I think a lot of people naively think of moves like this as pure money grabs and don’t appreciate that a lot of these moves are out of survival…especially for games like Rocket League that require a sufficient player base to even be a viable live service game.
Well, Rocket League doesn't need to be a "viable live service game", it could just be a regular multiplayer game that gives you a client and server executable to run your own.
It isn't like not being a live service game killed Quake 3, for example.
I don't believe RL or other modern online games could survive with even a tenth of the player base if they didn't have decent matchmaking, and you can't have decent matchmaking if you depend on players finding each other outside the game and one of them running a server and sharing the IP address. It's way too much friction to expect most players to do that.
Console games survive perfectly fine without any sort of anticheat/etc, maybe that would be bad for PC gaming but games could sustain their player base without anticheat, and matchmaking is neither necessary (lots of multiplayer games just don't use it at all) nor is it particularly expensive to run if that's all you're doing.
Obviously that would be a problem on the PC but games would remain popular and publishers would get paid without either of those things. Games as a whole wouldn't go anywhere. They just make more money this way.
I have 2600 hours in Rocket League. It's a fair bit for a "casual" player, but it's got nothing on pros (who are mostly up over 15k hours these days). I have some friends I play fairly regularly with, but we don't usually play against each other we play with each other.
The main reason I still play is to continue improving, and I don't think I could ever do that effectively if I was limited to only playing against people in my local sphere. My rank typically puts me somewhere in the top 1% of players (and honestly, I'm not even that good. The skill ceiling is insanely high), online match making may be frustrating sometimes but it's the easiest way to find opponents who will push those boundaries.
Would a hosted server work well for people who are much lower ranks who are primarily playing to just mess around with friends? Probably. I would quit tomorrow if online matchmaking went away though.
Arguably Rocket League does need to be a viable live service game. Without a sufficient player base, there's not enough for consistent match making...or you get matched to players far outside your skill level. Neither experience is good. Titanfall 2 is a good general example of attempting what you describe. As many have pointed out, that simply doesn't fly anymore. Quake 3 was over twenty years ago.
There are many different attempts at business models in games. Splitgate started with your suggestion and has since gone free to play. Numerous MMOs have tried subscriptions and have gone free to play. It's a sad state of affairs, but for every successful Minecraft, Stardew, or Valheim, there's thousands of failed attempts.
You can still run a master/default server (i'm repeating the same reply to everyone because it seems everyone has the assumption that providing a server executable means the game doesn't get to provide one or something).
I'm not sure I understand how providing a means to run your own server solves all these issues. Foremost in my mind is how you ensure competitive integrity when you can no longer trust all the servers. However, that's a bit beside the point.
The point I'm trying to make is that these things have been tried by one game or another, and there's good reasons why the "run your own server" model died for the most popular games. Ignoring that is, I think, discarding a lot of historical evidence and nuance against blanket "why don't they just do X" arguments.
If there's a better way, it won't be a return to the past. It will be something new that no one has thought of yet.
Yes, obviously a big part of it is that every studio is hoping for their game to become the next WoW or Fortnite or Destiny— a franchise that will print money for a decade with not much more investment than a few content drops a year.
But I think the expectations of players have changed too, as far as matchmaking, leaderboards, progression, anti-cheat, anti-abuse, etc. You just can't deliver these things in a consistent way with the distributed client-server model, and companies needed to own the end-to-end experience vs farming out the community management side to faceless volunteer guild/clan/server operators.
I guess it depends what you mean by need. Many multiplayer games (like AoE2) have switched to a hosted server approach because it’s better for performance and matchmaking. I mean, thinking back 15 years, non-LAN multiplayer was not very good at all. Even LAN multiplayer could be hard to set up. Even today, it’s fairly limited (especially since your upload speed is probably severely limited). But hosted servers for everything have been fantastic. Multiplayer FPS games have extremely good performance. Network issues for games like AoE2 aren’t nearly as prevalent.
You can still run a default/master server, providing a server executable doesn't mean it is the only way to play the game. But if the game stops being popular in the future it doesn't kill the entire game.
The game will die financially at some point regardless, the message i replied to wrote that it is about the game surviving. A game does not need to absolutely require everyone use the same server to survive as has been proven by other games also not requiring that.
Keep in mind again that this is about the game surviving not about squeezing all the money possible out of their playerbase - after all the topic was about hating what video games have become.
Rocket League reached something like 50 million players in its first year. They’ve likely earned over a billion dollars so far. This is not about survival, just squeezing your cash cows.
