The thing I’m criticizing is that they make this other kind of server impossible, even though it would be exactly the kind of backup plan you’d want for a situation like this one.

It would help people who wanted to have a functioning video game. Then you could ask your friend (or someone on Discord) what their IP address is and play with them.

I’m not mixing anything up. If they allowed for things like direct IP connections, you could still play Baldur’s Gate 3, online, regardless of this downtime. It wasn’t organically that we arrived here. It’s objectively worse.

Mouse and keyboard hasn’t been so much a requirement for the better part of 20 years on PC, but the rest tracks.

consoles are walled gardens that consumers pay to be in

Less and less as time goes on, is my point, for the reasons we’ve discussed. Maybe any one or two of those reasons aren’t doing it on their own, but in the aggregate, it appears consumers are slowly deciding not to put up with the downsides anymore.

Cloud saves that are free on PC, and they don’t block your access to transfer saves without it like consoles do. Playing online on PC is free, and we know exactly how to make it free on consoles, but they’re not interested in doing so. No one can guarantee 100% uptime, which is why it’s a bad deal to make the subscription for that stuff mandatory instead of allowing things like direct IP connections.

I’m pretty sure PlayStation requires games with certain types of multiplayer to authenticate with them as part of the agreement to publish on the platform so that’s restrictive.

It sounds like that requirement is just a bad deal for the consumer. And they charge you for it. And they can’t guarantee uptime.

You used to be able to type in an IP address whether or not the official server is running. Sometimes you still can, but seeing as Baldur’s Gate 3 has LAN and direct IP connection on PC but not on PlayStation, it sure seems like Sony is asking them to specifically remove the feature if they wanted it in the first place.

Then beyond that, you’ve got a mismatch behind what your money is actually for. It used to be for paying for their servers, but you often don’t even connect to Sony’s servers anymore. Plenty of games behind that same paywall have their own servers, like Call of Duty for instance, but Call of Duty’s multiplayer is behind the same paywall as Helldivers 2, which is running servers on Sony’s dime. And beyond that…the reason multiplayer is free on PC is because your purchases are funding them. The majority of game sales on consoles are now digital, just like Steam, and that is a trend that’s accelerating. Meanwhile, the subscription fee compared to free online on PC is probably one of a multitude of reasons that people are leaving consoles for PC.

Boy, it sure is a good thing that Sony charges a subscription fee for any and all network multiplayer traffic.

I’ll bet that number is significantly higher than zero, but as per reporting some months ago, much like with Redfall, Rocksteady saw a significant exodus during Suicide Squad, since the studio was tasked with building a game they did not want to make.

I miss when Rainbow Six was Rainbow Six. The first version of this game felt like Rainbow Six with a few oddities to it, like healing someone by throwing a syringe at them. Now it’s some wacky version of GI Joe.