The idea sounds like GameSpy back in the day for multiplayer games.
Comment on GOG is Getting Acquired By Its Original Co- Founder: What It Means For You
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 15 hours agoThe most benefit-of-the-doubt read on this that I’ve got is that, as a publicly traded company, the small margins GOG operates in might not be worth CDPR’s time when they can get higher margins for the same investment elsewhere. Adding some of my own hopium and conjecture, based on the “Why is Michał Kiciński doing this?” section of the FAQ, I hope this means a semi-near future of closing up the last few gaps in GOG’s DRM-free promise.
One of my biggest pet peeves with GOG is how it handles multiplayer. Some games add a warning when multiplayer is only available via LAN and direct IP connections. I need a warning when the opposite is true, because if it relies on GOG Galaxy or some other server, it’s just DRM by another name. To their credit, this warning is usually there, but I’ve come across a few games’ store pages that left it to the imagination, and I’d have to go to the forums link to find someone complaining about it to be sure. Other games, like Doom 2016, just omit multiplayer from the GOG version entirely, because they can’t even fathom how to make multiplayer work in a self-hosted way.
What I’d like to see (I’m a programmer, but I’m not deep in the world of gaming software engineering) is for GOG to provide a drop-in multiplayer server that can serve as a self-hosted version of GOG Galaxy’s multiplayer functionality, so that even if the developer doesn’t see it as financially viable to ensure their game’s multiplayer lives on, GOG can do that for them and make any online game LAN-able. If that’s possible. In my head, it sure seems possible.
ITeeTechMonkey@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
I feel like a lot of understanding behind the financial decisions around online games could happen if we explained to the kids what GameSpy was. Online was never “free”. Before microtransactions and Steam footing the bill, there were ads. But we had self-hosting as a backup plan back then.
dandi8@fedia.io 14 hours ago
I really want them to bring back self-hosting. Multiplayer games don't need to have a limited lifespan.
Tower@lemmy.zip 13 hours ago
I’d love to see legislation that if a game requires servers to play any portion of it, and those servers get taken offline, the source code must be released. Like, they’re already demonstrating that the game doesn’t hold enough value for them by shutting down the servers, so let the community take over.
Goretantath@lemmy.world 14 hours ago
It was free for the consumer, Nintendo just footed the bill.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
And that likely stopped making financial sense once online multiplayer operated at larger scales. On PC, GameSpy servers came with ads. Even downloading patches for games meant going to an ad-supported third party web site.
FartsWithAnAccent@fedia.io 9 hours ago
Remember Mplayer aka Mplague?
SkunkWorkz@lemmy.world 31 minutes ago
GOG Galaxy only handles lobbies, matchmaking and relaying connections to the host. So even if they provide a way to self host it, if the game uses dedicated servers to host sessions it still wouldn’t work if the game devs don’t provide the server runtime binaries. Only games that can host a session on the client would work without the server runtime.