| Zkuq said: 1. The thing is, there are lots of gamers and should there be no choice, PC would be much bigger. I never said everyone would switch to PC gaming. Also, while everyone remembers to say how expensive gaming PCs are, they often forget how much of it is more than they would have paid for the PC they would need anyway (ie. a 'normal' PC costs $500 and a 'gaming' PC costs $800, thus the user actually pays 'only' $300 for the gaming feature). 2. OK, this is pretty gray area. I'm not exactly sure about the motives of having all those random servers for games but somehow all of them hosted by the publisher is a pretty ridiculous idea. Anyway, see Counter-Strike for example, I believe most servers are user-paid. Please correct me if I'm wrong, it's entirely possible that I'm under the wrong impression. |
http://www.gameservers.com/game_servers/
Easy google for game server rental. Best thing about having dedicated player-hosted servers is the game will never die and you can run mods on them if you want. Can you still play Halo 2? Also, the server is a home for your community/clan, you can run it with your rules, maplist, whatever.
Mods are important, a lot of times they fill in the holes the devs left behind. Almost all CS servers have some kind of admin mod, some servers have extra anti-cheats like global ban lists, some servers have pro-mods for things like hitsounds, warmup, and demo recording/playback. A lot of good game ideas are prototyped by mod teams only to get stolen by lazy console devs and sold as something new and innovative.
