Company gets to keep their loyal old fan base happy

That's the thing for most games --- the loyal old fan base is not playing. The virtual worlds are empty, the social hubs are ghost towns, matchmaking doesn't work because there is only one player online.

Even in games that are still very active like World of Warcraft, there are many remote zones, especially those zones for beginners and from early expansions, that are completely devoid of other humans. Once-bustling digital cities are vacant. Searches for other players come up empty.

There's already tons of games lost over time, that didn't have any online functionality. Simply games that weren't well received/didn't sell well/were only sold locally.

I've got a bunch of games that were made by local developers way back, and distrubuted on floppies only locally at computer shows. I just checked a few, and there's absolutely no record of them online.

others I see on squakenet.com, but with no downloads available, so they're effectively lost, but with a record of their existence..

As frob points out -- part of the problem is down to how the game design interacts with a dwindling player base; a remaining base which, in particular, will skew towards very experienced and high-level players.

Another problem for MMOs in particular is that they are often architecturally-skewed toward data-centers. Its typical that an MMO's instance servers rely on a very fast connection to a relational database -- sometimes a particular flavor of database who's minimal licensing terms might be very expensive. It can be a lot of work to port to a free database and to commodity architectures in general.

On the plus side, cloud computing and the steady march of progress makes costs go drastically down over time, generally speaking. For example, I can spin up a virtual private server and easily run 1 or 2 good-sized dedicated quake 3 Arena servers for only $5/mo (a fully-occupied 16-player server running 24/7 eats about 1 TB/mo transfer -- you could probably do 1 game of 24 or 2 games of 12 with average occupancy; transfer is often the limiting factor here, and overage could get expensive). I read recently that Titanfall's cloud servers are similarly slim -- Applying the same kind of attention to optimization that game developers regularly employ, they only need a single fast core (2 for very large games) and a gigabyte or two of RAM -- That's something you can run for $10 or $15 per month (plus, again, possible bandwidth overage). And most of those services bill hourly, allowing for very cheap infrastructure during development and testing, and potential to scale up or down as needed with great agility.

That's the thing for most games --- the loyal old fan base is not playing. The virtual worlds are empty, the social hubs are ghost towns, matchmaking doesn't work because there is only one player online.

Even in games that are still very active like World of Warcraft, there are many remote zones, especially those zones for beginners and from early expansions, that are completely devoid of other humans. Once-bustling digital cities are vacant. Searches for other players come up empty.

Yeah, but 'keeping them happy' doesn't mean they ARE playing. People don't like choices being taken away from them or having things change. I have a few games where it really rather annoyed me when the multiplayer support was pulled. I hadn't played a game of Outpost 2 in at least a year or more when Sierra pulled the plug on its multiplayer support, but it would still have made me happier as a customer to know that 'something' was officially done for if I ever wanted to fire it up and have a game or two with some friends from way back when.

Even in games that are still very active like World of Warcraft, there are many remote zones, especially those zones for beginners and from early expansions, that are completely devoid of other humans. Once-bustling digital cities are vacant. Searches for other players come up empty.

Even new releases in smaller countries suffer this :lol:
Playing SWBF in Australia on PC 3 months after release, I can sit on matchmaking screen for half an hour and still be waiting for it to put me in a match. I've only got to experience 2 of it's game modes because the matchmaking system is completely broken when facing such small player numbers. For example, a game can only start if 20+ people are in the queue, but you must queue for one game-mode only... So people get in one queue, see that it's only got two people in it, then go to the next mode, repeat. You might have 20 people queuing total, but for different modes. Also, queueing is first-in-last-out. If you've recently joined a queue, it gives you the option of replacing a player who's just left a full match, but it stops giving this option to people who stay in one queue instead of constantly re-queuing.
I'm sure this works fine if there's thousands in the queue, but if it's failing after 3 months, how's it going to work in 10 years...

It's also true of pretty much every multiplayer indie game that releases on Steam. Thankfully, a great number also release the private server package, so at least you can fire up among friends, but a significant percentage don't, and once the faithful player base drains off after a few months, the game is as good as dead.

That's the thing for most games --- the loyal old fan base is not playing. The virtual worlds are empty, the social hubs are ghost towns, matchmaking doesn't work because there is only one player online.

Even in games that are still very active like World of Warcraft, there are many remote zones, especially those zones for beginners and from early expansions, that are completely devoid of other humans. Once-bustling digital cities are vacant. Searches for other players come up empty.

Yeah, but 'keeping them happy' doesn't mean they ARE playing. People don't like choices being taken away from them or having things change. I have a few games where it really rather annoyed me when the multiplayer support was pulled. I hadn't played a game of Outpost 2 in at least a year or more when Sierra pulled the plug on its multiplayer support, but it would still have made me happier as a customer to know that 'something' was officially done for if I ever wanted to fire it up and have a game or two with some friends from way back when.

So having a "ghost town" server where you could log on once in a year to just have your fond old memories of a game bristling with live tainted by the empty tomb it has become thanks to almost no-one being online anymore? Would that really make you happy? Would you visit the places that meant something to you 10 years ago like you would visit the grave of a long dead family member, alone, just to remember?

Or would you fire up the game hoping it would be like you remembered it from 10 years ago, be disappointed, waste way too much time looking for players and that feeling of awe and wonders from 10 years ago, and quit dissatisfied in the end?

I think we all do from time to time crave to relive some of our old favorites... its easy with single player games, especially old console titles. Many of the games you fire up just to be disappointed by how bad the game actually aged... or maybe it was bad all along, you just remembered it differently. Some aged well and are still fun to play (hence my multiyear project of playing through my JRPG collection in my lunch breaks, and fill the gaps in the collection whenever a cartridge I don't own yet becomes available).

As frob points out, some game just don't lend itself to such nostalgic consumation though. After 10 years, it will be hard to get a population to an MMO that will make it able to relive its original intended state. MMO's live and die by the number of people online.

I wasn't really that impressed by WoW when it came out, and never tried it until some longtime friends finally got me to try in 2011. It was better than I thought and worse at the same time... cannot say I was dissapointed with, just could bring myself to play it enough to pay the sub, so I stopped playing after a month.

But the point is, I did start at zero where most of the population was doing there end game thingy. Apart from my friends starting new characters, I could have played a singleplayer game. The other players I met where scarce and busy getting into the end game action... and as a singleplayer game, WoW fails hard.

So while I do see that some multiplayer games could lead a long and happy life on private servers as long as there is a community dedicated enough to pay for it, and actually do the legwork, many MMOs are just not made to be played by a small community... without extensive changes, they will never be able to live up to their old glory this way.

So having a "ghost town" server where you could log on once in a year to just have your fond old memories of a game bristling with live tainted by the empty tomb it has become thanks to almost no-one being online anymore? Would that really make you happy? Would you visit the places that meant something to you 10 years ago like you would visit the grave of a long dead family member, alone, just to remember?

Sure, why not? Plan weekend retro gaming events with a large group, and have everyone log on to a specific old game to enjoy a blast from the past. One of my co-workers recently did a MUD event not long ago, and actually managed to crash the server when they had more connections than the software could handle, which they never actually achieved in the decade or so the game was up and running as a full time thing people played on a regular basis.

Servers wouldn't even need to be 'up' 24/7 for a historical preservation, but rather it could easily be random retro events that come up every now and then. Kind of like real world museums: Most have vast collections in storage and only actively display a few things at a time. Some 'main attraction' stuff stays out full time for decades, but smaller parts get swapped out for new displays on a rotating basis. In the game world this too could work well. Sure I might not be able to jump up and play whenever I want, but "The game might come back for a week or a month at some point" is a lot better sounding than "The game isn't profitable, and we're flicking the switch on it, and it is turning off forever."

technically it is maybe possible to host the game server for a game after its lifetime with virtually no direct cost, however, maybe hosting your older game server would decrase the number of the users who actually wish to buy your newer game, becouse they are gaming on your old server with the game they buyd 10 years before. this could be a very important issue, if your older and newer game is very identical.

If we are going to go down the track of games as art, we need to start a preservation effort now

The smithonian started this a few years ago. I wonder how it's going. I don't live in the states, so I haven't seen it, but it's a cool idea