about your build processes and what you put in
| your source tree, so there is at least the possibility of making
| the project open source," said Carmack. "Think twice before
| adding dependencies that you can't redistribute, and consider
| testing with stubbed out versions of the things you do use. Don't
| do things in your code that wouldn't be acceptable for the whole
| world to see.
|
| "Most of game development is a panicky rush to make things stop
| falling apart long enough to ship, so it can be hard to dedicate
| time to fundamental software engineering, but there is a
| satisfaction to it, and it can pay off with less problematic late
| stage development."
|
| The last phrase is quite the euphemism for "the game disappearing
| entirely, forever" and through Carmack's repeated exhortations
| and examples you get a sense of someone who's very frustrated at
| seeing things built on foundations that can ultimately prove
| self-defeating. We've entered an era where even many singleplayer
| games require some sort of server ping, while other games don't
| work at all if you're offline (which outside of MMOs has
| sometimes felt like industry overreach).
| jwmcq wrote:
| I'd say it even makes a difference for single player games that
| don't "phone home" - I was actually thinking about this the
| other day in relation to the recent (and mostly welcome) trend
| of remastering older games, and how these releases seem to vary
| so widely in quality.
|
| Obviously I don't know for sure, and there will be other
| factors like money / time spent on remastering, but I'd still
| wager that e.g. the fact that the Metroid Prime remaster was
| able to add in a (seemingly) whole new lighting system and
| control scheme whereas the the GTA trilogy remaster couldn't
| even get half of its weather effects working probably speaks
| volumes to the respective code quality of their originals.
|
| Either way, I'm certain that I'd much rather work on porting /
| patching / remastering a game from a studio that's following
| the advice Carmack gives here.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I've had two internet ratio players that were bricked because
| they'd phone home to the server, and the company running the
| server would go bust.
| pipeline_peak wrote:
| To me Meta was always a big PR stunt to steer people away from
| all the negative press FB was getting. I really don't think the
| creator of Quakes opinion is all that important, sorry.
| nsteel wrote:
| But leaving things out to slowly die is maybe just as bad. I
| spent hours and hours playing TF2, and while I can still play it,
| last time I did it was full of hackers. It has ruined the memory
| for me.
| Michelangelo11 wrote:
| One thing that's really sad to me is that older games end up
| being a lot more durable than newer ones (from say the last 15
| years or so). For example, you can still play games like Master
| of Orion 2 or Total Annihilation in multiplayer, because they
| rely on players hosting servers, and some people still host
| servers 25+ years after release (and people have even written fan
| patches to make that possible today, if necessary).
|
| But modern games that rely on matchmaking through the
| developer/publisher? Forget it, when they go down, there's no
| saving them, alas.
|
| So really this is a pretty clear-cut case of functionality
| deteriorating because the maker of the game has way more power
| than before to change the game _after_ the customer bought it
| (the recent brouhaha where BMW or whoever offered a subscription
| to boost your car's top speed by unlocking a speed lock in
| software also comes to mind, not to mention "purchased"
| streaming-only movies disappearing forever once the streaming
| service dies, etc.).
| yazzku wrote:
| Indeed. It's a form of DRM if we take the R to mean
| 'restrictions', whether it's intentional or not. It just goes
| to show that all these publishers have no interest in making
| great games, but to simply milk players for a little while
| before moving on to the next thing. That and the loot boxes are
| the main reason I don't buy "modern" games anymore. I stash all
| my cash for GOG.
| corbulo wrote:
| 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.
| ynx wrote:
| 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.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| 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.
| the_only_law wrote:
| 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".
| Ygg2 wrote:
| 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.
| corbulo wrote:
| 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.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| 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.
| syrrim wrote:
| >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.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| 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.
| corbulo wrote:
| Greed isn't the true culprit. You don't make more money
| by making any % of your consumer base hate you.
| oliwarner wrote:
| 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.
| oneplane wrote:
| 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).
| thomastjeffery wrote:
| 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.
| iepathos wrote:
| 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.
| tomnipotent wrote:
| And it's recent review rating has jumped to 87%, while all-
| time rating has crawled to 79% from its low 70s launch.
| duxup wrote:
| Maybe that's really the place for that kind of service?
|
| I kinda like the idea of more open gaming type systems.
| antihipocrat wrote:
| Recently on a whim I downloaded HL2 and logged into the
| deathmatch lobby. There are still self hosted servers active
| with dozens of players duking it out.
|
| I joined in the fun, and for an hour I felt like I was 15
| again, it's held up surprisingly well! If epic ever turns off
| the Fortnite server, it's just gone.
| Ntrails wrote:
| I like to believe that someone somewhere is still playing
| wolfenstein:ET
|
| I had so much god damned fun playing that game
| fer wrote:
| It got recently released on Steam, so there's a large surge
| of players lately.
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| Its never been easier to host a game server than it is today.
| We had to cohost and ship servers 20 years ago. There were some
| game hosting companies but they were usually bad performance
| for the price. Nowadays you can spin up a VM with a moments
| notice for a lot less money and investment and yet we are in
| the age of games not coming with dedicated server software.
| philippejara wrote:
| you're speaking of multiplayer games, which is true, but even
| single-player games will face this when they have denuvo, once
| the denuvo server goes out you're also unable to play your
| single player games.
|
| EMPRESS is the last line of defence.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| Microsoft would say their biggest competition is previous
| versions of Windows. I assume the same could apply to games,
| especially networked games with high replay ability. Given the
| choice between supporting the 'competitor' or killing it I can
| understand why studios would kill it.
| thrill wrote:
| "Your company suffers more harm when you take away something dear
| to a user than you gain in benefit by providing something equally
| valuable to them or others."
|
| Google Reader.
| bennysonething wrote:
| "The default today may be a distributed mess of spaghetti, but
| that is a choice."
|
| I'd like to hear more of his thoughts on this. The distributed
| and service orientated the stuff I work in gets, the less we
| ship. It's glacial.
| cglong wrote:
| Why was an Internet Archive link posted?
| https://www.pcgamer.com/john-carmack-goes-off-about-online-o...
| dang wrote:
| We've changed the URL now from https://web.archive.org/web/2023
| 0206154619/https://www.pcgam....
| loganc2342 wrote:
| Typically that would be to get around a paywall. As far as I
| know PC Gamer doesn't have one so this is peculiar. Someone can
| correct me if I'm mistaken about that.
| trollied wrote:
| It does not have a paywall.
| Michelangelo11 wrote:
| HN didn't want to accept the direct link (the error message was
| something along the lines of it being expired or broken, even
| though it loaded fine in Chrome), so I tried some workarounds,
| and this attempt worked.
| andsoitis wrote:
| is it better to keep pouring money into something that only
| 10,000 love? or is it better to use that money to create
| something that millions would love?
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| Should we only have 3 television channels so that we are all
| homogeneously talking about the same topics, or should we have
| 100 channels so that we all end up in echo chambers?
|
| There are pros and cons to both. But is this a forced choice,
| or can we have both?
| wffurr wrote:
| Release the server code and let the 10,000 maintain it
| themselves.
| sosodev wrote:
| Even that requires significant effort that companies are not
| willing to invest. They'd have to scrub the server of
| proprietary code, like integration with an account server,
| and update the client to work with the new system.
| tikkabhuna wrote:
| I'm not in the game industry, so I may be wrong, but there
| doesn't seem to be any push in the game industry to use
| open source for common problems.
|
| Why should a matchmaking/game browser use proprietary code?
| Create standards and use off the shelf components for
| common problems. Whenever I go into the settings menu of a
| game I wonder how much time has been spent reinventing it.
| amrb wrote:
| Remember when we had mods and games like desert-combat (bf2
| devs) and counter-strike got created.
|
| I'd like to see DLC die tomorrow please and we get back to
| passionate people making maps and mods again.. maybe have a
| community where people build things, become game developers
| because they enjoyed the hobby.
| tikkabhuna wrote:
| Its something that has pained me greatly in the last couple
| of years.
|
| I completely agree. Game devs have stripped so much away from
| the user. Matchmaking, lack of server hosting, no mods. It
| feels like much of the community has gone.
|
| I play BF5 regularly and there's still a large number of 64
| player servers full all day, every day. However, there's very
| few community servers and cheaters are so common. EA/Dice
| have abandoned it and there's no way for the community to
| keep it going.
|
| Another game I used to play, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, is
| free to download [1] and still has plenty of community hosted
| servers/mods. That's a game coming up to its 20 year
| anniversary.
|
| [1] https://www.splashdamage.com/games/wolfenstein-enemy-
| territo...
| ReliantGuyZ wrote:
| Is it more expensive to find a new customer or keep an existing
| one? Sure, for lots of these games, continuing support means
| pouring money into a product which has already been paid for,
| and that investment means little to the continuing payoff of
| that product. However I would argue at this point in VR's
| tenuous life, Meta is burning its existing customers (its early
| adopter evangelists) in the hope that new ones will
| materialize. But then again they've run the numbers and I
| haven't,
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| "I didn't set out to build a car that would be all things to
| everyone. I set out to build a car that would be everything to
| someone." - F. Porsche (who doesn't seem to have much trouble
| making money)
| rrrhys wrote:
| Answer: Let's do neither!
| mftb wrote:
| Is it better to build something that is beloved for a month or
| 10 years?
| smoldesu wrote:
| Arguably you can do both, if you let the community sustain the
| old thing (like what Carmack did with Quake).
| nickjj wrote:
| > Arguably you can do both, if you let the community sustain
| the old thing (like what Carmack did with Quake).
|
| For games like Quake 3 it was quite open before it was old.
| The game was community mod'able during its prime. You had
| mods like OSP being "the" mod for competitive game play (1v1
| DM, Team DM and CTF). It being fully open sourced later on
| was icing on the cake.
|
| Wikipedia said it sold 319,970 copies for about $15
| million[0]. It was a 1 time purchase game for like $50 at
| release. It took 1.5 years to make with a team of 9. Not a
| bad turn out for a single purchase and open game with a self
| hostable server component. Keep in mind that was 20 years ago
| when gaming was way less popular.
|
| [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quake_III_Arena#Sales
| oblak wrote:
| Exactly. Besides, "pouring money into something millions
| would love" is an absurd statement.
|
| 1. Success is not guaranteed. At all
|
| 2. Things enjoyed by the masses don't need additional support
| to stay alive
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| I don't personally know any other field whose products have
| deteriorated over time like the game industry's and it being
| clear because the quality of software developers in that field
| have went down.
|
| In other industries, changes in material usage can be cost saving
| in nature or more robust.
|
| But in the games industry, new generations of players are
| literally losing out in features that previously existed, or
| quality concerns that one never had to think about before.
| sosodev wrote:
| The quality of developers in game dev has not declined. Studios
| grew and merged into massive companies that follow the
| established pattern of profits over people.
| hourago wrote:
| This same thing happens to movie stars. Twenty years ago some
| actors moved masses just by appearing in a movie. Nowadays
| actors are dispensable and movie characters are performed by
| different people. Massive studios also kill opportunities for
| actors. And I am sure that this is true in most industries. A
| few companies own most products and jobs and can manipulate
| them as they desire.
| [deleted]
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Exactly. There's not a ton of competition.
| pixl97 wrote:
| There is not a ton of competition in games?
|
| I generally disagree on that if you stick to Windows based
| games. Now if you're playing on any of the consoles, well
| longevity is decided by the platform owner.
|
| In the indie games industry there are likely more games
| than ever that are better than ever and can be self hosted.
|
| The unaddressed problem here is that 'online only' skinner
| box style games are massive money makers when they are a
| hit. Couple that with ever increasing costs in making top
| of the line games and you can see why the people handing
| out funding want to go that way.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| There is not a ton of competition in AAA games.
|
| Indie games are getting better, but if you want AAA
| graphics, etc. your competition is far more limited.
| Retric wrote:
| Profits over people has reduced the average quality of devs
| over time.
|
| Cyberpunk 2077 shows they are still tossing out unfinished
| bug ridden messes. The only difference is so many AAA games
| like Assassins Creed, GTA, Call of Duty, etc are just
| incremental releases they have more time to polish the same
| crap.
| SkyPuncher wrote:
| > Call of Duty, etc are just incremental releases they have
| more time to polish the same crap.
|
| Unfortunately, as this year's CoD release has shown, they
| can't even do incremental updates correctly anymore.
| They've broken major parts of the game, removed key
| features (like leaderboards), and taken months to release
| content.
| waboremo wrote:
| The lessons to be learned about Cyberpunk 2077 have very
| little to do with quality of devs. Instead it has
| everything to do with mismanaged timelines, misaligned
| expectations, marketing based on a game that doesn't even
| exist, securing brand deals before the game is even
| playable, and more micro-lessons specific to game
| development (like assuming your engine is capable of a
| different genre easily).
|
| Speaking of Assassin's Creed, the reason they're able to
| polish is not because it's the "same crap". On the
| contrary, every time they've had to deal with an engine
| upgrade they've suffered huge bugs (and I'll touch on this
| later on). But they're able to mitigate this by having
| large teams operate as cogs, with higher level tools, and
| this has been battle tested for years. Call of Duty is
| another, huge teams, working on cycles. CD Projekt Red did
| not have this in place. Their expectations were utterly
| delusional.
|
| Speaking about engine upgrades, maintaining your own custom
| engine is incredibly costly in every aspect. Harder to find
| talent, harder to maintain, harder to test. All of this
| compounds, and gets worse when you're trying to stretch
| your engine away from "the same crap" and into a new genre.
| This is why more studios now are relying on the likes of
| Unity or Unreal - including CDPR. Or EA, who once upon a
| time had both Eclipse (single player RPG engine) and
| Frostbite (FPS shooter engine), and are now betting on
| Unreal.
| Retric wrote:
| > having large teams operate as cogs, with higher level
| tools, and this has been battle tested for years.
|
| That's what I mean by the same crap. It's not that the
| engine is unchanged and they never add new gameplay
| elements, but rather the team/company knows more or less
| exactly the kind of game that they're making on day one
| and therefore what kinds of people they need etc.
|
| Specialization isn't a bad thing, but it does mean you
| can get away with less generally competent people which
| very much plays a role in staffing etc.
| sosodev wrote:
| The thing that irks me about incremental releases is that
| they charge full price for every new release AND include
| micro-transactions.
|
| So we end up in this situation where to be consumer
| friendly they should either adopt a rolling release F2P
| model (like fortnite, dota, cs:go, etc) or at the very
| least pledge long term support to each release.
|
| They do neither so games like Call of Duty end up as a
| money pit when they get infested with hackers a couple of
| years after the series moves on to the next title.
| [deleted]
| conceptme wrote:
| Prett much the same with all software as service these days,
| you don't own your software anymore.
|
| Even media with all streaming going on it's sometimes just
| gone.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| > I don't personally know any other field whose products have
| deteriorated over time like the game industry's and it being
| clear because the quality of software developers in that field
| have went down.
|
| Having been playing computer games since the mid 90's I don't
| know if that claim is actually true. Once upon a time there
| were games that would delete your entire hard drive when
| uninstalled and wouldn't last a 15 minute game session before
| blue screening the whole system. Honestly, given the complexity
| that modern games require I don't think it's bad at all.
|
| I think the problems we're seeing with modern games actually
| being worse (the new Arkham game compared to the old) are
| strictly dollar and cents choices. The ability is there, but
| the industry has become far too pragmatic.
| pathartl wrote:
| A lot of your concern of older games has been fixed over time
| by the development of emulators and wrappers. Multiplayer
| (and live DRM) components of modern games can't be easily
| RE'd in most cases. Especially with services like Xbox Live
| the most helpful data is actually packet captures where one
| can actually go through and replicate the protocol used.
|
| I honestly would challenge you to find games from the mid
| 90's+ that won't work on a modern machine. Many times if
| there's a feature that straight up doesn't work it's due to
| online services being discontinued. There's been some work
| done to rebuild services like GameSpy or Westwood Online, but
| once more forms of encryption and anti-cheat or DRM were
| implemented in these sorts of services, the harder it's going
| to be to preserve their experience.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| That wasn't my argument here - the older games, at the time
| they came out, were often a mess. Some bugs were patched
| out, some weren't, but the quality at the time they were
| relevant wasn't any greater, it was often worse.
|
| But yeah, we're in a new phase where publishers kill games
| and then they are gone forever and that's a real shame. I
| think there needs to be some sort of legislation around
| abandonware so that people can host live services and MMOs
| after the publishers give up on them.
| pathartl wrote:
| I agree. I think a lot of copyright/patent laws have
| gotten in the way of game preservation. What bothers me
| is many people in the industry have held onto old
| code/assets over the years, but have no legal way of
| sharing that with others. It's odd, sheet music can be
| documented and distributed, but with games being more
| complex and tangled it's almost an impossibility to have
| clean-room REs/decompilations. And yet distribution of
| source code while maintaining copyright is pretty darn
| easy. Release the source, protect the assets behind
| copyright.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > would delete your entire hard drive when uninstalled
|
| > before blue screening the whole system
|
| TBF at the time the number of possible configurations a game
| could run on was close to infinity
|
| Nowadays platform are much more stable, drivers are much more
| polished and you have 2/3 max manufacturers that make all the
| hardware gamers use which mostly is top of the gamma
| components specifically built to run games.
|
| I remember assembling my PCs in the 90s by putting together
| components cannibalized from everywhere I could, using esotic
| hardware that took weeks of debugging to make it work, CPU,
| RAM and BUS were constantly abundantly overclocked, air flow
| was a joke at best and software configurations were highly
| customized
|
| The fact that they even booted it's a miracle
| renewiltord wrote:
| I don't feel this way at all. Played the new Call of Duty :
| Modern Warfare and it was a mind blowing cinematic experience.
| Felt like I was in a blockbuster movie.
|
| Watching a friend playing Ghost of Tsushima and it's the same.
| So good. Horizon : Zero Dawn. Crazy stuff.
|
| I don't know what these guys are doing, but the scenes are
| gorgeous. The gameplay is loads of fun (MW2 is sooo much fun).
| The choreography is great. Love it all.
| wlesieutre wrote:
| Is the switch to always-online game services (even for single
| player, looking at you Diablo 3 and many more since) really
| driven by the quality of software developers? I've always
| assumed this was a management issue.
| fullshark wrote:
| The problem is the monetization strategies have completely
| upended the industry to the point that it's basically anti-
| consumer and pro-gambler/addiction.
| maccard wrote:
| I think this is a bit disingeuous. I probably fall into the
| category of "quality of developers in that field have went
| down", I've been working in games for a decade.
|
| Many of the problems with games are to do with game engine
| architectural decisions made 20 years ago - anything based on
| Unreal Engine has code that was last touched in the mid 2000's
| for example, and some of that is _not good_. Lots of issues
| around sloppy drivers, bad memory management stem from an
| overuse of the "old way" of doing things, which is driven by
| the programmers you're glorifying in your post. Some of the
| smartest people I've worked with are still working on their
| first game, and some have been in the industry long enough to
| be veterans.
|
| The quality isn't deteriorating, the market has expaned hugely.
| Companies that are now considered "small" would have been
| considered enormous productions 25 years ago, and those
| companies are pushing out incredible quality experiences.
| Companies that are absolute behemoths now are putting out
| iterative works that people _clearly_ enjoy because there are
| alternatives to them and yet they buy Call of Duty because it's
| fresh, fun, exciting, nostalgic.
|
| > I don't personally know any other field whose products have
| deteriorated over time like the game industry's
|
| Ignoring the fact that I disagree about the quality having
| fallen (stray, tunic, and vampire survivors are some of the
| best experiences I've had gaming, and they're all relatively
| new), people lament the same way about everything. Cars aren't
| built like they used to be, household appliances used to be
| more robust, movies were better in <X> time, children's toys
| are just ads for <y> show, there's no good music these days.
| Look on any thread here and you'll see the same thing (and if
| you speak to your parents they'll say the same about things
| that were better when _they_ were younger)
| ipaddr wrote:
| People buy call of duty because of the name regardless of the
| current quality vs an unknown title.
|
| Movies were better, they made less movies which increased
| quality, had better actors who had more talent (singing,
| dancing, acting). Kids TV shows are created to sell toys.
| Products are cheaper and made to be thrown out vs repaired.
|
| Profit keeps going up, quality goes down while prices try to
| stay the same.
| taeric wrote:
| I mean... do we even know what games people played long long
| ago? We have a few ideas, but surprisingly few. And that isn't
| even getting into songs and other stories that have been lost
| to time.
|
| What about recipes and such?
|
| But, with longevity, what other industries are there? Furniture
| is one that frustrates me, as everyone is sold on the idea that
| some furniture is for a lifetime, at least. Which is borderline
| bullshit. There can be some things that will last with
| maintenance, but a lot of really pretty things that last are
| also done using materials that we flat don't allow the
| harvesting of nowadays. Such that things can only last if they
| aren't getting used. :(
| gameman144 wrote:
| I don't know about that, well-built solid wood furniture can
| last a _really_ long time.
|
| (Upholstered items, though, I'm with you on.)
| taeric wrote:
| The hardwoods that help solid furniture last forever aren't
| really allowed anymore. Softwood furniture is highly
| dependent on the level of use you throw at it. And I'm
| willing to let my kids go wild and live on our stuff. :D
| pixl97 wrote:
| The combination of solid wood items with replaceable
| upholstery is the middle ground that allows the furniture
| to be updated with whatever is popular at the time. Of
| course finding a shop that does upholstery these days isn't
| easy or cheap.
| duxup wrote:
| >and it being clear because the quality of software developers
| in that field have went down
|
| I don't think the decisions John is talking about are in the
| hand of individual devs.
| flir wrote:
| Not convinced about programmers being worse, but printers,
| maybe? That's an actively user-hostile industry if ever there
| was one.
| NathanFlurry wrote:
| In my experience, game developers are some of the most talented
| engineers I've ever met. But they're _very_ different from the
| "high quality" engineers you'd find in the rest of tech.
|
| They're usually really good at getting the job done and
| balancing quality + productivity. However, most things are
| written with a one-off mindset because chances are your next
| game will need things to work completely differently.
| Everywhere else in tech you find "scalable" and "backwards
| compatible" solutions; not in gaming.
|
| Part of this is the job description. Unlike the rest of tech,
| you're usually building a game that will be popular for 2-3
| years then disappear. It's not common to find that model
| anywhere else in tech.
|
| Just my 2 cents.
| leereeves wrote:
| "Your company suffers more harm when you take away something dear
| to a user than you gain in benefit by providing something equally
| valuable to them or others."
|
| I'm glad a game developer is saying this to other game
| developers. Maybe they'll listen.
|
| I know that as a player, I think twice before buying games from
| publishers like Ubisoft that have a history of shutting down
| games - even games that I don't play.
| Freedom2 wrote:
| I don't doubt Carmacks legacy as a game developer, but which
| was the last game he had a significant hand in? I wonder if the
| industry has changed far too significantly under his feet for
| us to take his word like we used to.
| gameman144 wrote:
| Carmack has had a material role in advancing VR gaming tech
| even recently.
|
| Just one example is that he petitioned Samsung to remove the
| requirement for triple-buffering on their screens, to allow
| for better latency and in-game experience.
|
| Samsung declined, so he hacked apart his phone to make a
| proof-of-concept prototype of the screen without the triple-
| buffering. He demoed this to Samsung, and they agreed to make
| the change because the experience was so much better.
|
| It's tough to say "what game has Carmack had an impact on
| lately", because the scope of his role has was to impact the
| ecosystem of games and VR as a whole.
|
| You don't see pushback on Joe Biden along the lines of "But
| what has he done for Scranton lately?", because the role of
| president encompasses a larger scope.
|
| Similarly, the role of John Carmack has been larger in scope
| than improving one game at a time (and has been for a while).
| pessimizer wrote:
| Why would you _take anybody 's word_? You listen to
| knowledgeable people's arguments and decide if they hold
| together for you. You don't pick idols and just repeat what
| they say. Carmack shouldn't shut up because you've decided
| that his "legacy" is stale.
| CatWChainsaw wrote:
| Online-only games have different dimensions of cost benefit than
| single-purchase games. They require studios to maintain servers
| "in perpetuity", which incentivizes the worst impulses of the
| industry like microtransactions, lootboxes, and pay-to-win.
| anonymouskimmer wrote:
| Or they could price the games initially the way things like
| annuities are priced. Or free (or license) the games so that
| others can run the servers.
|
| Given the throughput increase in computational power and
| broadband this should be a decreasing cost even if the use
| stays static in perpetuity.
| superkuh wrote:
| Like Carmack says in the article, these dimensions of cost are
| a choice. Games which have private servers that anyone can run
| last forever at no cost to the company. But studios (excepting
| Valve with TF2) have never been able to make a game with
| microtransactions/etc that also works with private servers. So
| they chose the money instead of making a good game.
| andrewmcwatters wrote:
| The absolute costs of running game servers is so miniscule that
| for a majority of the most popular games that have less than
| say 10k concurrent players any given day, a company's interest
| payments would cover their costs several times over.
|
| I guarantee that you can run them in perpetuity. I worked for a
| game hosting company in my early career.
| maccard wrote:
| And I can guarantee you that this is not true. I've worked on
| multiple live service games in my career, and running servers
| for players efficiently and at scale is hard, and expensive.
| corndoge wrote:
| Oh no! Who to believe!
| pixl97 wrote:
| Public game servers are always going to be a target for
| hackers. Eventually libraries need updated and patched or
| logic exploits are discovered in the game. There is no such
| thing as perpetual in the computer security industry.
|
| Of course the self hosted versus company hosted equation is
| much different here. If the game publisher eventually just
| offered the server software for self hosting and freed
| themselves from the management burden it in theory would be
| much cheaper. But likely they've boxed themselves in with
| license deals that make this difficult.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| That's not even remotely true for the vast majority of games.
| Just look up the cost of game servers for Rust or Ark and
| you'll see it tends to be over $1 per slot. With many slots
| unused, the per month per player cost is only sustainable
| with recurring revenue like subscriptions/similar or players
| directly paying for game servers.
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