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Comment by TazeTSchnitzel | Hacker News Reader

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.

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 If there's any potentially valuable IP, no matter how outdated, it becomes increasingly unlikely older releases will be supported or patched.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

That's one strong imagination.

Never said it was likely, just hoped for.

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