When you worked in games, how did your team deal with the unplanned scenarios where a feature, or even the core game, wasn’t fun and you needed to go back to the drawing board?

You’re completely missing the point I’m making - it’s nothing to do with how matchmaking works or how to get self-hosted servers to work.

Your quote about “every game before the mid 2000s” is just reinforcing what I’m trying to tell you: no modern PvP game can get away with it anymore.

The current average player who’s played any modern PvP game in recent memory expects to be able to click a PLAY button that puts them into a match. That is your default user experience expectation.

If you require players to have to dig through a server list like people had to during the pre-mid-2000s, you lose players FAST.

You dilute your player base by allowing people to play in self-hosted servers because your default user experience of clicking PLAY and getting into a game gets worse (less players means less diversity of player skill and longer queue times).

For a game and studio that has no existing reputation and players who will jump on their stuff, you don’t have the luxury of splitting your already potentially small player base.

Modern PvP games that allow you to have custom games are all well-established and already have a healthy player base.

I don’t think it’s fair to assume what is or isn’t a leap for a developer. Unless you’ve worked on the game in question, we have no idea how easy or difficult it is to support any feature implementation.

Some would like to argue that “they should have thought about it!” and my answer to that is: that’s not how game development works.

Making games is hard, and unless you’re Valve with virtually infinite time and money, you have to make difficult decisions about what will get you to the finish line the fastest, while maintaining a minimum quality bar.

Every feature implementation takes time, and every added feature takes time away from something else, which takes you further away from shipping the game.

I have no idea how any game client and server implementations work (outside of games I’ve actually worked on), and I’m pretty certain you don’t either, so saying something is “zero effort to add” is presumptuous and naive.

None of what you’ve said solves any of the issues that I pointed out, only “look at how much extra gameplay you might get!”, and that’s assuming the devs took the time to make their game easily moddable.

For a primarily PvP game, the biggest challenge a studio (especially a small or mid-sized one) faces is gaining a large enough population of players early on. Without critical mass, the player base will rapidly dwindle because people get tired of waiting in queues for their games to start (whether it’s by matchmaking or finding a custom server), or the quality of the games get worse because they’re constantly getting matched outside their skill level (stomping or being stomped).

Providing examples of games from Valve doesn’t prove anything because Valve is an extreme outlier. They can afford to put a game out with zero marketing on their part and achieve 170k player concurrency - what other studio has that?

I’m not disputing the potential advantages that you’ve brought up - I’m only trying to explain the rationale that devs without virtually infinite time, effort and money have to contend with when working on a PvP game.

That’s why I specifically pointed out PvP.

While this sounds like a good idea, in the modern landscape of PvP games, it would never work.

Current player expectations for PvP games are now “click play, get into game”. Every layer of friction filters out players who don’t want to go through the hassle of being able to just play the game they bought.

It seems easy for you because you played multiplayer games in the 90s, but anyone born after that era will have to learn to filter through a megalist of servers with names like “BoB’s L33t S3rv3r”.

But let’s play devil’s advocate and say the devs could still add the self-hosted servers to their game in a couple different ways.

If devs added it to accompany the default matchmaking, there’s now the problem of their player base being siphoned away from the main matchmaking pool, which further destroys the default player experience.

If devs added self-hosted servers as a way to supplement their own matchmaking servers (e.g. officially hosted servers + player hosted servers), the player experience can now wildly vary depending on which server you connect to, especially since devs can’t guarantee the same experience on random Joe’s home ISP connection and server hardware.

There’s no winning for the devs. While your sentiment is valid, the practicality of doing it is not feasible anymore.

The sunsetting idea is good though and I wished that happened more too.

But how else will they sell you the same ‘remastered’ game 10 years from now?

Think of the corporations!

Genuine curiosity: are you a professional game developer?

Arco.

A recent and lesser known game - unique turn-based tactical combat, and a heart-wrenching story.

It’s all fun and games until the scammers use AI themselves to massively scale their operations.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caning_of_Michael_Fay

He absolutely deserved it.

Because many signing up for war are doing it for money due to the severe poverty they’re experiencing:

https://youtu.be/dVZjvOrJ0aM

I’m not a graphics engineer so I only have cursory knowledge of the topic.

The biggest benefits that ray tracing brings is the accuracy of lighting your scenes and being able to forego the “tricks” that you mentioned. These are almost always going to be screen-space lighting techniques and effects e.g. reflections (SSR) and ambient occlusion (SSAO).

Unfortunately, the bad news is that you’d still need to understand the 3D math and shader knowledge regardless of whether you can take advantage of ray tracing or not. The good news is there are numerous game engines and resources out there to help!

Hope you make something cool from the hobby!

Game devs are apathetic to ray tracing.

Traditional rasterization will never go away in our lifetime because ray tracing hardware will never advance broadly enough to replace it.

Ray tracing also doesn’t replace the work needed to achieve the desired atmosphere through lighting and fixing performance related issues - which is most of the work.

The games that do support it right now are primarily using it as a marketing tool, and developers are often paid by Nvidia or AMD to spend the time and resources to implement it.

The most broadly successful games are ones that run on the widest variety of hardware to gain the largest reachable audience. Given that Nvidia is pretty much the only competent ray tracing solution for hardware, that market is extremely small compared to the industry at large.

The technology in its current state is not an exciting prospect because it simply means devs have to spend more time implementing it on top of everything else that already needs to be done - purely because the publisher/studio took Nvidia’s money so they could slap the RTX label on the game.

Yes there is: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/clearurls/

Street value.

You’re welcome and I hope things work out well for you!

Relationships are hard, both platonic and romantic. Maintaining them in a healthy way is really difficult and no one can give you a map for how to navigate the issues.

Sometimes, you’ll find that despite your best efforts, relationships can wane or end over time. Your best friend might suddenly have to move halfway across the world for a job - while they’d still be your best friend, you won’t be able to get coffee/beer like you used to. Or a close friend could unfortunately lose their life at the drop of a hat, and you’d never see them again.

I’ve learned to focus more on and appreciate the time that you do have with a person, however long or brief it may be, because you never know when it’s the last time that you spend the most time with them.

It’s hard to understand the full context of your situation because there’s a lot of details missing, so I’m going to make some assumptions based on what you’ve said.

I think your mistake was to go straight to running when you haven’t even started crawling.

You’ve described yourself as not having been a very sociable person over the years, so planning a massive party of 30-50 people for people that you haven’t had regular contact with was likely to never have worked out the way you expected, regardless of how much effort you put into planning and setup.

My advice to you is to start small and take it in steps.

Firstly, don’t bog yourself down with thinking about how a) badly the party seemed to have gone, and b) how many relationships you’ve let erode.

Second, instead of focusing on those that didn’t show up, celebrate that you had 5 people who cared enough to come to it. Spend time cultivating relationships with them, because those were the ones who bothered to be there.

Lastly, for those you felt were important and let you down, you have to understand that people tend to treat big parties as optional. If someone is important to you, inviting them to a large party where they’re just one-of-many doesn’t really tell them how important they are to you does it? I know I’d feel a lot more important if someone invited me to their small and intimate party!

Additionally, you should reach out to them and let them know how you felt - no one can read your mind. You have to communicate how you feel and give people a chance to respond. If they respond positively, great - you’ve kept an important friend! If they don’t, then you’ve learned that your relationship with them wasn’t a healthy one.

You don’t have to pretend like it didn’t hurt you, but the onus is on you to communicate that to those you felt slighted by.

Also, don’t plan massive parties for yourself with over-the-moon expectations, especially not for your first birthday party!

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Because the truth is worth knowing

This is the defacto argument that gets pulled into reporting, good or bad.

What is the in the point in the truth in this article’s reporting? What about this story told you anything, or anyone, about what’s ravaging the industry? What message does a supposed $400 million cost tell you other than Concord failed? Do you think 160 developers worked on this project over 8 years with the intent to ‘chase the trend’? Do you think they spent 8 years of their lives building a bad product they didn’t believe in? Or was Sony and the entire leadership team able to fool all 160 people that they were building something special when all they really wanted was a trend chaser?

If this article has enlightened you in a way that has somehow eluded me, I would very much like to learn what you’ve gleaned.