Only a handful of games in the history of gaming have had open source / openly available multiplayer servers. Nobody is playing multiplayer games if users vote with their wallets like you want them to.
And the reason for this is because multiplayer games are hard to maintain and without a profit motive it becomes long-term unviable.
I used to play a lot of a game called BZFlag, which was fully open-source etc, but it always struggled to keep up with any amount of advancement in the gaming world because it was entirely built by volunteers with limited time on their hands.
Well, for some time, the biggest titles in the industry had openly available multiplayer servers (Quake, UT, basically everything on QuakeSpy/GameSpy). I ran a Quake 3 server on my VPS for years on end (I forgot it was even running at one point) for a grand total of $15/year. Effectively zero maintenance and it was set up during a single afternoon of config. Friends and I played on it and it just.. worked...
Eventually "players actually getting to do what they want with the software they paid for" somehow became a thing of the past, though I don't really know why. I mean, I can think of reasons, but most of those reasons suck.
> Eventually "players actually getting to do what they want with the software they paid for" somehow became a thing of the past, though I don't really know why.
- Making servers that are somewhat resilient to getting hacked is difficult enough if you control the servers and the code and no one can see it, but publicly available server binaries? There are more than enough eyeballs from cheaters, griefers and other abusers to discover exploits.
- If you offer server binaries to people and people get hacked by cheaters, griefers and other abusers as a result, they may hold you liable for damages
- Giving away server binaries also means giving away leverage and income. With UT99-2003-2004-3, everyone can simply set up servers and you as a publisher have no way of forcing people to pay up (or to take down central servers so that people are forced to buy the successor game).
- Giving away servers also means you give away a significant amount of brand control. Parents won't care that pedophiles or Nazis can target their children because some random server admin doesn't give a shit about moderating, they will associate it with your brand.
- In a related vein, modding is also in the crossfire. Just remember the GTA San Andreas Hot Coffee mod and the parental outrage over a decade ago - and today the influence of "concerned parents" groups has gotten even worse, not to mention legitimate concerns about people distributing pedophile or hate mods. As a publisher you can't really afford people replacing e.g. every opponent with the image of Black people.
In the end, most of the reasons boil down to people (and, at least for pedophilia and pornographic content, also governments) expecting game publishers to pick up the slack of educating people that it's not OK to distribute or spread such content, or that it's not OK to DDoS server admins because they decided to ban players for spreading hate content.
This is all a canard because things like Roblox are a far more efficient means of connecting children to both undue sexual and economic exploitation than any of the old, distributed server methods.
All of those old games were rated for teenagers or adults. Some of the worst actual threats to young children come from things like Roblox that give parents a false sense that the company is moderating the content effectively.
Unfortunately, most of the industry has chosen to support two bad models: either pure P2P or the uni-corporate-server-farm model. Neither of them really provide the best experience for consumers. While the distributed dedicated server model does have its own problems, it also has many advantages, including that of outsourcing server management to small businesses and hobbyists rather than absorbing all those costs to the software maintainer.
> - Giving away servers also means you give away a significant amount of brand control. Parents won't care that pedophiles or Nazis can target their children because some random server admin doesn't give a shit about moderating, they will associate it with your brand.
Ah yes, Argumentum ad Pearl Clutchum. It never fails.
You don't need the server to be open source. You just need to be able to run it yourself without any central server involved.
This has been very much the norm from the nineties up until fairly recently. I spent my childhood and teens playing games over LAN or the Internet with self-hosted servers (Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Half-Life, GTA, Dungeon Siege, Red Alert, Warcraft 2, ...)
Every game that had a LAN mode could generally be played either via a software VPN, or other methods. More often than not games (especially FPSes) would ship with dedicated server software. You still needed to buy the game, but then you could run the dedicated server on your favorite hosting platform and play.
I think it was the xbox-ification of shooters that changed everything. 2009 or so, if I had to guess. MW2 was the first game that I remember really pushed company owned servers hard. Coincidentally this was also used to sell overpriced, often useless, DLC. At least back then the DLC was maps though.
It might be my age but I find it easier to remember games that DID have dedicated servers, rather than those that don't.
As I recall MW2 was the first game that did away with servers entirely, so you were always served P2P by someone’s PC, leading to constant multiplayer issues (unlike MW1, which had dedicated servers)
Minecraft (the best selling game of all time) lets your self-host servers. You can also bypass their user authentication system on your own servers fairly easily, but you generally don't need to.
There are also many hosting companies that let you create and manage Minecraft servers via a web interface and take care of stuff like rotating backups so even the most incompetent users can self-host.
> Only a handful of games in the history of gaming have had open source / openly available multiplayer servers.
It was actually the norm in the 90s. Other comments have cited examples but it’s worth noting that consoles supported running local servers too.
What changed was subscription based online services and stupid loot (et al) boxes meant companies could extract a continuous stream of money from gamers without having to put out much, if any, additional content. So everything became online first.
Source: I ran several games servers in the 90s and early 00. (Still do in fact but only for Minecraft these days).
That’s an unfairly dismissive comment given we are still talking about thousands of multiplayer games throughout the 90s and early 00s.
In fact I’d go further than that and say: to old timers like me, this practice of locking multiplayer games to the studios servers feels more like a recent trend than what used to be the norm.
Oh man, I remember BZFlag. I loved that game. Even with the poor graphics it was still so much fun because the gameplay was slow paced enough that text chat was possible along the chaos. It felt like competitive battles over IRC. Haven’t experienced anything quite like it since.
And the reason for this is because multiplayer games are hard to maintain and without a profit motive it becomes long-term unviable.
I used to play a lot of a game called BZFlag, which was fully open-source etc, but it always struggled to keep up with any amount of advancement in the gaming world because it was entirely built by volunteers with limited time on their hands.