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Comment by andyjohnson0 | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if there is a business opportunity here: operating licence servers for legacy games. It would obviously require the approval of the game publisher, and some kind of subscription-based business model. I have no idea if that would work, but I suspect that there is a fair-sized subset of the gamer community that would be prepared to pay a small recurring fee to keep a much loved game alive. Thoughts?

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Nope. Game companies want to end those games so they can sell the same engine or mechanics but repackaged by an army of asset artists.

And sell an eventual remaster.

I'm sure you're right - its hard to see any significant upside for the original publisher. I'm not a gamer myself and it was just an idle thought.

Heard from inside source through a friend, take with a grain of salt, but that particular server was running ancient software (think very obsolete windows server version) and would have a peak of less than 10 concurrent users, worldwide. I don't think there is a business case to make here.

It's a maintenance nightmare. Poor, rushed together server components. Noone still around the company that still knows how it was built. No automated tests whatsoever, so any code changes or recompile with newer libs would require important QA efforts..

I'm not saying this justify anything. It's still very bad business practice and consumers are right to be mad. Kinda was predictable though, and game publishers should have a clear EOL policy when selling a game.

Doubt it. Steam offers this service to game developers for free[1], and some older games have switched over to them successfully after their old servers shut down (Company of Heroes is one example I can think of off the top of my head).

[1]- (paid for probably by the usual cut they take from selling games through their service)

GOG's original business model was basically selling legacy games with copy protection patched out and added patches for compatibility and localization. In the beginning CD Project/GOG did that through reverse engineering, so for publishers it was free revenue for old projects.

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