We've all been there right? You paid for a game, it required an active internet connection and a couple of years later the publisher decided they're done with it and shut it down leaving you with a broken game. Annoying.
Wanna know how to make that irrelevant? Make the server files available from the start. Wanna play with just your friends? Host a server. Wanna play with a dedicated group that actually bans cheaters effectively? Join a clan. Then, when the sequel comes out, who cares if the server tech is already known, because we can just host our own and collectively oust the cheaters ourselves. It’s funny because when multiplayer is handled this way, it stays active for decades. Look at the community for the old Battlefield’s, SW Battlefront’s, Call of Duty’s, Unreal Tournament’s, Quake’s, etc etc etc. They’re small, but they’re all still active and not chock full of hackers because they’re community led and community maintained. That’s a hell of a lot more consistent and reliable than trusting the studio to develop and maintain the server tech, and squash cheating long term. Eventually that system will always fail (look at every old CoD on console, where you can’t run your own servers. It’s basically a coin flip whether you end up in a game with a hacker, and I guarantee the devs will never do anything about it).
That doesn’t make the point irrelevant, it makes it even more likely to happen. Most of us don’t want to play on shitty, self-hosted servers and I’ll gladly remove that option to have a more secure game server.
Hot take, but games don’t need to be active for decades. Everything dies eventually. After 10 years there’s no need to keep running the game servers.
Wanna know how to make that irrelevant? Make the server files available from the start. Wanna play with just your friends? Host a server. Wanna play with a dedicated group that actually bans cheaters effectively? Join a clan. Then, when the sequel comes out, who cares if the server tech is already known, because we can just host our own and collectively oust the cheaters ourselves. It’s funny because when multiplayer is handled this way, it stays active for decades. Look at the community for the old Battlefield’s, SW Battlefront’s, Call of Duty’s, Unreal Tournament’s, Quake’s, etc etc etc. They’re small, but they’re all still active and not chock full of hackers because they’re community led and community maintained. That’s a hell of a lot more consistent and reliable than trusting the studio to develop and maintain the server tech, and squash cheating long term. Eventually that system will always fail (look at every old CoD on console, where you can’t run your own servers. It’s basically a coin flip whether you end up in a game with a hacker, and I guarantee the devs will never do anything about it).
That doesn’t make the point irrelevant, it makes it even more likely to happen. Most of us don’t want to play on shitty, self-hosted servers and I’ll gladly remove that option to have a more secure game server.
Hot take, but games don’t need to be active for decades. Everything dies eventually. After 10 years there’s no need to keep running the game servers.