Comment by LocalH
7 days ago
Also, part of the issue is the death of private servers. Game publishers have chosen to revert to centralized servers, rather than allowing private servers. Thus they have also taken on the additional cost of running those servers. Older games can be easily played on private servers to this day, as the community of any moderately popular game will almost always step up to provide the service. Even games you might not expect would be that popular or games that never had private servers - for example, Rock Band 3 only ever supported connecting to Harmonix servers in an official capacity. This support is also discontinued (they still operate the Rock Central servers, but only for Rock Band 4). Yet right now, thanks to reverse engineering, there is a fan-operated server that you can connect to with a slightly modified game. You can even download the fan-created server software (written in Go) and stand up your own server for your friends or for whatever other reason (maybe you want to run a small tournament and use a private GoCentral server to record statistics and have a private leaderboard).
> Game publishers have chosen to revert to centralized servers, rather than allowing private servers. Thus they have also taken on the additional cost of running those servers.
I fail to see the principal difference between a "centralized" and a "private" server here. Just publish the code for running the "centralized" server, as you would do for the private server, and add a possibility to configure which server to connect to in the game?
I could see this becoming an issue when the server is hardwired to require some publisher SSO login, but given how everyone + their dog uses OIDC nowadays, a requirement to make authentication interoperable is only a very mild restriction.