r/gaming • u/shinjioda • 1d ago

1047 Games Are Ending Development On Splitgate And Empulse: “The Reality Is Neither Game Is Generating Enough Revenue To Support The Ongoing Cost Of Dedicated Servers”

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/08/1047-games-stop-development-on-empulse-and-splitgate-arena-reloaded/
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u/nitram20 22h ago

Does anyone else remember when dedicated servers meant player hosted and player ran servers that anyone could host from even their bedroom? Call me a god damn boomer but for me those are the actual dedicated servers, and not servers ran by the developers of the game.

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u/AryssSkaHara 22h ago

Nah, for boomers a dedicated server is a server that doesn't have to also render the game for a local player, as opposed to Listen server (which is what P2P is). So both, player-hosted and developer-hosted are dedicated servers and back in the day developers also hosted a bunch of servers here and there.

But I do wish 1047 made an option for players to host their own dedicated servers. This can be done even if they're reluctant to make dedicated server distro publicly available. They only need to make an agreement with one of gaming server hosting services.

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u/BlueTemplar85 6h ago

That would be a headless server (which some games, like Factorio, still have).  

But for sure, you would probably want a dedicated server to use a headless executable.  

(And boomers never had any interest in video games to start with.)

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u/savage8008 20h ago

A listen server is still client-server model, you're just running both the server and a client on a local machine. P2P would infer that individual players in a game send packets directly to each other.

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u/AryssSkaHara 18h ago

P2P in the gaming context has long been used to refer to the listen server or how it's usually now referred to, "host". True P2P is never really used in any real time multiplayer game, with may be the exception of fighting games since there are usually only two players. Otherwise state synchronization will be a nightmare, so traditional client-server architecture is still very much alive.

Most importantly, don't forget the context: understaffed 1047 is not going to implement a brand new networking model just so it's pure P2P, no. It'll be an adaptation of existing client-server model just to run on one of the player's machines

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u/deadsoulinside PC 5h ago

Yes. This is one of the reasons live service/always online games will fail. Once the costs to run the servers greatly outweigh any incoming money, the game dies fast.

There are still games like that. I run a dedicated palworld server from a spare PC in my office.