this post was submitted on 05 May 2024
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The lesson we learn here is that you don't take money from the mob.
Don't go public with youre company.
Don't get involved with the devil.
Said this in another thread :
First off - yes Sony is in the wrong.
Second - Helldivers ain’t Flappy Bird. Making an online multiplayer game that needs the ability to do reliable matchmaking across multiple platforms with hundreds of thousands of players out there needs MASSIVE network and infrastructure support…
So you may say “don’t take money from the mob,” but this is more a situation of where if they HADN’T taken Sony’s support, they likely wouldn’t have been able to have the resources to have done all that themselves which could have made the difference between their great success and failure.
Remember that the first helldivers game was also a Sony published title where everything worked out fine for everyone then… but mostly because it wasn’t near as big a success story and making headlines but was instead a far more niche title lost mostly in the noise of smaller dev Sony titles.
I’m sure arrowhead has learned its lesson now and it will likely able probably to flex its muscles in the future thanks to its success financially - as I’m sure lots of publishers will be now coming at them with much more lucrative and favorable contract deals going forward, but they probably would not have been able to do what they wanted to do at the scale that they have been able to had Sony not been there to help provide that initial capital and infrastructure support.
This is Sony’s fault fully. The guys at Arrowhead are just wanting to have the means to make good games. They needed the resources to launch successfully and pretending it would have been feasible otherwise without said resources is sadly… naive.
What does it matter if the game "launches successfully" if it doesn't sustain itself? They knew theyd likely lose their players but they were hoping theyd be special - this game is not successful in the end.
Your entire argument boils down to: they wouldn't have been able to cheat us into thinking this was a good game without sony. If theyre going to take my money and kill the game anyway, it would have been better to not make it at all. That's what thousands of indie devs have to contend with every day.
I think his argument comes down to, don't hate the playa, hate the game. Far better for them to have made the game, as it clearly is a good game. The publisher coming in and shitting all over everything is what makes the situation bad. Hopefully, this can serve as more inspiration for indie devs (who do make most of my fav games) and maybe lead to more studios not accepting Sony as a publisher. I can't fault Arrowhead for wanting to make what they love, but I can hope Sony burns to the ground never to rise again.
You're talking like this was premeditated by the development studio......is that really the case?
Unless there's evidence that AH got a special deal, there's no chance they didn't know this was an eventual requirement.
I've been an engineer in the AA/AAA games industry for almost 2 decades, my job often involves assessing the technical feasibility of games that big publishers like Sony want to invest in/ acquire.
Someone somewhere at AW agreed to shove PSN sign-in requirements in the deal, hoping it would blow over like many games before. (e.g rocket league / epic account debacle). Now the devs are sorry it's not working out and say "their hands are tied", but they must have known this was coming. There are way too many legal ramifications for this to be a random power-move by Sony.
Edit: sony apparently lifted the requirement today
I'm gonna be honest. It didn't matter to them at the time. Look at it. They made their game and we all played it and loved it. For that time they were on cloud nine. They definitely got what they wanted, for a moment anyway. I can't say I wouldn't end up in the same situation if I was ever more than a shit dev.
Edit: but to add, I'd put huge banners in game saying it was a requirement at login. As far as I know I was never bothered in game for it. And if I was it was too easy to click and ignore.
I agree with you that they most likely needed the money to do what they wanted to do at that scale.
But I think my point still stands. Because it is a deal with the devil in the most literal sense that is possible. You get to your goal faster, easier or at all but in the end you have to ask yourself if the price you paid for that was worth it when the devil comes collecting. That is the moral of the fictional Storys, isn't it?
But to add to this. I think we, as consumers, aren't completely innocent either. Buying only the best looking, 1000 hours, other buzzword games. This undeniably sends a message to indie devs which can lead to people making self harming decisions.
One could argue that we got groomed to want that. And I do. All those blockbuster-games that were made under gruesome conditions are unsustainable. But we didn't knew that. We thought that they were the new normal.
But now we know better. This is just normal if you walk over corpses to get to your goal. And if we want developers that value our time and mental health, then we should value developers time and mental health in return.
Which means showing them that we will buy games that are not those 10 million dollar productions. And that we will measure the quality of the game compared to the resources that went into that particular game and not compared to a game that had an unholy amount of resources to burn through.
In the end we need to find a way to cut out all the rich people who came into the gaming industry as it broke into mainstream, who are throwing their weight/money around and bully everybody into submission.
And that needs strength of character. It means not buying the new shiny thing that we have seen an add for the hundredth time today, no matter how much we want that. It means not taking that deal which will make that problem go away quicker.
If gaming has taught us anything, it is how to prevail against overwhelming forces. That it takes compassion, companionship, a bit of anger and sacrifices.
If we haven't learned that, why the fuck are we even playing.
Or make a game that doesn't rely on those resources. I was considering getting this game when I got a system that could handle it. I'm gonna stick to my single player indie stuff.
This is like saying to any sort of person involved in commercial agriculture “don’t buy a John Deere tractor if you don’t like their draconic business practices.”
Like… there’s not really many other choices if you want to make a game that can do simultaneous cross-platform networked multiplayer and want to be able to launch on any console.
I mean, unless you want them making something that has massive difficulty coming to console… like maybe Lethal Company is the only recent example I can think of that’s a small non-major publisher-backed title that has networked 4-player multiplayer… and even then i’m not sure what sort of challenges that dev had when trying to implement any sort of netcode for gameplay.
Funny. I'm in thew ag sector and I would not recommend anyone buy a NEW John Deere tractor. Not unless you have the skill to flash the tractor firmware.
My peak multiplayer era was from then Arena shooters were kill. I don't touch Live Service games because of what we're seeing now. This game was going to be my first real try at one once I got a system that could play it as a lot of people were commending how it avoided the pitfalls of other Live Service games.
Just give me a game with a map editor and the ability to self host servers. The community itself will take care of the rest.
Quake 3 Arena came out in 1999 and has versions for AmigaOS 4, Microsoft Windows, Linux, Mac OS, Mac OS X, Dreamcast, PlayStation 2, Xbox 360, iOS. There's even fewer differences between PC and console hardware now a days.
This is the situation we're in, even if you don't like it. Yes, communities can take care of a lot. Yet for so many people the creation process and love of a product is why they create, not the money. I cannot blame the devs for wanting their game to reach as many people as possible. Nor can I blame Sony for wanting to make money, without that desire we wouldn't have as many opportunities to play amazing titles as we do, though we can absolutely blame the way that money is made.
So perhaps you may have gone a different route. Maybe it would have worked, maybe not. Maybe many of us only recognize John Deere, and maybe people in the industry know of alternatives. Point is, I am hesitant to blame devs for nearly anything nowadays. Because this isn't 1999, these titles aren't for the PS1, Dreamcast, or even PS2 or original Xbox. It's 2024 my dude and they had to make a choice: Get the resources, finagle some barely working alternative, or get help. I think many of us would have done the same.
Go shit on the big companies who are almost always the problem. Everyone else, man... they're just making the shit they want because many of them love the process. We're lucky we see so many projects reach the light of day, especially when for every successfully finished one I'd bet there are a 100 which are scrapped part way through.
What's the difference to the end user? I'm supporting indie devs by buying their retro shooters. Asking for server software and map editors don't hurt the the devs. It hurts the stock investors that demand the line goes up.
What I don't buy are Live Service games. This game was going to be my first in a while after being burned the few times I've tried before, but Sony thought they could fuck around.
The idea that there's a high amount of technician problems that need to be overcome to achieve crossplay though is nonsense. Just pick an engine with proven netcode and go from there. The biggest issue would be whatever red tape the console manufactures put up.
Have you tried Splitgate? They came out with a Forge-like map editor last year, and the gameplay is basically Halo mixed with Portal. It's pretty fun and totally F2P. The only things you can buy are cosmetics.
Welp, you just gave me a new game to check out!
I mean netcode for pc-to-pc games at least isn't really rocket science. I'm not as familiar with the crossplay aspect, but I'd hazard a guess that it is only difficult because console manufacturers have locked multiplayer networking behind their own subscription services. I can understand why they went the route they did, but maybe crossplay is overvalued if the cost is stuff like this.
what's your solution for online matchmaking in a squad shooter?
Community hosted servers worked pretty damn well for a very long time, and aren’t reliant upon large amounts of infrastructure to continue being playable. In fact, I can still go play almost every game from that era that was good enough to maintain a player base without issue. Deep Rock Galactic seems to do alright without matchmaking, for a more modern game.
How do you propose bootstrapping a dedicated community? Genuinely asking, is the plan for there to be a dev-hosted service for a while until the community either develops or fails to develop, then to hand it off?
The developers can host a few servers, sure, that’s an option. If that’s the method they take, they also release what’s known as a dedicated server utility, that allows anyone to launch a dedicated server on their machine, or to rent out a server in a hosting center. You can find this model in games such as Counter-Strike, Quake, Unreal, and some of the Battlefields.
This allows for the community to self police, and people will naturally end up in a community that fits their preferences, and rude or toxic players will quickly find themselves banned from the majority of servers and be forced to change their behavior or play a different game. Players can modify server settings, or make entirely new game types that the developers may not have thought about or wouldn’t have the resources to create, and people can create tools that allow servers to easily moderate their servers, and elect moderators and admins from within the community for when they’re not online. This also allows for developers to negate the need to be able to host millions of players, and when the game dies, if it does, all they have to host is a Master Server list.
——
Another option, especially for games with small groups of people is to allow the game to be hosted live by one of the players in the squad or group. This is called peer-to-peer servers. In this case, and can either be done by “hosting” the game server and waiting for or inviting players, or by having the game monitor latency and automatically migrate to the best host based on connection and distance. Deep Rock uses the first of these two options, whoever starts the game becomes the host, and stays that until they close the server or quit the game. In this instance, devs host no servers except the master server list, allowing even the smallest of devs to be able to handle millions of people playing their game simultaneously without any real increase in their server costs.
Typically, for smaller squad based games, like Deep Rock, this is the better option, while for larger player per match games like battlefield, the former is the better option. In both instances, players choose from a list of available servers in a menu and load in from there. You can check out Deep Rock Galactic or the Diablo 2 Remaster to see what a server list looks like.
? Open server browser and whatever matchmaking system. Matchmaking doesn't require the game be Live Service. Despite recent actions by Epic, running a Master Server for listing available games doesn't actually cost that much. If you're asking about Stat Tracking, I couldn't care about that if you paid me. I'm sure you could track that reliably on a server by server basis. Maybe have different communities that trust each other have a Stat Network.
So many threads about Hello Games (No Man's Sky) and other Sony backed titles being "victims". They knew what they were doing,
Highly recommend the Internet Historian video about no man's sky.
Also that game is really awesome now
I wouldn't, that dude's a nazi
If you don't go public with your company, some other company will go public, and buy your company or your customers from under you with the money they got from Wall Street. There are some companies that can try and resist, but the field tilts against them.
When you own something and someone comes to offer you money to buy it, you have this thing called “No” you can say, and then they don't buy it. It's a pretty neat hack. I learned it from Gaben.
Epic is trying to IPO and has all kinds of investors. It tried to undermine Valve by buying out its partners by just spraying money at them for exclusives - you know, "disrupt" the industry. Steam prevails because they are real good at what they do, and they had a head start, but it takes a Gaben to not sell out, a good team and a lot of luck to manage that. Steam is playing against a tilted field is what I'm saying, and is one of the few players who successfully are managing it. They are the exception.
Yes, notice how the person who owns the thing gets to decide to sell or not to sell it. Wild concept, I know.
The point is that you can say no to selling it, but for that to work you need to:
The point is that if Steam wasn't so much over the competition, Epic could have taken market share over with the exclusive deal shenanigans, or publishers could have started up their own marketplaces. The biggest reason for that is that Steam was early to the party and could get to a good product before others tried to enter the market.
If Steam didn't have that, people would have switched over to Epic and publisher stores, and we'd be bitching over Steam not having any good games on it because of backroom deals.
Yes, when you own the thing you can say no to selling it. Why is this point so hard to understand? Even if you don't have a monopoly or even if your product sucks you get to say no.
It's not, they're making a separate but contiguous point about how the market naturally incentivizes shittier tactics from it's participants, and how Steam, Valve, and Gaben are exceptions to the rule.
The point I'm making is that let's say Gaben did not have the headstart or the loyal player base. What is Steam or Valve? Its customer base or market share? Those are for sale, they can be bought with "free" services, exclusive deals with publishers, or other fuckery. Its team and employees? How would you pay them without revenue if someone else is price dumping the market?
Yes, Gaben could keep the logo with the bald guy with the valve on his head, but that's pretty much it. Everything else he has to fight for, invest in, keep alive. And the opponent, Wall Street, has literally unlimited money.
What I'm saying is that it's not as simple as "just don't sell out". And I'm speaking from experience, not as the sellout guy, but as the employee where the company was sold out from over me a few times already.
i think you are right in your assessment but I would argue that consistency also is a crucial factor.
It may be harder because of the things you say but in the end the people who invest money (into everything but the games themselves) are just in to make money.
They will try to squeeze as much money out of the customers without losing them. Or at least without losing Profit. Losing customers and still making more money is a valid strategy it seems.
People will notice that. Some earlier then others but it will get noticed and then they leave. To the next thing.
You are right with the headstart etc. so as a Dev you should accept your limitations and instead focus on the things that you can control (to an extent) and that is planing the budget in a way that you can be consistent.
And when people are looking for the next thing, you will be there better then before. Then you got customers and an image that seperates you from the rest.
And people will remember.