As much as this seems like an obvious ask now, I feel like there’s a lot of tightly pressed popular indie games now where this would be impractical, and require constant maintenance to have a “private server” version ready for the game’s end of life.
Take Helldivers 2. Their lobby system (the ship) is wrapped up around this online representation of the global war effort. Sure, there’s ways to change the game for a simplification with a Join Server By IP system, but that’s UI development you’d have to do while the studio still has money to do it - before some decline towards expiration. Often, it would have to somehow elevate priority above other bugfixes and expectations that are taking charge during the popular phase, especially since it will involve the core networking problems.
So, like anyone, I want this; I found Knockout City fun and it sucks we don’t have it anymore. But realistically, I also understand how this situation can happen.
If people can run pirate MMO servers, then they can run private Helldivers 2 servers. It’s very conveniently impractical for private servers to be distributed when the game has microtransaction revenue streams, because private servers would inevitably provide opportunities to sidestep them. They’d still make plenty of money though, because most people would choose to play on official servers regardless, but they see it as a threat to their business model, which is why they don’t do it.
It still stands in the way of preservation, and it’s not good enough to release private servers after the game is sunset, because there’s no guarantee while the game is still supported that it’s going to happen to keep the game alive. Plus, even in a best case scenario, private servers are necessary to get around server downtime, DDOS attacks, queues when the servers are at capacity, or just the ability to play with some friends if you’re in a cabin in the woods.
That’s true; I tend to think of a private server hosting a single game session of 1-4 players, but I haven’t interacted with private reimplementing of large community interactions. Generally, the commercial implementation would involve many connected servers, so it’s perhaps a bit more complicated than giving a separate address in a launcher option, but becomes less of an excuse overall.
That said, while the game is alive and well, the only motivating reason for that option’s existence is to support piracy of their game. Depending on how much they care, it’s something they’d have to keep under wraps in a development folder until the day the game dies out.
You may as well say the same thing about DRM-free games then, since this is effectively just a gimmick to disguise DRM. You don’t provide the server to endorse piracy. You do it because anything less is giving your customer an inferior product. Even if the preservation aspect of this didn’t upset me, I’d still have a hard time buying a game like Helldivers 2 because it comes across as phenomenally poor value compared to buying a game that’s built to last.
This should be a legal requirement, imo. It’s unreasonable for them to sell a game to people, and then make it impossible to play because they weren’t making enough anymore. That’s like making a movie unwatchable because dvd sales dropped
I would use the term “licensing” rather than leasing. A video rental store “leases” the license.
But the point is, they’re selling you a license to play the game, and then at some point after sale, without you knowing when or why, they rescind the license without compensating you. Any reasonable person would think that purchasing a game means a license to play it indefinitely, especially if you received some kind of binary in exchange for money at the point of sale.
It’s the difference between Uber offering a subscription model, but then a year later suddenly saying they don’t offer it anymore, vs Tesla selling you a car, but a year later disabling features on it, saying, “you were merely licensing/leasing those features”.
I’ve heard this argument thrown out before but my issue is always that you have a permanently declining user base since you can’t buy more copies. This is a band aid delaying the inevitable. It will not allow a game like this to live forever.
There’s one thing, however, that Harrison recommends studios do above all others when sunsetting a live service game: let players keep playing the game on their own servers. Before shutting down Knockout City, Velan released the game as a standalone Windows executable with private server support. It’s still available to download.
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