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Comment by papito | Hacker News Reader

I always assume I am buying single-player features. Who would want to commit to maintaining multiplayer for an ancient game?

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The DLC single player features you bought are also being removed.

Expansions, other scenarios, etc.

The old-fashioned answer to that is "allow multiplayer without your central servers".

> Who would want to commit to maintaining multiplayer for an ancient game?

This is part of why I believe in making multi-player exceptionally cheap and stable over time. I'm building serverlesss game infrastructure which is super cheap. It's a small tragedy when a multi-player games loses critical mass because the operational and maintenance costs don't out weight the revenue.

I'm curious which serverless product/provider supports the necessary low-latency requirements (read: UDP support.)

Or are you literally building your own atop something else?

I'm building my own, and I'm currently using WebSocket. I intend to integrate towards WebTransport at some point, but I need the WebSocket fallback since the world is not too kind to QUIC.

Thought about just having dedicated hosted servers the players can setup? 0 cost for you.

If you did that, what would stop everyone from just pirating your game?

Convinience and the risk for viruses. Ban pirate servers from the master server list etc.

Ignore multiplayer for a moment. What stops everyone from just pirating all of the single-player games that are currently sold on GOG?

What does that have to do with multiplayer servers?

If you let people run their own multiplayer servers, you have no way to stop them from playing with pirated clients. You're not in control of the servers.

Company-provided servers are an expense the company suffers, not something that's cheaper or more convenient than letting the player base operate their own servers. They make the game worse for both the company and the players. Why do you think they're mandatory anyway?

I thought about that, at first, but then I realized that I didn't want to setup servers for a single game. The problem with dedicated hosting is that you're still looking at a minimum of $5/mo, and I'm too lazy to spin it up and down.

I'm building a new kind of serverless which requires one to use my language, and it is a completely vertical stack (by myself).

Serverless is never cheaper than running on your own machines once you hit any scale. Just cheaper to start with. They want to hook you in so when you scale you pay them the big bucks.

Never? Not even if your needs are very unpredictable or seasonal?

The way serverless is defined today, yes. I want to change that, but you just have to buy into using my language.

My serverless infrastructure will be price competitive with dedicated hosting.

The core reason why serverless sucks so bad is that every-single-interaction is metered, and generally you have no state which amplifies the costs.

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