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Comment by mehlmao | Hacker News Reader

I miss games that allowed players to host their own servers. Players could find a server with a community they like and play there. Ultra-competitive players, people who wanted to mess around on weird custom maps, and people who didn't want to see or hear any swearing could all find a server that fit them and enjoy playing.

In the past 10 years or so new games have mostly stopped including this, in favor of matchmaking systems. I guess having a single, official server makes easier to enforce "progression" systems and sell microtransactions. I'd also suspect the the disappearance of community servers has to do with the rise of online multiplayer on consoles, which never really had that as an option.

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This to me shows the biggest problem with games. They aren't made by gamers anymore. It's Yet Another Media Outlet so it's been cash cowed to death.

Split screen is gone too. It used to be mandatory in the 1990s-2000s for FPS, now your lucky if a current gen title has split screen at all. This ruins one of the primary fun things to do with a game which is couch play.

Both of these things make it harder to microtransact and make games RPG like, so I get it. But I hate it really. The games are worse.

While not the sole or even probably a significant reason for the decline in split screen; I think split-screen has really suffered because of the need for consoles to be both somewhat affordable but also not terribly behind in terms of horsepower of what PCs can do at the time of the console's release. Depending on the game, the split screen can double the load on the cpu and gpu, and with consoles the way they are now their fps would plummet. A lot of games still are locked in at 30, some 60, which by most PC gamer's standards is already horribly behind. Now of days the vocal crowd of PC gamers say the only way to game is by playing games on 144hz monitors. While I would love to see the return of split screen, I don't think it will with the push to have games be on every platform now and run decently on all those platforms as well.

Nintendo seems to be the only brand left that understands the concept of "party" games. You can do 4p split-screen in Mario Kart, and you can do wireless ad-hoc in Splatoon (but this does require multiple consoles). Kirby Star Allies is also 4p same-screen.

Chat rooms and games with self-hosted servers are some of the best social media I have ever used. I wish there was a focus on building meaningful communities online.

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