The most depressing thing I’ve seen related to this topic. A small team that worked incredibly hard were lucky enough to achieve the impossible, and now they watch without any control as it is taken from them, for no other reason than greed.
Due to unchecked neoliberal capitalism, big companies like Sony already cover so much of the developed markets, that they have no way to naturally grow more. So they are forced to squeeze more out of what they already have, as stagnation is not accepted in this hellish system.
Including lying, controlling narratives, committing outright fraud, controlling the fate of companies through “consultants”, changing the definition of Recession, killing of whistleblowers, killing of journalists who help whistleblowers, to name just a very short few.
This system blows, how many millenia does it fucking take to figure that out?
Jurgis recollected how, when he had first come to Packingtown, he had stood and watched the hog-killing, and thought how cruel and savage it was, and come away congratulating himself that he was not a hog; now his new acquaintance showed him that a hog was just what he had been-one of the packers’ hogs. What they wanted from a hog was all the profits that could be got out of him; and that was what they wanted from the workingman, and also that was what they wanted from the public. What the hog thought of it, and what he suffered, were not considered; and no more was it with labor, and no more with the purchaser of meat. That was true everywhere in the world, but it was especially true in Packingtown; there seemed to be something about the work of slaughtering that tended to ruthlessness and ferocity-it was literally the fact that in the methods of the packers a hundred human lives did not balance a penny of profit.
Upton Sinclair
I read The Jungle a few months ago and its aged so depressingly well. Nothing has changed, it was obvious what was happening long ago, but we’ve done nothing but watch it get worse.
But only on one topic. Yes the FDA was created in large part from outrage over food condtions described in the book. But that really is only one chapter of the text, the majority of it deals with the exploration of workers in ALL sorts of industries (not just food), how preadatory home loans lead to finical ruins, how voting systems are rigged and how our policing system only produces more experienced criminals, not reform.
The last 2-3 chapters are explicitly socialist talking points that are still being said, for good reason, today. If the book was as influential as Sinclair wanted it to be, then we would’ve seen FAR FAR FAR more than the FDA.
I mean, heck, reread the passage I copied in. It’s not really about food.
So you’re intentionally exaggerating when you say “nothing has changed”. Yeah nothing has changed, except an entire Executive Branch department that didn’t exist before. It was more influential than many other books written at the time.
Of course the author wanted the book to be even more influential, that’s why authors write. No writer says “this book kinda sucks, I hope people read half of it and put it down”.
You can “uh actually” my phrasing if you really want to, but playing tone police is to miss my actual point how these are long standing and well known problem that Sinclair spoke about extensively.
If you don’t have anything meaningful to contribute to the conversation, it’s okay to just keep scrolling.
We haven’t done nothing. There’s Rojava and the EZLN building whole competing systems. There’s loads of people doing mutual aid or building cooperative economic structures all over the world, and those movements are gaining a lot of traction as people are waking up to how shit things are.
You don’t usually hear about all these projects, in the same way you may not notice termites hollowing out a structure until it’s far too late to save it.
I hope you have noticed that Rojava is next to Turkey, has lost much of its territory to Turkey, and can lose the rest anytime. Definitely fighting against it better than a certain UN member state too bordering Turkey (I’m being ashamed of Armenia here), but still.
EZLN may be in a better situation. Mostly because in Latin America “live and let live” seems to be not such an idealistic approach, since I’m confident there’s a lot of force which could squash them.
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.
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.
simultaneous cross-platform networked multiplayer and want to be able to launch on any console.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The point is that you can say no to selling it, but for that to work you need to:
Actually own a deciding majority of the thing
Have a good enough product to resist your business partners (eg. game developers) being paid with investor money to switch over to you, sapping value from your product.
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.
The most depressing thing I’ve seen related to this topic. A small team that worked incredibly hard were lucky enough to achieve the impossible, and now they watch without any control as it is taken from them, for no other reason than greed.
You were right though. And it’s only because we were all so furious about what they were doing and raised such a fuss about it that they decided to renege on that.
There are a lot of console exclusives that I like. I think an argument can be made that companies like Sony and Microsoft can add funding and support to make games better, sacrificing profits for console value.
With Xbox failing for another console, putting out half-baked products, and buying IPs instead of creating new ones, I’m worried that Sony will just start maximizing profits.
The devs that made Helldivers MUST have been aware of Sony’s mandatory PSN policy. This is just a sob story and throwing Sony under the bus at this point.
This would have been less of an issue if it remained enforced from the start. Re-enforcing it after demonstrating it clearly works without makes it look scummy and greedy. People could also easily refund if they didn’t agree. Now its too late.
For a lot of people it now looks as: now that the game is a success we want to collect everybody their data as well so we can make even more money.
Tbh, other games just require a 3rd party account without linking them explicitly. This requires an actual link which ( likely ) gives them access to a lot of your steam information which you’d rather NOT give to a corp that doesn’t seem capable at guarding people their data.
That is true, but it I’d an additional hurdle.
Sony is playing it smart.
They made an announcement and had a bunch of Outrage now. If they had just enforced it people would have refunded on mass probably. Now people can still actually play.
I’m guessing steam might be less eager to refund when the actual deadline hits. I also feel like a lot of people will just cave and link/create the account.
That’s definitely what Sony is expecting.
And it’s also what I’m hearing from friends. That they dont want to, but that it’s a fun game ans they’d rather keep playing with friends.
The thing is that it was enforced right at the beginning. There was a period where you couldn’t play without a PSN account, before they made it optional while Sony rolled out more infrastructure to handle the player numbers.
It’s an issue now because it wasn’t stated clearly enough and loudly enough that not having a PSN account was only temporary, and I think Arrowhead screwed up because they didn’t know that PSN accounts aren’t available everywhere and so were selling the game in places that couldn’t play it unknowingly.
Steam is usually pretty good about refunds and has apparently already pulled the game from the store in places where you can’t make a PSN account, so I imagine they’re planning to refund the game. This looks like the kind of thing that could be class-action lawsuit worthy.
The thing is that it was enforced right at the beginning. There was a period where you couldn’t play without a PSN account, before they made it optional while Sony rolled out more infrastructure to handle the player numbers.
That’s what I heard as well. I was a bit dumbfounded when I read that it suddenly became mandatory.
I think Arrowhead screwed up because they didn’t know that PSN accounts aren’t available everywhere and so were selling the game in places that couldn’t play it unknowingly.
I think this is the most plausible reasoning. It’s what I’m thinking as well, and also what seems to appear through the CM. In which case it is a screwup on their end. Though in 2024 I do get you’d expect people to be able make an account anywhere in the world for a company like Sony.
Steam is usually pretty good about refunds and has apparently already pulled the game from the store in places where you can’t make a PSN account, so I imagine they’re planning to refund the game. This looks like the kind of thing that could be class-action lawsuit worthy.
If they did that’s good on them, but not wholly their responsibility. It is a good move to prevent new purchases they’d have to refund anyway ( or until there is clarity on what will happen in those regions ). I would kind of expect the publisher to do this once they figured out this was possible though :/
You have to put in an actual support ticket. There’s examples of people who wrote something like “The publusher is forcing me to sign up to a 3rd party and I do not consent”
Re-enforcing it after demonstrating it clearly works without makes it look scummy and greedy.
Day 1 policy was that PSN linking was mandatory. Arrowhead execs knew this. Players who bought the game in non-PSN countries should have gotten a pop-up banner saying as much instead of the payment screen.
Im not even sure if the game would have taken off at all. Psn servers couldn’t handle the load which is Why it was disabled ( temporarily ) in the first place.
A lot of people, including myself, never even linked the psn because I could skip it.
Why do you care that a company as scummy as Sony is getting thrown under the bus? Outside of this fiasco Helldivers was a pretty great game. If throwing Sony under the bus gets this decision reversed literally EVERYONE wins, and honestly, as the Publisher, thats probably one of the things that comes with the title, taking the heat for shitty ass decisions that could otherwise tank a game
I didn’t think that’s necessarily true. They were contracted to make the game by Sony and when they started probably had no idea it would even be sold on PC.
The most depressing thing I’ve seen related to this topic. A small team that worked incredibly hard were lucky enough to achieve the impossible, and now they watch without any control as it is taken from them, for no other reason than greed.
Due to unchecked neoliberal capitalism, big companies like Sony already cover so much of the developed markets, that they have no way to naturally grow more. So they are forced to squeeze more out of what they already have, as stagnation is not accepted in this hellish system.
The line must go up, whatever the cost!
Edit: damn, Sony actually listened
Including lying, controlling narratives, committing outright fraud, controlling the fate of companies through “consultants”, changing the definition of Recession, killing of whistleblowers, killing of journalists who help whistleblowers, to name just a very short few.
This system blows, how many millenia does it fucking take to figure that out?
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
-Upton Sinclair
I read The Jungle a few months ago and its aged so depressingly well. Nothing has changed, it was obvious what was happening long ago, but we’ve done nothing but watch it get worse.
“The Jungle” famously spurred large reforms. The FDA exists and has a lot of power because people were disgusted by what they read.
That’s why you’re reading a hundred-year-old book: it was influential.
But only on one topic. Yes the FDA was created in large part from outrage over food condtions described in the book. But that really is only one chapter of the text, the majority of it deals with the exploration of workers in ALL sorts of industries (not just food), how preadatory home loans lead to finical ruins, how voting systems are rigged and how our policing system only produces more experienced criminals, not reform.
The last 2-3 chapters are explicitly socialist talking points that are still being said, for good reason, today. If the book was as influential as Sinclair wanted it to be, then we would’ve seen FAR FAR FAR more than the FDA.
I mean, heck, reread the passage I copied in. It’s not really about food.
My high school English class (in the Deep South) explicitly left those chapters out of our study of The Jungle lol.
So you’re intentionally exaggerating when you say “nothing has changed”. Yeah nothing has changed, except an entire Executive Branch department that didn’t exist before. It was more influential than many other books written at the time.
Of course the author wanted the book to be even more influential, that’s why authors write. No writer says “this book kinda sucks, I hope people read half of it and put it down”.
🙄🙄🙄
You can “uh actually” my phrasing if you really want to, but playing tone police is to miss my actual point how these are long standing and well known problem that Sinclair spoke about extensively.
If you don’t have anything meaningful to contribute to the conversation, it’s okay to just keep scrolling.
😂
Tone police? That’s rich, coming from the comment police. Besides, you said it twice:
Do you think no one can provide context for your comments? Everyone has to agree with you 100%?
We haven’t done nothing. There’s Rojava and the EZLN building whole competing systems. There’s loads of people doing mutual aid or building cooperative economic structures all over the world, and those movements are gaining a lot of traction as people are waking up to how shit things are.
You don’t usually hear about all these projects, in the same way you may not notice termites hollowing out a structure until it’s far too late to save it.
Do you have any links at hand for all that?
If not, I will try to add find and them to this chain for future reference.
Oh thanks for reminding me!
Anark | Liberation in Action Playlist
It used to be really hard to give a good list of these sorts of movements, but this series by Anark just puts it all in one place.
The first video is him just reading off a list, but this is the list in written form, which I find much easier to parse: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1W1wWjWNXhvHjMzzyxT5z5Es_kE6xmTYSadGSJfuVtpE/edit#heading=h.p04t775v871g
The next few videos are deeper dives into some of these, and the series is ongoing, so this playlist link should stay current as he releases more.
Thanks for the quick reference links!
I hope you have noticed that Rojava is next to Turkey, has lost much of its territory to Turkey, and can lose the rest anytime. Definitely fighting against it better than a certain UN member state too bordering Turkey (I’m being ashamed of Armenia here), but still.
EZLN may be in a better situation. Mostly because in Latin America “live and let live” seems to be not such an idealistic approach, since I’m confident there’s a lot of force which could squash them.
I’m afraid “this system” has existed since humans learned to lie and commit fraud, and it’s not called capitalism.
But there are some laws which these things follow - the more horizontal and decentralized everything is, the less such rot.
The political ideology is called distributivism and unfortunately associated with Catholicism, but it’s the sanest I’ve encountered.
Capitalism is the current name for the problem.
No, capitalism is a religious term among leftists, used for things much younger.
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.
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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.
KSP’s original team must feel the same way
You were right though. And it’s only because we were all so furious about what they were doing and raised such a fuss about it that they decided to renege on that.
https://twitter.com/PlayStation/status/1787331667616829929
There are a lot of console exclusives that I like. I think an argument can be made that companies like Sony and Microsoft can add funding and support to make games better, sacrificing profits for console value.
With Xbox failing for another console, putting out half-baked products, and buying IPs instead of creating new ones, I’m worried that Sony will just start maximizing profits.
The devs that made Helldivers MUST have been aware of Sony’s mandatory PSN policy. This is just a sob story and throwing Sony under the bus at this point.
This would have been less of an issue if it remained enforced from the start. Re-enforcing it after demonstrating it clearly works without makes it look scummy and greedy. People could also easily refund if they didn’t agree. Now its too late.
For a lot of people it now looks as: now that the game is a success we want to collect everybody their data as well so we can make even more money.
Tbh, other games just require a 3rd party account without linking them explicitly. This requires an actual link which ( likely ) gives them access to a lot of your steam information which you’d rather NOT give to a corp that doesn’t seem capable at guarding people their data.
People can still get a refund. It just has to be manually reviewed and deemed justified instead of just being okayed by the automated system.
That is true, but it I’d an additional hurdle. Sony is playing it smart.
They made an announcement and had a bunch of Outrage now. If they had just enforced it people would have refunded on mass probably. Now people can still actually play.
I’m guessing steam might be less eager to refund when the actual deadline hits. I also feel like a lot of people will just cave and link/create the account.
That’s definitely what Sony is expecting. And it’s also what I’m hearing from friends. That they dont want to, but that it’s a fun game ans they’d rather keep playing with friends.
The thing is that it was enforced right at the beginning. There was a period where you couldn’t play without a PSN account, before they made it optional while Sony rolled out more infrastructure to handle the player numbers.
It’s an issue now because it wasn’t stated clearly enough and loudly enough that not having a PSN account was only temporary, and I think Arrowhead screwed up because they didn’t know that PSN accounts aren’t available everywhere and so were selling the game in places that couldn’t play it unknowingly.
Steam is usually pretty good about refunds and has apparently already pulled the game from the store in places where you can’t make a PSN account, so I imagine they’re planning to refund the game. This looks like the kind of thing that could be class-action lawsuit worthy.
That’s what I heard as well. I was a bit dumbfounded when I read that it suddenly became mandatory.
I think this is the most plausible reasoning. It’s what I’m thinking as well, and also what seems to appear through the CM. In which case it is a screwup on their end. Though in 2024 I do get you’d expect people to be able make an account anywhere in the world for a company like Sony.
If they did that’s good on them, but not wholly their responsibility. It is a good move to prevent new purchases they’d have to refund anyway ( or until there is clarity on what will happen in those regions ). I would kind of expect the publisher to do this once they figured out this was possible though :/
I’ve had three refund requests rejected so far (~10h playtime).
You have to put in an actual support ticket. There’s examples of people who wrote something like “The publusher is forcing me to sign up to a 3rd party and I do not consent”
Day 1 policy was that PSN linking was mandatory. Arrowhead execs knew this. Players who bought the game in non-PSN countries should have gotten a pop-up banner saying as much instead of the payment screen.
Im not even sure if the game would have taken off at all. Psn servers couldn’t handle the load which is Why it was disabled ( temporarily ) in the first place.
A lot of people, including myself, never even linked the psn because I could skip it.
Sony bailed them out when their servers went down in February by sending engineers to assist. It makes sense that Sony wants a favor in return.
Why do you care that a company as scummy as Sony is getting thrown under the bus? Outside of this fiasco Helldivers was a pretty great game. If throwing Sony under the bus gets this decision reversed literally EVERYONE wins, and honestly, as the Publisher, thats probably one of the things that comes with the title, taking the heat for shitty ass decisions that could otherwise tank a game
My argument here is that Arrowhead is not some great dev that is helpless.
I didn’t think that’s necessarily true. They were contracted to make the game by Sony and when they started probably had no idea it would even be sold on PC.