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"The only reason WoW is preserved for the future at all with third party vanilla servers is because during the beta they made a mistake and leaked a ton of debugging info and world data early on. Ideally (from the company's perspective), we wouldn't even had that and one of the biggest blockbuster MMOs in history would simply be lost"

I'll disagree with this one right here. I've been part of the wow emulation community at its very early stages and it was in fact some inside info that a few people got. (Angry employees etc you name it) The earliest wow emulator is from late vanilla. The world data also exist on the client side making its easier to use them. Blizzard has found more ways of countering decrypting actual packets from the server to the client but of course as always at some point the c3-c4 packet algorithms are leaked by an unknown source.

Yeah, I think my memory may be inaccurate / hazy since at this point, it's been almost 13 (!!) years. Boy, I feel old now.

I think I was referring to: http://www.eqemulator.org/forums/archive/index.php/t-11175.h... and similar. So not even an emulator, just a leaked, crippled version of the game earlier on. Thanks for the correction.

The irony is that a lot of games before the era of centralisation have active preservation communities and will probably live on - but a lot of newer games likely won't, for the reasons you described.

I think it's very likely people will still play Tetris, Final Fantasy IV and Star Craft in 50 years. Star Craft II and Final Fantasy XV? Not so much.

Exactly right, we're looking at a hole in modern video game archival history with the way the industry models their games these days. The older games aren't nearly as hard to preserve.

And that's just single-player games. Will MMORPGs like Final Fantasy XIV still be playable?

Life, uh, finds a way. As long as you have talented people that love a game, they will find some way to preserve it. Even though Blizzard is still running Battle.net to this day (bless them for that) -- people have created spin-off servers for Starcraft by analyzing the netcode and mimicking the servers:

https://freeablo.org/ (diablo)

https://shieldbattery.net/splash (starcraft broodwar)

http://www.openwow.com/ (world of warcraft)

If Blizzard ever shut down battle.net 2.0 there will be a group of people putting their heads together to mimic the server. Or, if needed, recreate the entire game engine from decompiled code or scratch. Look at OpenRA and OpenBW for these examples:

http://www.openra.net/about/

http://www.openbw.com/

And if that's not good enough, game preservation might become a new industry just like art preservation. We already have GoG releasing classic titles by working with publishers and digital rights holders to re-release classic games; this model can be extended to those "black box" games where the server code is saved in a repository for years but never released until someone like GoG comes along and revives the game the legal way:

https://www.gog.com/

So, if a game is loved by enough people it will live on.

The appeal is obvious though. These games are actually impossible to pirate.

I feel any game is possible to pirate given enough resources. However, point taken, there's definitely a certain drop off point where the resources required to do it aren't very likely to be marshaled when it becomes sufficiently prohibitive.

It's preferable to a company trying to squeeze all the profits possible out of their games, but certainly not for preserving gaming history many years later when profits aren't much of a factor.

I mean, I guess it's possible to reverse engineer and implement the entire server side. But it wouldn't really be different from implementing a clone of a game as a way of "pirating" it at that point.

Not sure if there's a game that does this already but if I ever made an MMO, I'd try a business model of open source server and client and compete on paid hosting. Minecraft sort of has that going with realms but closed source and centralized accounts. Both of those have been circumvented with the Java code but the C++ based version is the future and the Java code with eventual get feature freeze.

Edit: Now that I think about it, this is pretty much the same as the current business model for many development platforms, open source tools and cross platform support, compete on hosting.

Isn't the hosting the commodity part of the equation and the creation of the game where the valuable IP is?

Anyone can run a server for TF2. In fact, official servers for it are a new thing.

Yes. And if they can patch out the connecting to steam requirement for TF2, it can be preserved even if Steam dies eventually.

Unfortunately for Overwatch, a battle.net account / connection and their centralized servers makes it a far harder task. They've moved toward a model where the reverse engineering and ingenuity involved to get it to work outside of their control is increasingly prohibitive.

These things often take volunteers hundreds of hours to figure out and are illegal according to terms of service agreements (followed by lawsuits no less--if you look into "bnetd" and "fsgs" starcraft alt servers, and WoW bots, Blizzard is not afraid to go this route). If it's just too much work for said hackers, it likely will not get done, especially if legal action against the volunteers is a probability.

I like to imagine that if Battle.net ever died, they would release a patch for overwatch that would remove the battle.net connectivity.

That's one strong imagination.

Never said it was likely, just hoped for.

I like to imagine good things too, but I suspect if that happened it would be because company would be in bankruptcy proceedings. The trustee appointed will have a mandate to extract the most money from the carcass of the company, and arranging for work to be done to release a DRM-free patch is definitely not part of that, and I doubt he could legally do it even if he wanted to.

There is also quite some history showing that DRM-content providers do go under, and people do lose access to their "purchased" (rented) items.

I think you're right: Too often, people underestimate the power of creditors in industry. If there's any potentially valuable IP, no matter how outdated, it becomes increasingly unlikely older releases will be supported or patched. I suspect you're also correct regarding the legal issues: In many cases, licensing agreements were made between the now defunct company, and others, which may or may not carry over. Often, even the licensors themselves may have been acquired, and discovering who actually owns what becomes expensive or prohibitive. Worse, on rare occasion, the parties involved are dead.

Nevertheless, there are sometimes happy endings, and I'm reminded of this comment [1] by Don Hopkins just over a week ago highlighting the importance of equal parts archivists' duties, detective work, and persistence (very much worth reading) with a healthy dose of luck. Unfortunately, this is probably more an exception than the rule, though older/niche games are perhaps more likely to survive through such efforts than popular ones (Carmageddon's resurrection with the new Stainless comes to mind) given that there's less at stake.

If a much more popular franchise goes belly-up, I would be exceedingly surprised if independently playable versions were ever released. More likely, you'll see new installments based on the same IP with the same shortcomings, thus repeating the cycle. Tribes is a curious, if complicated example (failure, resurrection, failure, resurrection), but it's also a case where an interested third party was able to circumvent the authentication server code (Tribes 2 via TribesNext).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13693675

How many of these newer games though, frankly deserve to be kept around? Most of them are just the nth iteration of the original which made their name, and bring little or nothing to the table. If .1% of today's games survive, you'll have a really good idea about the other 99.8% with .1% left to surprise you.

That is irrelevant. "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder". Everything should be preserved. And given that games are a digital medium, it's probably one of the easiest to preserve.

"Everything should be preserved."

In what perfect world? In the real world, triage is a thing.

Except that doesn't really apply here. If these servers weren't black-boxed, it'd be trivial to preserve them.

But I understand why companies don't want this, however. Why would you want people playing your game for free on private servers instead of your own?

Or, once they stop making money on a game, why would they want people playing it for free instead of playing their new games?

Because newer games are usually better in every way except one: nostalgia. Even though diablo 3 is available the only game I play regularly is diablo 2 despite its horrible graphics, simply because it brings back fond memories of childhood.

Well D3 was terrible at release, so I disagree. Ok game, but you where zoomed in way to much.

I finally bought the ultra Komplete GOTY whateverthefuckedition on sale for about $20. Now that it's a complete game, patched and fixed, I'm really enjoying it for that price point.

Frankly, that is the secret to modern gaming... wait.

> In what perfect world? In the real world, triage is a thing.

And SD cards pretty come come in cracker jack boxes.

Storage is cheap. :)

You still have to pay... and who's going to do that? I don't care about saving most of today's game for posterity, and most of the more notable and unique examples are not tied to something like Battlenet.

The last company I would worry about servers going away is Blizzard. People are still playing the first Starcraft and Diablo 1 and 2. How many years later is that? WoW has been around forever as well. All of their "worlds" are lasting.

I wonder what'll happen with app store, even if the developer doesn't use centralized servers.

From what I understand, old unupdated games will soon be removed from app store and it won't even be possible to download them?