On Mon, 11 Dec 2006, Dave "M3pH!sT0pL3s" Williams wrote: > " The gaming companies really need to start go through all the > costs on all levels. Sooner or later all the communties will stop > supporting the games and they have to set up all the servers themself and > administrating them will not be an easy task" > > EA, i believed tried this once and quickly changed their minds.
afaik they still charge you if you are in their ranked systems. They are also one of the companies that doesnt understand how much costs are involved for setting up and maintaining servers. I really dont understand why ISP's and GSP's think this cost model is a good idea and actually pay for that. First we have the costs for colo and man power and above that pay the game company to be able to set up the servers. A colo with a gold service level agreement and full time management of a small farm will probably have a cost of 400.000-500.000 euro on a yearly basis. Even more if we scale this up this abit. > Also if the adverts end up running thru our servers are we gonna get > paid comission for them using are hardware to serve thier ads? i hope > so. TBH with the way valve are treating us atm i'm starting to think i > could make more money from serving BF2 and quake based games. Atleast > their admins don't get messed around and ignored like we do currently. > I've said it on the windows list in the past and i will say it here now. I cant imagine Valve being so stupid so they start sending the banners through the server. Its just bad design and will by certain be the downfall of the game. And it will be getting out of Valves control, since we, the serveradmins, can block those with plugins or a updated firewall setting. If they then starts to punish all that actually block this feature will lead to a extremely large drop in the amount of servers. For most people bandwidth costs money... More likely the gameadvert will be downloaded from a central server farm (The steam servers?) and painted by the games graphic engine directly. > Valve don't care about any one of us. They are becoming, if not already > become, The microsoft of the gaming world but worse. I thought EA already got that spot. EA have aprox 50% of the market share in gaming. And will continue to buy great game development companies, squeeze all juice from the game they wanted from them and let them there to rot. > We need to stand up, shout real loud and make them pay attention because > they are taking what we do for them for granted and saying it's in the > gamers interest's. I've never heard so much shit in my life. Politicians > lie better. Atleast when they open their mouths we take it with a pinch > of salt. Screaming, whining and jumping with rage will not solve anything. Giving the companies insight of the costs and how much work is invloved to run a community and server farm is the only way to get attention from the game companies. How we present this to the game companies is another issue. Maybe by adressing this the way we do now in this forum, which will only go through to Valve, or make a couple of articles on various larger newssites, that will give all game companies the information and will have a greater impact. It is then up to them to decide what they do with that information. Maybe they do something nice with it or they just dont care and go and do their business anyway. /Bjorn _______________________________________________ To unsubscribe, edit your list preferences, or view the list archives, please visit: http://list.valvesoftware.com/mailman/listinfo/hlds_linux
