this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2025
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Dedicated servers. Let people host their own servers. How is this so fucking hard to understand? When the company is ready to move on and retire their official servers they can do so without invoking ire from the playerbase.
Or keep the live service model, but label things correctly:
You're getting a subscription to the service that's guaranteed to last at least until [planned minimum end date]. Make it illegal to label anything using "buy" that doesn't grant a permanent, non-expiring license to the software or digital good.
There's nothing wrong with charging for a subscription. If that's their product, and the only way they can offer the product, then clearly market it that way and there's no legal problem under the proposed rules.
Granted, that still sucks for videogame preservation, but at least it's honest. And I'm not sure how many people will be willing to shell out $80+ for a "minimum 24 month subscription" to a new game, or pay $9.99 for a "micro"transaction they're guaranteed to keep access to for ~~8 7 6~~ 5 months.
Yup. Even just release the match matching server as a Linux app would be better than what they do now which is just kill it all.
The problem (for them) with that is that the server is what keeps the live service shit locked down so you have to pay for it. If you control the servers, you also control the unlockable items. They don't want that. They want to nickel and dime you with skins.
I know what you mean, but they're going to abandon it eventually, right? What matters is how they abandon it; what they leave behind. Currently, they leave nothing for the playerbase.
If they need to retire the live service to move forward, so be it. But if I wanna boot up a server for a night of gameplay with friends on some retired game I should be able to do so.
Allowing dedicated servers after said live service retirement is the fix.
They don't want it to be competing with their new releases, even if it's only a small theoretical competition that doesn't actually occur in the real world, so they currently have a small incentive to kill it. This is why there needs to be regulations introduced to ensure the server software is released when they shut it down.
are you even allowed to host dedicated servers for console games? i don't think we'll ever get those sadly, they're stuck on offical ps/ms/nintendo/game company hosted servers without a way to spin one up and have users join those (which completely goes against online subscription fees for the consoles).
They used to have them for some OG xbox games and PS2 games.
I mean hosting a game via a server binary you're hosting, not your game console acting as a dedicated server. I believe Mecassault for Xbox had lobbies you would manually join because it was pre-matchmaking and some players would mic check you too.
What do you think the game console is doing when you are running a dedicated server on it? 🤨
Well only in 8th gen there was dedicated servers, before that I know it was all peer to peer.
How would someone host their own version of a live service game?
Way I see it is it just stops being a live service game, and stays at the latest version, which is the one you can then host.
Exactly this. It would obviously be disappointing to lose leaderboards or any other massively multiplayer elements like that, but just being able to fire up the game and have fun with friends after the live service has shut down is basically all that needs to happen.
Leaderboards and such could still be kept along with high multiplayer count.
It might not be as 'unified' as a traditional live service, but it's totally feasible.
As long as they actually let you run a server its fairly easy to self host and there are plenty of services that let you rent professional grade systems with enough data and hardware to handle tons of players.
What is to stop devs from sabotaging the preservation effort by releasing a cookie clicker patch the day of server shutdown, that converts the game into a cookie clicker clone? Or more simply, introducing so many intentionally buggy out features that the game is rendered unplayable? Would consumers have the right to pick which version of the game they get to self host at the end?
Lawsuits.
Rent a server and run the software, like any other game server? People used to run their own "illegal" World of Warcraft servers. There is not reason any other live service game couldn't be run on a private server, game developers just decided to hold their server software hostage.