What are POGS?
What do Minecraft, Valheim and Rust have in common, other than their massive success, longevity in the game, and their great & active communities? The game developers decided that game server hosting is for gamers themselves to do. This concept is called Player-Owned Game Servers. This article highlights what POGS are, and what opportunities it can bring for your next multiplayer game.
Empowering your players
Publishing game server files to your players has many benefits. Ranging from reducing your infrastructure cost to the creation of new communities around your game. The POGS concept creates a sense of control and ownership for those who play and experiment with it.
Naturally, those who play your game, will start exploring new options how to get the most out of it. Prime example being Minecraft. Within months of the game coming out, content creators, entrepreneurs and developers have created thousands of new ways of playing the game different than what it was ever designed to do.
Modding & Community Innovation
With the addition of mods, plugins and community servers; an entire ecosystem next to the game was created. This modding ecosystem is still thriving and creates longevity, some say this is the reason why the game is still alive.
Minecraft is not the only example where modding has taken a big stance in the popularity and increased replayability of a POGS game. Only to name a few: Rust, ARK, Terraria, Valheim, and now even Palworld has gotten its first mods that drive new content to the game, which anyone could explore.
With the ownership and customisation you give to players and communities, they will have to host their servers on their computers, or at game server providers. You as game developer, can take a step back and not watch all money go to waste for official server hosting yourself. At the end of the day, doing official server hosting yourself is expensive and it won't get any cheaper soon. You as developer, can focus on what is truly important to you; improving and adding new content to the game you love.
Low latency for all players
By distributing server locations among players, a network of decentralized game servers emerges, strategically positioned across various regions worldwide. This distributed approach ensures low latency for all players, irrespective of their geographic location. By hosting game servers closer to players' physical locations, data travels shorter distances, reducing the time it takes for information to be transmitted between the player and the server. Consequently, this minimizes latency and ensures a smoother, more responsive gaming experience for everyone involved, regardless of where they reside on the globe.
Conclusion
Player-Owned Game Servers is a powerful tool for gamers and communities to take ownership within a game. With the highlight on customization, community building, and user-generated content, POGS offer players and communities new opportunities for creativity, collaboration, and connection within games.
