No servers but Nitrado for 7 years?

[contingency7]

https://mailwizz.survivalservers.com/index.php/campaigns/jh601zrdlx460/web-version/kb024o43zg045

A letter to our ARK fans:

Let's talk about the dinosaur in the room: the ARK: Survival Ascended server hosting monopoly.

A few months ago, we received word from within the ARK community about a deal made between Marbis (the company who owns Nitrado) and Wildcard/Snail Games on a fully closed loop exclusivity for all multiplayer servers for a period of 7 years - that includes ARK: Survival Ascended launch as well as ARK 2. When we found out about this news, we immediately contacted our connections within ARK as we felt betrayed and blindsighted by the lack of communication prior. Up until then, we had been hosting ARK in official and unofficial capacity without any "strings attached" agreements for official ARK tournaments, Playstation servers, and our unofficial PC servers. Our pleas were met with stonewalling even with an offer to group together countless small businesss game server providers to match the funds needed to pay for the exorbanant server hosting debt to Nitrado that Wildcard/Snail Games was responsible for.

We've always preached the golden rule for multiplayer sandbox games: a full release of dedicated server files available to the community without any back door deals or exclusivity agreements. Please read below a recent example of how G Portal targeted and manipulated the developers of a game called Frozen Flame into full exclusivity.



It's extremely saddening the impact these decisions have on the community as a whole and the 100s of small businesses who have made ARK their business - selling and helping 100,000s of ARK server owners launch and maintain their servers. The private market has many options, server hosting locations, and price points in a healthy competitive environment for the large majority of eager players to create their own private world for their friends and family to plan on. These types of deals rip that away and much worse, stifle innovation, discourage people to play these games, and can kill games at launch. We've seen these deals go south on countless titles that have had rough/poor launches - Conan Exiles (with a partnership with Ping Perfect and later G-Portal), SCUM (with an exclusivity with G Portal), Last Oasis (completely botched launch), and many more. These games and their communities have all been negatively impacted by behind door deals.

We don't stand for this and encourage Wildcard/Snail Games to make the right decision and force Nitrado to open up the server files for ARK: Survival Ascended without limitation immediately. Sign the petition!

[JackalopeHunter]

I for one am against this type of monopoly. We are seeing it more and more and had I known would not have purchased ASA. Talk about a big FU to all the private server hosts out there.

[The_Feet]

SAME BUSINESS model the scmubags over at SCUM did to their playerbase. 'Tis why i flipped SCUM the bird and moved on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1Ip6_U2lIo

[Flavalicious]

Scummy company makes another scummy business decision. More shocking news at 10pm 😅

[Looniper]

The patch notes say this was changed.
Private/Dedicated servers can be run by all of us now.

So Nitrado can't charge you premium on a game server that takes 12 gigs of ram just to operate.
Oh look! Same patch note, with the release of the exclusivity to Nitrado... they Somehow cut the RAM usage in half..

I'm sure there wasn't an agreement in place that got Nitrado double server fees by eating double the actually needed RAM, that simply didn't need to exist once anyone could host the servers..... surely not.
These companies don't have a history of that sort of thing, after all.

[retsam1]

Originally posted by contingency7:

https://mailwizz.survivalservers.com/index.php/campaigns/jh601zrdlx460/web-version/kb024o43zg045

A letter to our ARK fans:

Let's talk about the dinosaur in the room: the ARK: Survival Ascended server hosting monopoly.

A few months ago, we received word from within the ARK community about a deal made between Marbis (the company who owns Nitrado) and Wildcard/Snail Games on a fully closed loop exclusivity for all multiplayer servers for a period of 7 years - that includes ARK: Survival Ascended launch as well as ARK 2. When we found out about this news, we immediately contacted our connections within ARK as we felt betrayed and blindsighted by the lack of communication prior. Up until then, we had been hosting ARK in official and unofficial capacity without any "strings attached" agreements for official ARK tournaments, Playstation servers, and our unofficial PC servers. Our pleas were met with stonewalling even with an offer to group together countless small businesss game server providers to match the funds needed to pay for the exorbanant server hosting debt to Nitrado that Wildcard/Snail Games was responsible for.

We've always preached the golden rule for multiplayer sandbox games: a full release of dedicated server files available to the community without any back door deals or exclusivity agreements. Please read below a recent example of how G Portal targeted and manipulated the developers of a game called Frozen Flame into full exclusivity.



It's extremely saddening the impact these decisions have on the community as a whole and the 100s of small businesses who have made ARK their business - selling and helping 100,000s of ARK server owners launch and maintain their servers. The private market has many options, server hosting locations, and price points in a healthy competitive environment for the large majority of eager players to create their own private world for their friends and family to plan on. These types of deals rip that away and much worse, stifle innovation, discourage people to play these games, and can kill games at launch. We've seen these deals go south on countless titles that have had rough/poor launches - Conan Exiles (with a partnership with Ping Perfect and later G-Portal), SCUM (with an exclusivity with G Portal), Last Oasis (completely botched launch), and many more. These games and their communities have all been negatively impacted by behind door deals.

We don't stand for this and encourage Wildcard/Snail Games to make the right decision and force Nitrado to open up the server files for ARK: Survival Ascended without limitation immediately. Sign the petition!

The situation is actually worse than this. And potentially catastrophically worse.

1. The agreement of 7 years is true but can be extended longer if chosen.

2. After 3 years in the agreement, Snail games is allowed to accept bids from other hosting services. HOWEVER the clause in the marbis contract states that the bids must -match- the conditions that marbis has made an agreement with Snail for. That potentially means that even if a bid is accepted, the -same- issues of monopolization could occur and worse be extended for longer (due to the bid agreement terminating the nitrado agreement) the exclusivity for more than 7 years.

3. This is the potentially even more catastrophic one: Clause 6.2 of the agreement states that if ASA doesn't globally launch by october 31st, Nitrado would be give sole exclusivity to server hosting for Ark Survival Evolved as well. That'd affect 60k+ servers out there if the same shenanigans happening with ASA are equally implemented for ASE.

People though will say, "well it launched". But the reason why this is of concern is that the language of the agreement is ambiguous. It could be interpreted ---just--- as ambiguously as the language that caused the current ASA exclusivity antics preventing/severely limiting players with their ASA server running.

https://investor.snail.com/node/7086/html


Its a concern, may not happen, but until we see how november unfolds, its something certainly to be watchful of.

[TheBeesHeez]

Originally posted by retsam1:

Originally posted by contingency7:

https://mailwizz.survivalservers.com/index.php/campaigns/jh601zrdlx460/web-version/kb024o43zg045

A letter to our ARK fans:

Let's talk about the dinosaur in the room: the ARK: Survival Ascended server hosting monopoly.

A few months ago, we received word from within the ARK community about a deal made between Marbis (the company who owns Nitrado) and Wildcard/Snail Games on a fully closed loop exclusivity for all multiplayer servers for a period of 7 years - that includes ARK: Survival Ascended launch as well as ARK 2. When we found out about this news, we immediately contacted our connections within ARK as we felt betrayed and blindsighted by the lack of communication prior. Up until then, we had been hosting ARK in official and unofficial capacity without any "strings attached" agreements for official ARK tournaments, Playstation servers, and our unofficial PC servers. Our pleas were met with stonewalling even with an offer to group together countless small businesss game server providers to match the funds needed to pay for the exorbanant server hosting debt to Nitrado that Wildcard/Snail Games was responsible for.

We've always preached the golden rule for multiplayer sandbox games: a full release of dedicated server files available to the community without any back door deals or exclusivity agreements. Please read below a recent example of how G Portal targeted and manipulated the developers of a game called Frozen Flame into full exclusivity.



It's extremely saddening the impact these decisions have on the community as a whole and the 100s of small businesses who have made ARK their business - selling and helping 100,000s of ARK server owners launch and maintain their servers. The private market has many options, server hosting locations, and price points in a healthy competitive environment for the large majority of eager players to create their own private world for their friends and family to plan on. These types of deals rip that away and much worse, stifle innovation, discourage people to play these games, and can kill games at launch. We've seen these deals go south on countless titles that have had rough/poor launches - Conan Exiles (with a partnership with Ping Perfect and later G-Portal), SCUM (with an exclusivity with G Portal), Last Oasis (completely botched launch), and many more. These games and their communities have all been negatively impacted by behind door deals.

We don't stand for this and encourage Wildcard/Snail Games to make the right decision and force Nitrado to open up the server files for ARK: Survival Ascended without limitation immediately. Sign the petition!

The situation is actually worse than this. And potentially catastrophically worse.

1. The agreement of 7 years is true but can be extended longer if chosen.

2. After 3 years in the agreement, Snail games is allowed to accept bids from other hosting services. HOWEVER the clause in the marbis contract states that the bids must -match- the conditions that marbis has made an agreement with Snail for. That potentially means that even if a bid is accepted, the -same- issues of monopolization could occur and worse be extended for longer (due to the bid agreement terminating the nitrado agreement) the exclusivity for more than 7 years.

3. This is the potentially even more catastrophic one: Clause 6.2 of the agreement states that if ASA doesn't globally launch by october 31st, Nitrado would be give sole exclusivity to server hosting for Ark Survival Evolved as well. That'd affect 60k+ servers out there if the same shenanigans happening with ASA are equally implemented for ASE.

People though will say, "well it launched". But the reason why this is of concern is that the language of the agreement is ambiguous. It could be interpreted ---just--- as ambiguously as the language that caused the current ASA exclusivity antics preventing/severely limiting players with their ASA server running.

https://investor.snail.com/node/7086/html


Its a concern, may not happen, but until we see how november unfolds, its something certainly to be watchful of.

The game launched globally on the PC platform - as per the wording in the contract. They have fulfilled that criteria of the contract, nothing ambiguous about it.

[Znogris]

Originally posted by Looniper:

The patch notes say this was changed.
Private/Dedicated servers can be run by all of us now.

So Nitrado can't charge you premium on a game server that takes 12 gigs of ram just to operate.
Oh look! Same patch note, with the release of the exclusivity to Nitrado... they Somehow cut the RAM usage in half..

I'm sure there wasn't an agreement in place that got Nitrado double server fees by eating double the actually needed RAM, that simply didn't need to exist once anyone could host the servers..... surely not.
These companies don't have a history of that sort of thing, after all.

ive been running a dedi all night nice try though... its ALWAYS been available if you just tried

[retsam1]

Originally posted by TheBeesHeez:

ive been running a dedi all night nice try though... its ALWAYS been available if you just tried

And you're restricted to 1 map per steam account only, did you read about that yet? So come next maps, you're unable to run them as a cluster....

[Feynt]

Originally posted by retsam1:

And you're restricted to 1 map per steam account only, did you read about that yet? So come next maps, you're unable to run them as a cluster....

Actually <adjusts glasses>

They've just released anonymous access to the server, so you can download and set up as many servers as you want across multiple VMs if necessary. But to improve matters, within 24 hours of release, someone had shown pictures of their server running multiple instances of the previous, "1 server per account", version on the same VM. So the DRM is weak sauce and nothing of value was lost. It has just been a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ obtuse road to this point so far.

[Jyandalf]

v25.18 - 10/27/2023 - Minor version for servers and clients

Steam DRM has been disabled for the ARK: Survival Ascended Dedicated Server & Anonymous Depot has been made available
Reduced Server RAM usage by approximately 6GB

About time they fixed that issue. Now I wonder if I can refund nitrado

[KAObserver]

I'm sure they got paid a ton of money for that, I personally can't really blame them. It's not like Nitrado doesn't have a history of running awesome servers. Bugs aside with the base game, I've personally had dozens of servers with them.

[Znogris]

Originally posted by retsam1:

Originally posted by TheBeesHeez:

ive been running a dedi all night nice try though... its ALWAYS been available if you just tried

And you're restricted to 1 map per steam account only, did you read about that yet? So come next maps, you're unable to run them as a cluster....

And again wrong as they just walked that back and removed the DRM but keep hating and spreading lies all good in my Dedicated Hood!

[Caduryn]

Originally posted by Znogris:

Originally posted by retsam1:

And you're restricted to 1 map per steam account only, did you read about that yet? So come next maps, you're unable to run them as a cluster....

And again wrong as they just walked that back and removed the DRM but keep hating and spreading lies all good in my Dedicated Hood!

Tbh he posted it before the Patch dropped

[Looniper]

Originally posted by Feynt:

Actually <adjusts glasses>

They've just released anonymous access to the server,

Which they announced in response to the outcry from us about the situation.

As to those who were able to get multiple working, they had to go through hoops that risked their Steam account, and directly violated the terms of service, but yeah, they were able.

..
I'm still laughing at the fact that they somehow magically cut the RAM requirement by 50% in the patch that announced that Nitrado (who was up-charging 50% to host ASA because of the memory requirement) lost exclusivity.

[RoadDog]

if ppl let scammers scam and dont do anything or even dont say anything. nothing will change. ppl forgot who have more power! WE THE GAMER not some scamm companys ! GET IT ALLREADY !