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John Carmack Says No Dedicated Servers For Rage
AndrewDBarker writes "Modern Warfare 2 will use a matchmaking setup powered by IWNet for online play (as we've discussed). It's too early to say what Rage will use, but Carmack indicated he believed the servers are something of a remnant of the early days of PC gaming. That said, he realizes the affinity many PC gamers have for them — and is glad Rage won't be leading the charge away from them. 'The great thing is we won't have to be a pioneer on that,' he says. 'We'll see how it works out for everyone else.'"
Since you didn't say which company, I'll point out that you're referring to Valve's Steam Stats for Counter-Strike: Source, Counter-Strike, and Team Fortress 2.
I'll also point out that those numbers are the number of concurrent players, not the number of total players.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
Just like we need another slashdotter's disproportionate observation as id provided the tech, while Raven provided the fun/or lack of fun factor of the new game. It'd help your argument more if you would read up on who's actually putting their hand into the cookie jar of the new sequels.
Authentication and dedicated servers are not mutually exclusive, every game I can think of since Quake 3 (and probably earlier) has authenticated the player against a master server before letting them join. While possible to run hacked servers, it generally requires everyone involved to have the hacked client, and they have always been few in number and full of hackers and such to make a guaranteed shitty player experience. This is about selling DLC, plain and simple. I know that this decision is going to cost them my sale for MW2 and Rage. I bought the first Modern Warfare and loved it and was already sold on the second one when they announced this nonsense. They've lost my sale, and it will probably be blamed on piracy and used as an excuse to shove more drm and more DLC down our throats. Speaking of DLC, it has also cost Bioware a sale of Dragon Age, I was actually credit card in hand ready to buy it when I found out about the 3 or 4 different "editions" with different amounts of content, and even the most expensive one still doesn't get you all the content, theres more DLC to buy. It's ridiculous! Why buy and navigate the DLC maze they have created when I can pirate and have all the content and all the DLC and all the pre-oder "rewards" without jumping through hoops?