-
Hey Guest. Check out your NeoGAF Wrapped 2025 results here!
Why is Sony shutting down online services for games?
- Thread starter Remark
- Start date
yeah it costs money to keep servers running, but shouldn't that paid Playstation Plus subscription be covering those costs?
I mean, you are literally paying to play online, you'd think that some of that money could go towards actually keeping the games online.
I mean, you are literally paying to play online, you'd think that some of that money could go towards actually keeping the games online.
Thoughts and Theories by Remark
idk worked with server farms before, never been as bad as people say it is.
dano1
A Sheep
Well if it doesn't cost that much rent your own servers and make everyone happy...
goldenpp72
Member
Is it impractical to have community ran servers for games? Why not offer the option if a few devoted fans would foot the cost, I know a few games have this but, it might shut up the few hardcore remaining fans and keep most happy.
ChronotriggerJM
Member
Sonys infrastructure just doesn't scale that well. And a ton of their games surpass the 16 player count, which I imagine would do horribly for peer to peer.
I'd love if more games would let users host. Warhawk for life.
I'd love if more games would let users host. Warhawk for life.
I would if I could but Sony doesn't allow that option for me smh :l
No, it really doesn't. If anything, he was short selling the amount of work that goes into the back end of some games.
Now again let me preface that I think sony has been kinda short and overly ruthless with servers with many of its games (especially when examples like mlb come up), especially in light of its competitors.
But running the back end and all of its associated services and VMs (or even physical servers in some cases) has been understated.
It costs more than you think. Who's going to patch the servers when there are security flaws? Who's going to repair them when the hardware fails? Who's going to maintain backups and restore data from them if necessary? Who's going to monitor traffic to the servers and mitigate denial-of-service attacks? Who's going to ensure online play is still actually working for their users, and if for some reason there's a problem, perform the necessary software or hardware maintenance to fix it?
The cost of the hardware and the Internet connection is one thing, but the cost of the labor required to maintain these servers is the more important number here. If the cost to maintain them is greater than the amount of money they bring in, even if they have multiple online games collectively using the same servers for their online play, then as a business, and especially as a struggling business, which is more or less what Sony as a company overall is, they don't have much incentive to keep them running.
I still think it's a shame, but it's also just a reality when trying to use limited resources efficiently.
The cost of the hardware and the Internet connection is one thing, but the cost of the labor required to maintain these servers is the more important number here. If the cost to maintain them is greater than the amount of money they bring in, even if they have multiple online games collectively using the same servers for their online play, then as a business, and especially as a struggling business, which is more or less what Sony as a company overall is, they don't have much incentive to keep them running.
I still think it's a shame, but it's also just a reality when trying to use limited resources efficiently.
You guys seem to like your subsidized extended game rentals quite a bit. Aside from lining the pockets of some major third party publishers for their continued presence on their platforms, much of ps+ pays for your rentals.
What you're looking for is pc gaming not console gaming
Just for XBL servers for XB1... MS added hundreds of thousands of servers for redundancy
Now try to figure out how much that costs just in energy alone
Then you need to calculate the cost of the buildings and land in which they sit
Then you need to know how much it costs to have the huge data pipes running into these facilities
Then you need to factor in maintenance on both software (monitoring, reprogramming in case of failure) and hardware end (replacements) and customer service.
It's not cheap. Not even after initial build out.
The reason MS has all these fancy toys to play with is because their servers are already a business... so they are just leveraging what they have... it'd probably be a money loser if they went as large scale as they went with for X1 and didn't have that existing infrastructure.
CarbonFire
Member
A lot of games require more processing power and throughput than any 1 console is able to deal with as a client server. True P2P is garbage for fast-paced games that require a reliable server connection, since it's only as good as the weakest link in the network. And crappy internet is still more of the rule than the exception, if not in download speeds, certainly in ping times and packet reliability.
Except thanks to the focus of console gaming, pc gaming has become saddled with the shackles of p2p as well.
Thing is this would be possible as well on console if they actually fucking allowed it smh. It's been done before but Sony in that bitchmade mode rn smh :l
just need a couple mad hacks son and ur on dedis mad quick
power of the PC gaming mane, gaben overlords n all that
^
I think you need to lay off the drink tonight lol
The exception isn't the norm. We don't just play call of duty
I think you need to lay off the drink tonight lol
The exception isn't the norm. We don't just play call of duty
Kurt Angle
Member
miss you RyanLive Footage From Microsoft HQ:
You wanna try to play Rockstar Table Tennis online in 2015? Go right ahead you magnificent bastard.
StrangeTaco
Member
I don't really see a P2P fallback being feasible from a business standpoint, Sony/Microsoft would have to create the infrastructure and coding to support that and if the server populations for a game are that small where the servers are being shut down they would probably lose money in the deal.
As for the second, again coding and other things would need to be put in place for this kindof thing to work making it unfeasible. Also server hardware is fairly different from console hardware because of their different purposes, making consoles a bad choice to host a server from. As far as third party hosting solutions for consoles I don't see it ever happening because console gaming seems to be more "consumable" than PC gaming.
Also unless you have some extensive experience working in the networking field I doubt you have the background to make that kind of call.
Hahahahaha pretty good joke funny guy. Pretty good jokes.
As said earlier in the thread, Sony still prioritizes what games get shut off based on player count and how many people are still playing. Since MLB is an annualized franchise, they probably record major drop offs of player count from the previous year's edition to straight to the the next one.(or if you feel they are more insidious, they cut them off to get people to upgrade, who knows)
Games like MAG, and Resistance and the games they shut down are essentially online games that dried up population wise long before then.
I'm not defending such a practice, just offering the explanation.
*and very reasonable game sales might i add. People always say the 'free' games are the big thing of PS+, but i usually don't care about them over the great discounts on the store
in my defense if warhawk can do it anyone can. its just if your willing to do it if you catch my driftie ;3
You think this is a fucking joke? No it's not stop it.
I'd imagine Sony already has teams managing servers and server code. If they are making use of virtualization, or at least automated deployments and scalable designs, supporting one additional game with a small community probably wouldn't cost that much.
It doesn't make any sense to me that game servers ever shut down permanently in 2015.
Practically all servers are virtual these days – it seems like it would be simple to just dynamically scale the number of VMs allocated to each game based on the number of active players.
If there's only 1-32 (or whatever) players, then only one server instance runs.
If there's not a single player logged into the game, then zero instances run until someone connects, and then one gets spun up.
Either way, it costs practically zero money, goes a long way towards preserving community goodwill, and ensures that no games will ever become dead, uplayable disks (see: MAG).
Practically all servers are virtual these days – it seems like it would be simple to just dynamically scale the number of VMs allocated to each game based on the number of active players.
If there's only 1-32 (or whatever) players, then only one server instance runs.
If there's not a single player logged into the game, then zero instances run until someone connects, and then one gets spun up.
Either way, it costs practically zero money, goes a long way towards preserving community goodwill, and ensures that no games will ever become dead, uplayable disks (see: MAG).
autoduelist
Member
Not just equipment. Not just salary. You also need physical space, climate control, maintenance/replacement of hardware, security against incursion, and may have potential problems if upgrades to server break your online somehow. etc, etc.
Online eventually dies and isn't worth maintaining. Where do you draw the line? What if nobody has even tried to play a game in a year? Is that okay to end? Resistance PSP?
Really? smh.
lol it doesn't mean shit unless u want it to mean something chill. just how i roll u dig me familia
I don't see what you are arguing about Remark. We know money is the cause since what other reason could it be? I hardly think they are shutting it do to spite unless they really hate the vita.
If you want to argue that it morally disgusting to sell the product that you have the intention of only allowing customers access to a bit over a year(unless it becomes popular) than you should say that.
We know why.
If you want to argue that it morally disgusting to sell the product that you have the intention of only allowing customers access to a bit over a year(unless it becomes popular) than you should say that.
We know why.
I mean that would probably be the best way to approach it. My problem is that even though I know the why, there's many other options out there to avoid this and/or make it so it doesn't really effect the community.
The short answer is costs. Even when factoring in all of the obvious costs, the major post is likely to be opportunity cost, in this case the amount of money that is passed up (directly and indirectly) by favoring to maintain the services of a dying game over expanding the services of an in-demand game.
KimonoNoNo
Member
Out of interest is the Demon Souls servers still up after all this time?
I know a couple of years ago Atlus planned to turn them off, but changed their mind a couple of times.
I know a couple of years ago Atlus planned to turn them off, but changed their mind a couple of times.
Sony/EA and anyone else who shuts down likely have a policy that if a certain number of users don't log in after a number of months/weeks then the game is end of life.
The ideal alternative is that they should allow hosting companies to take over and allow users to rent servers. Like Battlefield 3 & 4.
And CPU cycles, storage and memory costs are zero? If you're going to allow VMs to spin up, you need to reserve resources for them to spin up. I'm not saying the costs for a single VM is astronomical but if you add up the reservations for every title as time goes on, it adds up.
The ideal alternative is that they should allow hosting companies to take over and allow users to rent servers. Like Battlefield 3 & 4.
And CPU cycles, storage and memory costs are zero? If you're going to allow VMs to spin up, you need to reserve resources for them to spin up. I'm not saying the costs for a single VM is astronomical but if you add up the reservations for every title as time goes on, it adds up.
Hans.Gruber
Banned
Ninja Scooter
Member
lol it doesn't mean shit unless u want it to mean something chill. just how i roll u dig me familia
Oh lord...
We outchea :O
CosmicQueso
Member
lol it doesn't mean shit unless u want it to mean something chill. just how i roll u dig me familia
samueljacksoninpulpfiction.jpg
Charles Brandon
Member
probably a stupid question but why can't they just allocate server resources dynamically as and when? No one gamer can be playing on more than one game at once. If you shut down the server on online game A, maybe he'll move to online game B but the overall server load is the same.
Ninja Scooter
Member
I didn't know Noreaga posted here.
You already know :O
SocksAndShoes
Banned
and electricity to power the servers, room to store them in, etc.
InsaneTiger
Member
Virtual servers run on real hardware.
Anyway, seems like everyone in GAF is an armchair network engineer and server support engineer and business executive.
If you can do it better than do it and quit your bitching. Life isn't fair and all business are about the bottom line.
Anyway, seems like everyone in GAF is an armchair network engineer and server support engineer and business executive.
If you can do it better than do it and quit your bitching. Life isn't fair and all business are about the bottom line.
Iced Arcade
Member
this really isn't new though, Sony has always been doing this and did it a lot last gen.
Tal Shiar Agent
Banned
The PS Store is being removed from the PSP anyway so it doesn't make sense to support games online there.
As for other games it's all due to player base vs. profits.
For example, after SOCOM 4 failed and killed the brand it didn't make much sense to keep the older games up. People weren't playing them and weren't buying them.
Conversely, Warhawk is still up because Sony only hosts the master list. Actual game servers are hosted on users PS3s. Plus, they've added the game to PS Now so they are still making money on it.
If a company is only hosting master lists it costs very little to keep it running, the users are footing the bill for the actual servers. That is why GameSpy games stayed up as long as they did despite not receiving payments anymore for their services.
As for other games it's all due to player base vs. profits.
For example, after SOCOM 4 failed and killed the brand it didn't make much sense to keep the older games up. People weren't playing them and weren't buying them.
Conversely, Warhawk is still up because Sony only hosts the master list. Actual game servers are hosted on users PS3s. Plus, they've added the game to PS Now so they are still making money on it.
If a company is only hosting master lists it costs very little to keep it running, the users are footing the bill for the actual servers. That is why GameSpy games stayed up as long as they did despite not receiving payments anymore for their services.
You say this as if PSN and their online titles are interlinked. I'm pretty sure PSN and SCEs online titles are two entirely different sources of costs. Its a bit of a false equivalence.