richardhutnik said:
This is based upon Activision seeing the console market model superior for revenues than the PC market. By doing this, they look to crack down on pirated copies of the game, and oversee everything gameplay wise, and can then be able to run advertising also in the place where gamers log in, and get more revenue. It breaths some life out of the community, but that is replaced by more money. Did you think that top game titles wouldn't go this way? Or are you still telling yourself that PC titles outsell console titles by a wide margin? Anyhow, company run servers happen to also force the players to meet each other online, and does help foster the generating of community. |
Counter-Strike has ads yet it uses dedicated servers. Another example is Killing Floor. There's a free weekend for it on Steam and I saw that they have ads (video too).
You can meet people on dedicated servers too and I'd rather have servers that I often visit vs matchmaking to meet people. I don't want my friends list filled with crap. It's already annoying enough on PSN to get friend invitations from people that I might have played one match with, especially when it's a blank invitation. Nor do I want to have to rely on that list to play with people when I could have simply joined a server I often play in and played with the other regulars.
To be quite honest, I don't think many people were expecting it to go this way. Consoles might have become more popular than PC games, but dedicated servers are like a standard for many PC games. Obviously with the response, this was a very sudden bomb that was dropped on the PC community especially when everybody was preparing to migrate from COD4 to Modern Warfare 2 including clans and the people who would mod/create maps/get dedicated servers.
