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The future of mmos is rental servers.
Rungar
Member RarePosts: 1,132
I believe well see less and less big mmos, as its already trending this way and instead we will see the rise of the rental server.
1) Its cheaper for the players as only one person has to rent the server.
2) worlds can be more personalized in terms of rulesets
3) people are generally tired of people they dont know and mmo management in general. They want smaller better communities with some control over who is there.
4) allows the use of mods to personalize the worlds to players liking on a server basis
5) Is easier for developers as we go back to just making the games that can support a couple of hundred players at a time.
I can see a company like microsoft leading this providing top notch server technology at rental cost that can apply to multiple games. If they were smart it would be part of their windows store strategy. If they make all their games to leverage server rental they not only get to sell the games but also rent the server space. This will be the biggest incentive possible for online games sold by microsoft. Steam cannot compete with that directly.
1) Its cheaper for the players as only one person has to rent the server.
2) worlds can be more personalized in terms of rulesets
3) people are generally tired of people they dont know and mmo management in general. They want smaller better communities with some control over who is there.
4) allows the use of mods to personalize the worlds to players liking on a server basis
5) Is easier for developers as we go back to just making the games that can support a couple of hundred players at a time.
I can see a company like microsoft leading this providing top notch server technology at rental cost that can apply to multiple games. If they were smart it would be part of their windows store strategy. If they make all their games to leverage server rental they not only get to sell the games but also rent the server space. This will be the biggest incentive possible for online games sold by microsoft. Steam cannot compete with that directly.
.05 of a second to midnight
Comments
No mmorpgs other than Koran cash shop ones.
games go to steam so they can get exposure but they cant be hosted by steam at least not at the moment. Integrated server space rental will become part of the selling features of the platform for multiplayer games.
The biggest sticking point I see is when a game does a hot fix or update to the code. All those mods you talked about are generally broken until the mod owners can get in and adapt the mod to the new code which can't happen until the game company puts out the 'mod kit' for that patch they just did.
SWG (pre-cu) - AoC (pre-f2p) - PotBS (pre-boarder) - DDO - LotRO (pre-f2p) - STO (pre-f2p) - GnH (beta tester) - SWTOR - Neverwinter
for instance steam automatically updates all my games. You rent the server space from steam and that gets updated as well.
There really isn't many promising games on the near horizon unless one of the many asian games in development becomes a surprise hit.
Possible sure, but unlikely to appeal to me regardless.
I also see myself playing smaller MMO alikes such as FO76 and such but not on private or rental servers, I prefer more stable management and service.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
And people are already hosting minecraft, ark, rust etc etc on rental server.
As for private server, Legend of Aria is doing that. They let people hosting their own private server. But I don't think the developer is enthusiastic about it since if people are playing on private server less people would play on official server... Which could mean they potentially make less money.
I was really bummed(okay, super salty) about this as this was my lesson in crowd funding...
It might be cheap for players but not for the person running the server.
Yes individual servers offer the best experience and offers more choice to the players.
ALL and i mean ALL of the studios are looking for ways to monetize and get the most money for their game so it is unlikely they do anything for we the gamer.
We have been typically seeing this movement from the low budget or early access games that don't have cash shops and or because they don't want to run servers.
Most always i can't stand how developers setup their servers,i find the setting to be atrocious.
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
I think what were seeing is that the bigger games get the dumber they also get due to scale issues. Less cool features, less interesting things offered. Less specific to how you want to play. Trying to please everyone pleases no one.
a steam ( for example) based world might offer you tools to trick out the world and your friends could come play there. It really just shifts the subscription(or most of it) to steam from the developers and lets developers work on the game itself. Expansions etc.
Since large scale server farms operated by microsoft and amazon etc are much more efficient, scalable and offer game platform loyalty it seems like a win win for developers and the big game hosts like microsoft and steam.
They don't need to have players running their servers to do that. And in fact when it's running on cloud it's often more effective to not have players running or modding the servers. The cloud isn't that effective tool for having 1000 people who run 1 000 differently modded server configurations. It's much more effective when you have 1 dev who can use it to run all 1 000 servers at once.
But the future of MMO's, I think will look just like we have now for the foreseeable future. Until the tech is there for something that will really change how we play games.
Logic, my dear, merely enables one to be wrong with great authority.
Things like the MOBA and BR genres were created by visionary people within the confines of another game engine.
Put the burden of populations in ONE PERSONS HANDS.
Who will pay the bills ?.... Will this player always pay the bill ?
How does he charge others, paypal ?
How will he advertise to get 1,000 players to join his server ?
How does he prove his server is reliable to strangers ?
Is he reliable ?
How does he deal with one or more assholes ?
When the population drops, how does he re-advertise ?
How does he distribute his code ?
Can other people keep the code a secret ?
Many large populations play tricks on payments
What incentive would the renter have to do this ?
Best you can hope for is 10/20 good friends.
For the OP... Think before making a topic !
All that's required to go in this direction is a large "storefront" company like microsoft or steam to provide automated hosting services and a company like unity to improve their network handling a bit.
Im not saying I necessarily like that but mmos have stagnated and failed. The lack of real development is proof of this. They have gone into the abyss way ahead of the rest of us.
Large "storefront" company ?
Is this not the same as non rental servers.... Same as it had always been ? You just went full circle and beck to original server design.
Even more worst..... Introducing another 3rd party to get involved (Microsoft and Steam), to complicate even more..... The logistics would be amazingly hard, not to mention the un-needed cost.
its only a matter of time before they add server space to this platform. All you'll have to do is "start/restart" if you have the game and space rented. Its just a way to make smaller games persistent without all the hassles for the player.
There is big money in this so it will be done.
You would expect Steam or other major company to be a go-between for this RENTAL PERSON and other players, and expect steam to coordinate all these efforts and manage every anomaly involved with it.
Add that every individual game would have it's own non-standard way of providing servers, and steam will tailor their services to cater to each game ?
Again,
Who will pay steam for this service ?
Will they sign a contract so they don't back out of this service.
Their are a million holes in this idea.... AND FOR WHAT ?.... How does this benefit anyone ?