Epic is turning off online services and servers for some older games | Hacker News Reader

Epic is turning off online services and servers for some older games

epicgames.com

308 pointsmariuz352 comments

Remember the days when the server component was included with the base game? Anyone could launch a server and play with friends and strangers online. I miss those days.

Now we get a company deciding it is not worth maintaining the infrastructure and an entire part of a game is gone forever.

It seems DRM is not the issue, and my comment was irrelevant.

~~You can only buy from DRM-free suppliers, like GOG.com.~~

Some of the games being shut down were/are also being sold on GOG: https://www.gog.com/en/game/unreal_tournament_2004_ece

Wow. I did not expect this. I apologize for my unresearched opinion.

The dedicated server is included in the game...

Some games from that are are on the list (e.g. UT) so I'm wondering what's going on there.

For those the service used for searching/listing the servers is being taken down. If you know the ip address of a server you can still play.

No need to remember IP addresses, we have DNS now ;-)

You have to wonder just how little hosting a lobby server must cost a company the size of epic. Collating a list of server IPs and names seems fairly trivial.

It probably has more to do with paying someone to keep it patched and running happily.

You can host your own game server in UT but you're still depending on Epic services for the server listings and license (CD key) validation.

Private servers were so much better than matchmaking in my opinion, there was a sense of community to the game and you would make friends. Now playing with randoms (all of them in their own private discord parties) feels like playing with NPCs.

whynotboth.jpeg

Team Fortress matchmaking will match you to their official servers, and sometimes even on third party servers. TF also has a server browser where you can select which third or first party servers to join. You can also join directly via IP, if the matchmaking service ever goes offline.

TF2 hasn't matched to 3rd party servers or allowed directly connecting to Valve servers in 6 years, since the introduction of a matchmaking service. They did, however, let a bot flood on official servers get so bad for so a few years that community servers took off and became popular again. It's only been this year that they finally started to effectively fight back against the bots, making casual usable again.

I have recently joined a modded server using matchmaking in the MvM mode, so either Valve allows that, or they run modded servers.

As far as botting goes, it's still not fixed. There was an obvious aimbotter named 'Vinesauce' that went about for 2 weeks getting kicked out of every match (and sometimes rejoining). I can't fathom having this little moderation/development on a game that still must be making millions per year.

Ah, fair enough, I generally don't play the MvM mode. Strange that they allow community servers for the matchmaking service on that after pulling it from the standard mode.

In my experience with Valve's servers in the eastern north american region, while the bots aren't completely gone, there are far fewer of them. Online discussion has indicated this isn't necessarily the case for non-NA regions.

I saw the vinesauce bots. It's my understanding that Valve bans any account kicked from an official server from rejoining that server for half an hour or so. Game harassers run small fleets of their bots. It's likely just another same-named bot joining rather than the same one rejoining, no?

As already mentioned, the matchmaking will not put you on community servers, and its existence has pretty much killed the majority of the community server scene. The game has more players than ever but less community servers than ever and most server mods that used to be very popular have been abandoned as a result.

I mean isnt that an indictment against the system by the community at large? People favor quick, normalized matchmaking. Having the option is amazing, but I dont think the general population really wants that, even if they would say they want the choice. Hard to justify the effort for the company then IMO.

Yes, most people are lazy and will always pick the most obvious and convenient option. No, that doesn't mean that the most obvious and convenient option is better.

The general population doesn't really "want" anything, they're satisfied with whatever they're fed and rarely think about it at all. Back in the server browser days you didn't hear constant complaints from people who wanted matchmaking instead, the switch to matchmaking happened because developers wanted to optimize engagement and increase their control over the game experience so they could monetize it more effectively, that's it.

Valve has always done it right IMO. CSGO is the same, you can start a server yourself or you can play on official servers.

Valve has always been community centered and it really shows in how all their development tools are pretty much available such as mapping tools, server tools etc.

With CSGO most of the matchmaking isn't even done in official servers, but with third party organizations like Faceit. If you want to be a professional CSGO player then you can't even rely on official servers. Nobody can go pro by playing official only when it comes to CSGO, you literally have to use third party services and their community servers.

What always pissed me off is when they didn't have private servers and in fact charged you a monthly fee for multiplayer and still made one of the players act as host, giving that person a massive latency advantage.

This is how Nintendo does online gaming currently.

Yeah, and you can't have two people independently playing Animal Crossing in one single household since you have to expose the Switch as a DMZ host with all ports on your provider's NAT IP forwarded to it. If your provider doesn't offer you a publicly routed IP (aka CGNAT), you're completely out of luck being the host for Animal Crossing.

And even worse, the ruddy thing doesn't even speak UPnP, so you have to do everything manually!

That's appalling. We've gone from running internal on local networks to forcing a potential security issue to allow for multiplayer.

My personal favorite is Microsoft discouraging local Minecraft servers with the rational that anyone could type anything on them! Who knows what you and the people you explicitly allow on your server might type!

But your switch example is worse, I think.

> My personal favorite is Microsoft discouraging local Minecraft servers with the rational that anyone could type anything on them! Who knows what you and the people you explicitly allow on your server might type!

I do understand where they're coming from, it's brand safety 101 - they don't want to risk the PR disaster from incompetent parents coming into their child's room and seeing n-bombs dropped into the Minecraft chat, leading to the parents shitstorming Microsoft for not moderating the chats when Microsoft for once isn't responsible for not moderating.

I think that legitimate fear is also why so many games removed self-hosting servers. I can remember from the UT2004 days that there were a lot of questionable things said in online chats... obviously sexism, but also lots and lots of racism and antisemitism.

> I do understand where they're coming from, it's brand safety 101 - they don't want to risk the PR disaster from incompetent parents coming into their child's room and seeing n-bombs dropped into the Minecraft chat

Maybe, I’m misunderstanding the initial statement, but if this were case, why ban local servers and not public, internet accessible servers? I promise there’s a much higher chance of that hypothetical happening on those.

Nintendo has required you to compromise your network security for online play since the DS and Wii. They often required you to set up "DMZ" and port forwarding and still wouldn't work, and the original DS could only do WEP wifi security.

> and the original DS could only do WEP wifi security.

That's excusable though. The DS was released in 2004, with WEP being deprecated only in the same year [1] and most consumer routers / APs of the time not getting updates to WPA anyway.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wired_Equivalent_Privacy

I know Nintendo includes this step in their hole-punching troubleshooting guide, but it's just not necessary. I've never met anybody who needed to do this to get their NAT traversal working, it's worked out of the box for every Switch game I've used for everybody I know. I'm sure there are people with weird or bizarre enough networks that standard STUN techniques don't work, but in my ~4 years of playing switch online games with my friends I've never met any of them.

you assume that Nintendo knows what they're doing, which is pretty bold if I may say.

STUN seems like an important technique to get right for their core business, and should boil down to sending a few UDP packets back and forth with a server. As long as they have a dozen engineers that have a clue, it seems reasonable to expect NAT traversal to just work on a switch in most setups.

I have an AVM FritzBox router with UPnP enabled, easily Germany's most-used and most-loved router model. Everything that uses UPnP works out of the box, but I've never seen the Switch create UPnP rules on its own.

I wonder what the fuck keeps Nintendo from operating their own STUN/TURN servers, at least for their own fucking games where I pay 35€ a year for their online service.

It was a sense of community borne of the shared trauma of getting those servers working.

"Have you opened the right ports on your router? Okay, what kind of router do you have? Who provides your internet? Okay, go to http://192.168..."

With Microsoft's DirectPlay, it was even worse, since only the lobby functioned in a client-server mode. Once the game started, it went full P2P and all players without port forwarding timed out.

I recall kali.net worked pretty good with Warcraft 2 way back in the day.

That's just taking bad parts of client-server and P2P modes.

Huh ? The only thing that does not work well is AoE on different windows versions. But this is excelence in action at Microsoft.

I get what you are saying, I remember the days struggling with firewalls and NAT, with tools like hamachi... but I think you were responding to the stage of online games that came after that - private servers you generally had hosted by a provider.

Best of both worlds, community run, unique so communities would form around servers, and can't be obsoleted.

Downside is matchmaking isn't as good, but oh well.

Communities often formed "leagues" you could compete in. You could join teams for team games and teams were ranked, had matches, competed. For more single oriented things you were your own matchmaker: choose the servers with more skilled players. Different skillsets naturally tended to gravitate to specific servers because they knew they could compete with other skilled players.

But you could find a group you enjoyed playing with and learn from them. I spent hundreds of hours in a UT2k4 server in Team Arena Mode warmup just practicing air rockets, shock combos, and flick lightning gun headshots. RIP UT2k4

Matchmaking feels like it's a really effective optimisation, but of the wrong metric. It's trying to match you up with players of the same skill level in a reasonably short amount of time. I think I place higher value on seeing a familiar set of players, and gain a greater sense of achievement from rising in skill within that set than from rising in global rank.

That's how I learnt that stuff, another reason I love it.

but also amazing things built by community

I remember the first time someone built a dedicated server for WC3 custom games (dota) that supported players reconnecting after a dc. it was mindblowing

This sounds like an Eternal September kind of deal.

That is, perhaps something some can enjoy nostalgia for but ultimately not sustainable.

The more modern version is what Minecraft is doing: give people a server they can run, but also offer your own server hosting service. Any seven year old can buy a Minecraft Realm for their friends (if they get their parent's credit card), but you can also rent an instance from a number of other providers if you want something with more freedom (and mods) but still some hand-holding and a dashboard, or host it on your own hardware if that's your thing.

That was fun though! Back when even the lowliest noob was editing a config file for one reason or another.

And that's when we all learned about Hamachi... and now here we all are with our tailnets instead.

Oh, how the times have changed...

And that's when I learned some real world IPs overlapped w/ Hamachi's and random sites/services stopped working! Wtf! Took me forever to figure it out.

Using the word 'trauma' to describe networking configuration is a huge exaggeration.

Lol I learned about 'screen' (like tmux) from running a server.

I would ssh in, start it up, login with the game, certify everything was working, then kill the ssh and be confused the game dropped.

The instructions mentioned screen but all it seemed to do was break the scroll buffer.

Eventually I learned. That was fun.

Same experience here, as a GTA SA:MP operator. That's probably how I started with commandline Linux

Very same. SA:MP servers taught me to run a Linux server and to make gamemodes in Pawn (C-like). I got my first C++ game development job a few years later, and it has been a successful career since. Thank you, SA:MP.

They are better in some regards, not others.

It doesn't get much easier to get quickly into a game with people ready to play than matchmaking usually. However, consistently playing with and against the same people is not as much a thing of course.

The upside of matchmaking hence is no scheduling and waiting, the downside is playing with whoever is online anywhere instead of a familiar group.

And there would be admins, that actually cared and banned cheaters.

Ohhhhh I miss those days.

Or the admin banned people that killed the admin.

Or people that were too good.

Or people that weren't good enough.

Or people that were trying too hard.

Or people that didn't give up when they were the last one on the team alive, making the admin wait longer for the next round to start.

Or people they just plainly didn't like.

Some of the hosted server admins were the og "powerhungry moderators" of today. Many seemed to be okay though.

And none of that was a problem because you could just leave and join another server. Meanwhile in modern games, if the admins (aka devs) don't like you, you get punished across the entire game.

Ahhhh, the days when you could get a certain weapon or loadout banned on the server for blowing away an admin one time too many. I kinda miss em.

Even public servers, where you log in because of the vibe /community and know who you're gonna find there.

Still getting those vibes with some games like Hell Let Loose but it's a dying breed!

Also you would have some shared values about how you enjoy playing the game from hardcore competitive to just goofing around, instead of throwing everyone into one or two queues and letting them rage at each other for ruining each other's fun.

You could also have multiple servers. We had a competitive and casual server.

You also wouldn't be forced into near guaranteed loss games to keep your W/L near 50/50. When one team was clearly overmatched compared to the other, the mods (you know, that other great reason to private servers) would turn on autobalance.

I always said Starcraft Broodwar Got big in spite of Blizzard. The way they locked Starcraft 2 made it clear it'll die sooner than later, now the moment they decide to plug the plug on the SC2 servers it's gone.

Is there no new bnetd?

None that I know of.

Agreed. I played TF2 for a while, found the No Heroes servers, liked the community, paid the $4/month for an account. You got guaranteed slots and they had over a dozen servers for different maps. They used their own sound effects so if someone was stacking kills or whatever it would play announcer or musical clips. It was fun and added a bit of excitement. Of course you get to know the regulars, say hello and even make friends and chat on Steam. I've lost contact with all of them but its okay, what we had during the time it existed was nice.

After a while, like everything else I moved on and didn't play for years. One day I decided to install TF2 for kicks and in its place was a different game. I played for maybe 15 minutes, lost interest and uninstalled the game. I wanted to see what happened to No Heroes and found that they had closed up shop a year prior. I was saddened and honestly very turned off to the game which is why it was uninstalled.

Its because of this loss of community that I have ZERO interest in modern multiplayer gaming. Now its all about ranking so its just an Ego/dopamine boosting machine. I just wanna play a game and have fun. I could care less about rankings, they mean nothing.

> They used their own sound effects so if someone was stacking kills or whatever it would play announcer or musical clips.

Whew, to me this was a strike against community servers. There was a period there where I couldn't join a single CS:Source game without a boatload of Simpsons sounds downloading preventing me from playing. I remember replacing the downloaded sounds with 0 byte files so I wouldn't need to hear them, but servers kept changing the paths so I'd have a bunch of redundant ones to clean up.

Thankfully in true Valve fashion they gave me an out, well after things had gone completely off the rails, with a command line (and later UI) option to block only sound downloads.

When WoW added cross realms to PvP battlegrounds it was an eye opener as to how good our realm's community was. Queue times got better, but the enjoyment dropped through the floor.

Meet someone that you worked well with in a battleground?

Oh well, you’ll never get to play with them again.

Killed all sense of community.

Cross Server dungeons/raids had the exact same consequence. In the early expansions you would play with people and get to know them. Sometimes you'd be levelling at a similar pace and cross paths on a few of the instances/quests. Maybe you'd get to chatting?

I know we recruited several people into a casual guild based on doing a few dungeons and getting on well with them. This was, ofc, before guild perks etc gamified that aspect in a shitty fashion.

Ofc you also got to learn people you never wanted to instance with again. Reputation mattered! As the Parent said, may as well be playing with NPCs.

Everybody talks about this part with rose colored glasses and nostalgia, conveniently forgetting trying to put a group together for a dungeon and spending upwards of an hour before you even start, not even knowing if your team members are good enough.

I certainly don't have the time to spend on that sort of thing, so if it weren't for things like dungeon finder I wouldn't even play the game anymore. Same with other games, if there wasn't any matchmaking I probably just wouldn't play.

> Queue times got better

I'll take the shorter queue times thank you very much. Waiting for half a day for one battle was not acceptable.

Nowadays, those private servers earn you a cease & desist letter. At least in the US.

A lot of private servers are actually reverse engineered from game binaries. It takes a lot of dedication and a lot of time in IDA/Ghidra to accomplish. You basically run your own copy of the backend and a patched client that connects to your backend.

When I was a teenager I remember playing on MapleStory private servers, and the backend was reverse engineered from the client. GTA private servers are also popular nowadays.

I don't really know where I'm going with this comment but you can always develop your own private server for a game if you have a team that's dedicated enough.

How do you do that when most of the calculations (and data required for those) happen on the backend?

In the case of MapleStory, in the past much of the game logic used to happen in the client side, that's why it was easier to reverse it (And create cheats for it).

In many other games that have private servers: If there was no codebase leak, basically guessing what you can't know. That's why many private servers doesn't work 1:1 when compared to the official servers, people just tried to make the calculations as close as possible after reversing it.

GTA 5 has private servers as well, and it has a similar fat client architecture. It also uses P2P for a lot of things which was probably helpful for the FiveM developers.

MapleStory was also kind of an interesting case because the developers were careless enough to include debug symbols with their binaries on multiple occasions.

These sorts of games are usually not implementing sophisticated algorithms on the server side.

The client is typically just sending simple events (e.g., player moved left) to the server. The server collects events from all the connected clients to build a shared state, and pushes state updates to clients.

Edit: jpcrs makes a good point about this and their comment is worth reading.

It is because doing the calculations on the server does not scale well, so no one wants to do it, usually what happens is that all the clients have to run the simulation anyway so the devs make sure it is the same simulation and all the server does is ship what are effectively the keypresses around. this is why desyncs are such a problem.

Note that having the server do the calculation can solve some of the cheating problem, I remember a modified quake server that would not send location information if you could not see the player, which made wallhacks not work. I just got totally nerd sniped by the memory and while I can't find the demonstration video that impressed me so much at the time. I did find that it was darkplaces quake that added the option "sv_cullentities_trace" which prevents wallhacks.

www.icculus.org/twilight/darkplaces/readme.html#ServerFeatures

sure, but almost any game built on the Steam engine or an id engine came with the server code, which was nearly any game that mattered for a decade. That was a huge library of games you could self host a server with.

Private/Community servers don't require self-hosting. E.g. in the Battlefield franchise the community for BF3 and BF4 is still going quite strong despite there being 3 successors since. And the reason is that people can play with the same people every night. The successors (BFI, BFV, BF20something) are completely uninteresting to me since there is simply no sense of community. I don't get the point in "matchmaking" even for casual gaming.

You mind sharing links? I would be interesting to try some bf again

I remember, but I also remember the downside - that as the game got older joining a server became a shit-show.

By the end there was literally one CS server I trusted to be friendly and busy and not running "rpg-mod" or "zombie-mod" or a thousand other adjustments I didn't like, such as "no-awp", "price adjusted" etc.

Just finding a vanilla experience became difficult, doubly so if you wanted more than "dust/dust2 only".

Add in the fact that these servers could send your computer files (in theory just maps, sounds and decals, but difficult to secure of course), and you can see why companies shy away, not just to have greater control of the experience.

You can still have official and community servers by packaging the server alongside the client.

Not to mention malware, there have been quite a few exploits for CSGO regarding this.

Brings back memories of being an admin on a CS 1.6 server and having the ability to send a command that would open a person's CD Drive

We had "local build servers" at one of my previous jobs. Those servers - normal towers, not racks - would communicate they are working on some job by opening CD Drives.

Brilliant. I love this. Thank you for sharing.

CS 1.6 private servers were great. roll the dice, starwars maps, iceworld...

Some of my best gaming memories. Mouse maps were my absolute favorite

I don’t know why you’d ever want to play anything other than dust2 /s

I raise you Italy and the office map I dorgot the name of and that is most likely just called office...

cs_office if you prefer

That's the ONE! My all tme favorite!

Back when you could mod counter strike locally, skin packs etc.. (I'm sure that even before that when you could mod how others saw you.., but that may be rose tinted glasses).. so much fun.

It's obvious why they stopped it eventually (pldecal.wad pretty much became obligatory porn sprays everywhere), but those were the days.

Dusty Dunes in Holland FTW :)

Well indeed, you could even alter your skins so all players would appear bright pink too. This was before resource checking so such cheating was impossible to detect.

In retrospect it's hard to see how the game wasn't more plagued by cheats than it already was, but again it comes back to learning which servers were good servers and had active moderators who could ban people who were obviously cheating, and the less obvious probably just got away with it but were by definition less disruptive.

Of course, that also led to third party tools like PunkBuster in the end whose function then was later centralised with VAC.

>Back when you could mod counter strike locally

GoldSrc games/mods were the golden age, and I will die on this hill. I preferred Natural Selection over CS, and it was just as moddable. It was the best. I was suited up in Mjolnir armor, wielding the pulse rifle from Aliens, blasting the soldier bugs from Starship Troopers.

> Add in the fact that these servers could send your computer files (in theory just maps, sounds and decals, but difficult to secure of course), and you can see why companies shy away, not just to have greater control of the experience.

Oh please. That's corporate apologia.

I mean, yeah, those concerns are real but 99.9% of the reasons they aren't doing it anymore is that having a monopoly over servers give them better control over monetization.

If it were only games. I remember an assistive technology product, roughly 6 years ago, which was a barcode reader plus online DB. Until the company went bust, and the device magically transformed into a brick.

This may be the one of the few true benefits of Web3/decentralization. As long as people see value in the network, it will stay online. Even if it's just a few people.

That's just as true as pre-web internet 1.0 though, what benefit does putting it on a blockchain add?

I am guessing they imply that blockchain hosted IoT infrastructure wouldn't simply go away, because, you know, its part of the blockchain.

Micro transactions to turn my lights on and off?

Not thanks.

https://www.newyorker.com/humor/daily-shouts/l-p-d-libertari...

It also reminds me of the coin operated door in Ubik: http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=1615

Probably a better example than mine for this example!

I find it interesting that, for some reason, mentioning Web3 very quickly ended up at libertarianism. My point was that storing essential data on a blockchain means it can be distributed and there's no single point of failure. For some reason people think Blockchain == crypto, however, but Blockchain can be done without crypto.

Something like this can be compared to torrents, where the data is distributed, so as long as someone hosts the data it will be available.

Web3 is crypto in everything that I have seen, admittedly I don't pay it too close attention so I may be missing some nuance but from my understanding to write something to a Blockchain I'm going to need to pay a fee to do so.

I've not seen any web3 projects tout themselves as free data storage, perhaps you could point me to some so I can be better informed?

> to write something to a Blockchain I'm going to need to pay a fee to do so >I've not seen any web3 projects tout themselves as free data storage

Well, of course, because the main reason for building blockchains is currently to make big bucks by selling the attached cryptocurrency. Also, storage isn't free, so fee data storage can't exist. That also isn't what I was describing.

There's no need for there to be payments involved in a blockchain, however. What blockchain does is provide a medium to store data that is signed by someone and can be read by others. It also allows this data to be stored in a distributed fashion on the devices of anyone who wants to store it, without there being a possibility that someone changes the data without anyone knowing.

The commenter I responded to wrote: > which was a barcode reader plus online DB. Until the company went bust, and the device magically transformed into a brick.

Hypothetically, if you were to use a blockchain to store the data, in stead of a centralized DB, anyone could run a copy of that blockchain and become a peer in the network. Users who still want to use the product after the company disappears can become a peers in the network to keep it running and prevent the device from becoming obsolete.

There have already been large organizations that experimented with blockchain in somewhat similar scenarios. They all run an instance of the blockchain and any data that has to be tracked between them is written to that blockchain. It's completely private to those companies, but nobody directly owns the data and there are no currency transactions involved in these blockchains.

I understand that there's confusion about this, because blockchain in the public eye means cryptocurrency. But cryptocurrency is just an implementation of the blockchain technology. And that technology works really well without any form of micro transaction involved.

With blockchains, everything is open and accessible. Nothing is hidden, nothing will disappear against the will of others. At least that seems to be the dream some people in that space are trying to achieve, as I understand it.

On the more practicable side, I guess more automation for preserving stuff is also used. Making it a bit more comfortable to achieve those goals.

A lot of the lightbulbs in my house have a similar model: they are basically controlled by a remote server somewhere, not owned by me. I ask the server to please turn my lights on.

There are some more expensive options that don't have this 'feature'. Look for Zigbee or Z-Wave. Here's a comparison page:

https://www.security.org/home-security-systems/z-wave-vs-zig...

That being said, I do have some 'cloud' IoT devices too, most of which were purchased because they were:

A) Cheap

B) Made by large companies

C) that weren't Google

This makes me _reasonably_ comfortable that the device and service will likely run for a while. I have some WeMo plugs that work great, and I also bought some second-hand Amazon plugs for $5/pp at a thrift store.

I want to get some z-wave light switches and scene controllers and make the actual light outlets smart, rather than putting the intelligence into the bulbs themselves. Unless you're going to be using the RGB abilities, putting the intelligence into the disposable part doesn't make a bunch of sense to me.

To arrange it all, I use Home Assistant, which I don't love, but it's just the best of the open source solutions available.

The lightbulbs probably don't directly have Wi-Fi and communicate with the remote server, therefore probably support local protocols such as BLE, Z-Wave, Zigbee, therefore it's probably possible someone has reverse engineered them already (even if they don't have a local-only mode).

Take a look at projects such as Home Assistant, they enable a fully local experience.

Most smart lights these days are either wireless based on Zigbee (e.g. Philips Hue, IKEA's Tradfri) and standard profiles or, for expensive smart homes and offices, wired on KNX/EIB. With either of these, if the vendor goes bust, the only paperweight will be the gateway, but you can continue to use the appliances.

I have my lightbulb server rigged to toggle my lights whenever I flip a switch.

Someone really reinvented the CueCat from 2000/2001?

Ah you beat me to it. Went to grab coffee and didn’t press reply.

I remember the :CueCat too except it was a lot longer than 6 years ago.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat

Didnt know that one. However, looking at Wikipedia tells me :CueCat was given away for free. The story I was remembering above is about an assistive technology, read, EXPENSIVE and OVERPRICED technology for the disabled. It hurt quite a few people when they figured out their investment is now a door stopper.

They still are sometimes - I was fiddling around with Steam and in my "Library" I accidentally clicked a dropdown which displayed "GAMES" and "TOOLS" as options - clicking "TOOLS" filtered on a bunch of interesting SDKs and Dedicated Servers (DayZ, Arma 3, Half-Life, Just Cause 2, and such - loads of which I don't even own or play). It's not perfect and it's far from comprehensive, but there are some games which offer this still

There's also the SteamCMD tool that makes running dedicated server easier: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/SteamCMD

I miss days where gaming magazines had CDs filled with demos which you could test before the purchase - tho it was more possible that friend of friend had pirated full version you could borrow.

Yep I remember having to run a fleet of Windows XP servers to host Joint Operations servers. Fun times!

Worser still, some actively patch_destroy their own older games that have a more active community (due to superior game balance, less monetization etc.) to drive growth towards the new game.

I think they should be legally required to provide it honestly. The support period for games is getting shorter every year. I mean Unreal Tournament is from 1999, so 23 years old, hats off they were still running servers for it, that's honestly very good. But take Overwatch for example instead, people paid what, $50 for it? That's a game that's online only and is no longer possible to play since Overwatch 2 was released. It was only 6 years old and I'm sure many people prefer it over Overwatch 2, but they can't play it even though they paid for it.

I honestly think it's kinda fucked up that this is legal. It shouldn't be.

This wouldn't work with games nowadays. Or let's rephrase is: it would discourage game developers to develop these type of games. If Blizzard would make private servers for Overwatch available, that would mean people wouldn't care about buying cosmetics from Blizzard. Same goes for games like League of Legends, Fortnite and even Call of Duty nowadays. If you can have your own private servers, you just unlock everything. I see that as a consumer you would want that to be a thing, but from a developers point of view other ventures get more attractive and we wouldn't have those games anymore.

I think this is a fallacy.

Maybe the big developers wouldn't have incentive to develop billion-dollar cosmetic-powered games anymore, but someone would make it work financially.

You'd still have hugely popular multiplayer games, and maybe they would be somewhat less ambitious in scope and features (i.e. dev cost), but they would still be fun, and have strong communities built around them.

Maybe they sell DLC map packs (which would not have the "community fragmentation" problem from today's centralized matchmaking if private servers exist), or figure out other ways to generate incremental revenue.

Or maybe they don't, and just sell the base game, and are still successful because it's not a 5,000 person team and a nine-figure budget.

Today's games don't exist because of the business model, it's the other way around.

It’s interesting to me that entire genres of games were created because private dedicated servers were available and bored teenagers could create a TC and play with their friends. Also the technology was such that assets and game scripting were accessible Team fortress, counter strike, Dota, plenty of examples. You bought half-life so you could download and play the mods. I guess that niche is filled by Roblox now? Or maybe Minecraft?

One recent genre is auto-battlers from Dota 2 custom game tools. To my eyes that’s been the only large genre grown from in game tools in a decade which has life beyond original game itself.

Tower defenses and AoS/Dota/ARPG/Mobas as examples of the above from 90s and early 2000s. Maybe “gliding” is a genre too from counterstrike now seen outside in games like trackmania, and probably Gary’s mod is it’s own genre too. Then only genres and modes which live within the original games since (though amazing and well done).

I really think Blizzard had an opportunity with StarCraft 2 to rewrite gaming history if it’s modding tools were up to par. Instead we got custom games less sophisticated than ones 20 years younger from it. I don’t think the modding community ever really recovered being left empty handed in that era. Maybe it’s recovered, modders were left without adequate tools for a while. Modders really did produce hundred million to billion dollar genres in the past, I’m not sure if that is still happening.

I see this as an advantage.

TF2 lets you mod pretty much anything and by all accounts its cosmetics are still hugely profitable for Valve.

> TF2 lets you mod pretty much anything

It's not 2012 anymore, 90% of players play casual where sv_pure is always enabled so you can't mod almost anything.

And it doesn't kill TF2 to support and offer the option for both.

Depends on your definition of "kill".

The original pre-matchmaking TF2 experience is dead. Modern casual is nothing like it and often feels indistinguishable from playing vs bots.

I think there's an answer to this, which is to separate the inventory service from the game servers. Keep the same inventory service online, reuse it for all of your games. Any official servers and any vanilla servers will validate that you own the cosmetics you use, modded servers can override this but you can't use your cosmetics everywhere unless they're actually registered to you. (Or possibly the clients validate it too in which case even a modded server couldn't override it for every player.)

And (as with several other things being discussed in the comments) of course Valve has already done this, and offers it as a service: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/inventory

you can just disable cosmetic drops/leveling/whatever else on private servers since it's sadly such a massive part of multiplayer games nowadays, problem solved.

Why is that a bad thing though? Multiplayer shooters existed before the modern rent seeking paradigm. And they can exist afterwards too. The only thing we would lose is that particular parasitic business model. Not everything should be legal.

If this parasitic business model is legally crushed, companies will just move on to the next one, and likely eliminate an entire class of games that a lot of people enjoy because they cant make as much money off of it.

Oh no, then we're stuck having fun modding old games on our private servers.

Curious if there is an open source generic "game server backend" that indie devs can code to that would allow smaller devs to host online games?

I suppose not — to the degree that the backend doesn't just act as message/traffic coordinator but also has game logic. (Although I can imagine an architecture where the back end indeed just manages message sending ... and one of those recipients is the host app that handles the game logic.)

There's a few things out there, several game focused backend as a service. Most of them are focused on mobile games because that's where the easy money is.

Funny enough, there's a Google for Games github org that has some good open source projects for things like matchmaking, cloud saves, etc https://github.com/googleforgames

Why would that be a problem once they decide to no longer support overwatch? When you turn off your servers, release one last patch that adds running your own server to the game as part of your game shutdown.

No skin off your back other than "cutting into sales of thatsamegame, butnextversion", which people are going to buy anyway.

What legal remedy exactly do you propose here?

The release of Overwatch 2 wasn't the end of the original Overwatch. The Overwatch game that came out in 2016 hasn't existed in a long time. That game had 12 playable characters. The game was changed and that 12 character version stopped existing less than a year after the game came out. Now there's 32 characters with vastly different skills and play styles, really changing the game. The maps are different. Even the original 12 characters have had some changes.

Should it have been illegal for them to add characters to the game? It's not what I originally paid for. They took away the original Overwatch the second they rebalanced or added characters.

> Should it have been illegal for them to add characters to the game?

Sure, why not? Or at least illegal to forcefully change my game without giving me an option of not updating (at the cost of maybe not having anyone to play with). One could argue that I as the customer should be allowed to decide when to patch my game client and server.

There obviously needs to be consensus between players so some version is going to be more popular than others, probably the latest version, and the developer has an interest in keeping the game fresh so as to sell more copies (or lately, skins), so as a customer I'm driven towards the latest version, but I don't see why I should be forced to it.

I honestly don't see the problem you seem to see.

It would be such a terrible outcome, having the player base fractured over tons of different versions. It would be a far worse experience than them adding some new characters and game modes and renaming the game Overwatch 2.

Yeah but that's not something you actually expect would happen do you? Like 99% of players won't bother and will just go with what the developer provides until the developer decides to kill the game, at that point you have the self-hosted servers available.

Yeah, but one could argue by making updates to the game they're destroying the experience of the old game, taking it away from me. I see little difference in the argument about the "original" Overwatch servers getting migrated to Overwatch 2 and them releasing updates which would ultimately make older versions effectively unplayable (no players).

Like cool, you've now put the force of law into making them continue to manage old versions, versions that practically nobody plays on. By adding a single new character they've now changed the game, and if you didn't like that addition, it's an unplayable game even if you had the option to not update. This is fundamentally the same as Overwatch getting shut down (the old version becomes effectively unplayable).

If anything, they shouldn't be legally allowed to modify the game at all, because making a modification to it makes the original effectively unplayable because there'd be effectively no player base. Or maybe they should be allowed to make updates to their game platform...

If the release of Overwatch 2 was effectively taking Overwatch away from the people who paid for it, every update to the game was effectively taking away that edition of Overwatch from people. But people didn't care until the launcher got updated to say "Overwatch 2", suddenly now that's a travesty and Blizzard is somehow taking it away.

I got Overwatch on release day. I still can play Overwatch today. I don't get why one would say they took it away from people unless you agree every update to the game is taking the old game away from people.

I've never played Overwatch, it was just an example, but my point stands regardless of whether players want changes or not; I simply want there to be some accountability for mega corps so they can't just abandon games, release the new iteration for $60, and then kill the old version off.

Or rather, so that when they eventually do, a potentially still popular game isn't rendered unplayable since there are no official servers and no software for me to use to host my own.

It's more aptly fit to use CoD as an example to be honest, I just used Overwatch because I'd read some were unhappy how they just killed it and replaced it with "sort of but not really the same game".

Since I'm not in the Overwatch scene, can you answer something I'd been wondering? Did they migrate cosmetics from 1 to 2? Cosmetics seems to be the big cash cow these days so if the new one has similar characters, but they kill the old one off and don't let me bring my hard earned or bought cosmetics then I'd be pretty pissed personally.

> Did they migrate cosmetics from 1 to 2?

Yes. Your whole account got migrated.

> I simply want there to be some accountability for mega corps so they can't just abandon games, release the new iteration for $60, and then kill the old version off.

Well then definitely don't point to Overwatch for that, because they released the new version for $0 and migrated everyone's equipment.

> It's more aptly fit to use CoD as an example to be honest

You mean the game where I can play multiplayer for games released well over a decade ago? I haven't heard of an instance where they shut down the old servers for that series yet at all. Other than that they'll be doing that for their free to play platform, but that's practically the same argument as Overwatch to Overwatch 2. You should be able to import accounts, it's no cost for the new version, etc.

EDIT: I guess some CoD versions ran on GameSpy which shut down a while ago. That was a third party system not made by the publisher though, dunno if you can really hold the publisher responsible for that third party service going offline.

It’s honestly difficult to imagine a bigger waste of governmental resources and time than legislating that computer game developers must legally provide server software for their multi-player games.

These days aren't gone for good though. Look on Steam how many games offer LAN support or dedicated servers for instance (server browsers are a different topic unfortunately)

It's just that gamers in the past have voted too weakly against the managed MP infrastructure in some subgenres and triple A moats... Don't know whether anyone is still protesting this or whether newer generations don't even know what's happened here.

I don't really buy that "vote with your wallet" argument. It's not like you really have a choice. People can't decide to buy their favorite game with our without an open infrastructure. For example of you want to play StarCraft 2 on LAN with your friends or even only a similar game you just can't. It does not exist. If there is only one candidate then it's not really a vote, is it?

Well, more generally you want to hold the (usually big) devs/publishers accountable to the shit they pull to select against bad stewards of the art form. One way is withholding purchases.

Unfortunately a big chunk of unopinionated consumers will eat what they're served (FIFA, BF lol) and this encourages publishers to push P2W, gambling or fast iteration, which splits communities. And long-lived community-owned MP infrastructure is not particularly profitable either...

That said, a more major driver of not offering dedicated servers may simply be the lack of necessity because using cloud infrastructure is pretty sophisticated nowadays and controlling it yourself simplifies development and deployment.

Luckily the market is diverse, so overall I'm not too worried. I trust that organic discovery and good stewards keep MP gaming (and modded gaming) as I have known it alive.

That's why I play games, which are running on private servers for years. Like ultima online.

Honestly the saddest part is how you could have both the private servers and matchmaking almost seamlessly, have official servers flagged for matchmaking and allow for a server browser like csgo, team fortress 2, etc, and yet so many act as if it was exclusively one or the other. As a big titanfall2 fan this is just infuriating since the game has been unplayable pretty much due to years long dos attacks on the servers that the company doesn't give a shit to fix, nor releases some form of dedicated servers for players to host themselves. The game is even in a modified source engine iirc.

> Honestly the saddest part is how you could have both the private servers and matchmaking almost seamlessly

Not true, having to pick a server to join by yourself out of a list was an essential part of the classic online experience and the existence of any kind of matchmaking system harms it.

Team Fortress 2 is a prime example of this, originally it only had a server browser and the community felt most "alive" during this time. Then they added a basic matchmaking system that could place you on community servers, but only if they ran stock maps and settings, which heavily discouraged running any kind of modded or customized server, and significantly harmed any servers with a strong sense of community since you had random players, often fresh F2P installs that were barely distinguishable from bots, joining servers with no intention of ever playing on them more than once. Then they replaced that with the full official-only matchmaking we have today, which killed most of the remaining servers and associated communities.

I don't disagree that dedicated servers only would be better, much to the contrary, but sadly matchmaking is here to stay and there's nothing we can do about it. You can have parallel dedicated servers that have no impact at all on the matchmaking experience, that's my point, not that matchmaking would put you into community servers, seamlessly was probably the wrong word for it. I wouldn't dislike official dedicated servers being accessible by both the browser and matchmaking however.

> You can have parallel dedicated servers that have no impact at all on the matchmaking experience

No, you can't, because in any multiplayer game with microtransactions (which almost all multiplayer games released in recent years have), any servers controlled by the community would be in direct competition with the developers, which is why the option is rarely provided in the first place. If matchmaking exists, developers have an inherent motivation to lead players to it and away from any experience they don't fully control. So why would they even allow it?

Yeah, I made multiplayer games in those days. Very few people played relative today and you had so much lag. You really had to build your game to accept 0.5 sec lag. There is a lot to be said for today.

I find the concept of "esports" without dedicated servers to be a farce. The "sport" dies as soon as the profit incentive dies.

> Remember the days when the server component was included with the base game? Anyone could launch a server and play with friends and strangers online. I miss those days.

I hear you, but several of the games in this particular announcement seem like they're from that era:

    * Unreal Gold
    * Unreal II: The Awakening
    * Unreal Tournament 2003
    * Unreal Tournament 2004
    * Unreal Tournament 3
    * Unreal Tournament: Game of the Year Edition

IIRC, back then the games usually shipped with the server component and all servers were run by players, and the publisher only ran a simple directory server.

Since those directory servers were so simple, I think I seen cases where someone cloned them, then batched the binary to just to go a different address for the directory.

I think battlefield 4 (pc) has the best of both worlds: official servers and community hosted ones. It had its drawbacks, however: community servers often spoofed player count and you would end up joining almost empty lobbies when you thought it was a full server.

Also, when the playerbase was declining, it felt harder to find servers that you enjoyed to play on.

Overall I felt it was a great experience. I hope more games take this approach in the future.

"A" company? Surely you mean "every" company.

I still (mostly) limit my multiplayer gaming to games with that available via Steam.

ARK, Valheim, etc. If games come out and I have to rely on their server or rent one, it's a pass for me, especially if I can't play privately with my group of friends.

I've been using Battle.net though... for about 15 years, I'd only do LAN, or LAN over VPN (Hamachi), but the ease of use was, of course, much better on Battle.net.

I hope that we see a comeback.

>gone forever

yeah, lazy devs or they're just herding everyone to their own servers where they can mine data for more profits? Either way, looks like a prime business opportunity to test out a recent addition to DMCA exemptions to allow supporting "abandoned" servers. If the users are there and willing to pay.

The address for the master server in UT2004 is set in the ut2004.ini file and can be replaced.

http://beta.openspy.net/en/howto/ut2k-engine/ut2004

OpenSpy has similar options for the other Unreal games. Some require patching. Their code is open source and on Github. https://github.com/chc/openspy-core-v2

The latest Unreal Tournament will soon be gone however, it may never return as it was never finished.

Its strange that Unreal Tournament was kind of abandoned by Epic. It was such a great game in every way- so far ahead of its time. Even today Unreal Engine is probably the best off the shelf 3D game engine available.

I am surprised that they dont make more of the franchise. If they repackaged UT2004 with the new engine (UT2023) I would play the hell out of it.

Epic was working on a new UT which has been in early release. It's quite fun but I believe development stopped some time ago.

It was killed due to the success of Fortnite.

That's just one side of the story. While the success of Fortnite definitely played a part of the cancellation, no one really cared about the Unreal Tournament reboot. It got no traction at all. The game was playable but had no players. And while there was a big interest of a small group, it got no interest outside of that group. I think that even if Fortnite wouldn't have been as big as it is, Unreal had no chance because the gaming demographic changed and there is no demand for a game like UT anymore.

Arena shooters in general are kind of a dead genre. Quake Champions, Diabolical, and a few others all collapsed. Even Halo Infinite couldn't sustain a player base.

Halo Infinite died because Microsoft mismanaged it. They had huge player numbers at launch but they failed to keep the content going and people moved on. They couldn't even manage a tie in with the stupid halo show when it launched.

Their complete lack of interesting custom games is what killed it for me.

Halo, for me, was about forge and messing around in fun game modes people came up with. Releasing Halo without forge and with bare bones custom game tools is like selling a car without seats.

Yeah, they claimed live service and I believed them, but forge was released a month ago and I can't muster up anyone who wants to play anymore. lol. I can't even get my bro to play through coop. Bums me out because halo was my jam almost my entire life but they can't be arsed.

It's sad because forge mode looks amazing.

Server Browser added this most recent update, and to MCC a while back.

Halo infinite failed because literally half of it's content was garbage. A bunch of new guns, most of which sucked, a bunch of new maps, that weren't impressive, and genuinely game modes that were so boring and bad, my friends and I gamed them to get them over in a couple minutes instead of the normal 30 minutes it would take to play out.

It was also really glitchy, really poorly optimized, and full of GARBAGE microtransactions. It was like multiple tens of dollars for a different set of armor, while previous halo games arguably pushed cosmetics as an awesome thing and an actual status symbol because you couldn't buy them, only unlock by completing challenges.

I hope they open-source all the assets and maybe the existing game code like they've done with some other cancelled titles. It would be cool to see the community finish it or build something from the ashes

It turns out the source code was available from the beginning: https://github.com/JimmieKJ/unrealTournament

It didn't get "no interest" it got people dipping their toes in waiting for it to be done.

I played it, and enjoyed it (I played the living daylights out of UT 2004 and UT 3, and was eager for UT 4). I was waiting for the single-player portion of UT4 to be in a cleaner state. It was the only reason I signed up for an Epic account. But UT 4 stayed in rough shape with unfinished features, though it was playable.

I doubt I'm the only one that was tracking it and watching games like the newer (and amazing) Doom come and go.

Right, Epic was making gobs of money on Fortnite and couldn't justify continued funding of an open source UT4. I recall how cool it was that they decided to run the project as free-to-play open source... I even played for a while. Then PUBG happened, leading to Fortnite as a response, and it sucked all the air out of the UT4 effort.

Yes, it stopped when Fortnite was getting traction. It was a small team and development was not going well anyways.

This was the reason I stopped buying any epic stuff. When they went Xbox instead of PC for gears of war, and then never came back, I wrote them off.

I've got good news for you-https://store.steampowered.com/app/1097840/Gears_5/

Fortnite is the new money maker, UT doesn’t even come close unfortunately

I'd be curious to know what percentage of Fortnite's playerbase has even heard of Unreal Tournament, let alone played it.

Epic’s internal team working on the new UT was repurposed to fortnight when fortnight started making a whole bunch of money.

Not spelling fortnight incorrectly because on my phone.

Make Unreal Tournament great again!

The Unreal franchise was Epic's flagship product for many years. UT is a natural platform for esports (cf. CS:GO). Sure, UT might not be casual enough for everyone, and Epic was right to focus on Fortnite when it blew up, but why Epic hasn't marketed UT as an "elite" gaming product and put it at the top of its esports food chain is beyond me. I would expect it to provide a halo effect for the rest of their products. (And besides, there is so much untapped IP in the Unreal universe)

I think Epic have been looking at ID’s various attempts at making a modernised or esports friendly Quake (arguably UT’s prime competitor at the time), and believe there’s no market or demand for it.

I wonder if there are any bits of Quake 2 code still left over in CS:GO

I know Carmack made a comment that HL2 did have bits of Q2 in it.

They were working on it when fortnite got big, in fact it was kind of a cool experiment where they involved the community in the process and development, halfway crowdsourced in a way. But when fortnite got big the team got moved to that, so here we are.

We need legislation/conventions/culture of opensourcing server software if a game/service is abandoned, to easily self-host or if a third party platform wants to take over stewardship of hosting a specific service. Just update a url in your game config to point to the new provider/server.

> legislation

It's not even an option in most of the developed world, it's equivalent to property expropriation.

Just add a requirement to declare for how long the online part of the game will continue to work. With the loophole of it being "infinite" if you allow community servers.

Requiring open protocols and guaranteed interop are feasible though.

Distributing implementations of closed protocols is speech. I don't see why such restrictions would be desirable. If you don't want to play games that use closed protocols, you're under no obligation to do so.

This is an absurd stretch. The definition is already stretched too far without additional stretching.

you could probably require it to be included on sale, though.

That probably will never happen because the a lot of developers don't even own 100% of the server software. The original Doom's open source release stripped out the audio library they used and removed calls to it in the source code. Software has gotten a lot more complicated since then.

Like Half-Life 1 is based on idTech, so they would need id/Bethesda/Microsoft's permission. Maybe they could release it under GPL, because idTech grants that license, but that would required everything else in the game would have to be released under GPL too. That would be pretty hard if they used anyone else's proprietary libraries.

Moving onto Half-Life 2, it uses Havok IIRC. A license for that starts at 5 figures.

Thats true of the client code, but the backend servers? I think its far less likely to not be as open, and honestly even if they release a version of the backend servers that's just close sourced, I dont think anyone would care. It doesnt stop people from enjoying Counter-Strike or G-Mod in 2022.

Source docs: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Networking_Entities

> The server, as central authority, processes player input and updates the world according to the game and physics rules.

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Source_Multiplayer_...

> The server simulates the game in discrete time steps called ticks. By default, the timestep is 15ms, so 66.666... ticks per second are simulated, but mods can specify their own tickrate. During each tick, the server processes incoming user commands, runs a physical simulation step, checks the game rules, and updates all object states.

Havok made the legacy engine used in Source 1 free of license fees in 2021. Before that it was $25,000 per title. Source 2 uses in-house Rubikon to dodge those fees: https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Havok

100%, even at the very least they should release some docs on how one might re-implement a backend. I get it might not be possible to release the server code especially if there's other services involved but that could be up to the community preserving the game if they want to re-implement everything.

While not that unexpected, I'm curious to see if this will start a trend that other game publishers might follow. I'm mainly curious about when Blizzard will deem the cost-benefit analysis to swing in favor of shutting down their old battle.net service which hosts games like StarCraft 1, Diablo 2, and WarCraft 3.

For StarCraft 1 specifically (and its Remastered version), a few us have been building a custom server/launcher[0] which should at least ensure that the game/community doesn't completely die out. However, we still rely on Blizzard's online services to verify the in-game purchases, like HD graphics (the game will automatically stop rendering the HD graphics if you didn't log into Blizzard's services in the last 30 days).

It remains to be seen how this will be handled by Blizzard if (when?) the time comes.

[0] - https://github.com/ShieldBattery/ShieldBattery

Diablo 2 resurrected is supposed to use the old code with a “graphics” uplift. When it first hit they were having some battle.net issues, on the blog they spoke about dealing with legacy code and challenges.

Hopefully, for D2 this means a lot longer life.

>>I'm mainly curious about when Blizzard will deem the cost-benefit analysis

3-6mos after the MS deals closes will be my prediction, or 2mos after the deal is blown up by the US Government and Activision starts massive cost-cutting

This acquisition is such a hot topic, I doubt that Microsoft is going to do anything controversial in the first 2-3 years.

>how this will be handled by Blizzard

I'm going to guess 'in the most used hostile way possible'.

I'm no fan of Craptivision, but to their credit, Blizzard has maintained their old games for a VERY long time and continued to provide updates for years and years and years, much longer than most MMOs survive, all without a monthly fee. And once in a while they'll remake old titles with more modern engines.

I've never seen a company turn a game around like Blizzard did with Diablo 3 -- from the shitty real money auction house to probably the gaming world's single best loot system.

If we want to talk user-hostile, many EA games like Mass Effect don't even let you play different classes without spending hundreds of dollars in lootboxes. It's ridiculous.

Fear not, it has already started. Blizzard shut down Overwatch 1 (a paid game) a few days before the launch of Overwatch 2 (a free game AFAIK) so the games wouldn't compete with each other.

They are exactly the same game though. Just a different name.

Disclaimer: I hate Blizzard Activision

I don't see epic being a better alternative to Steam. Steam sucks, is anti consumer but Epic is even worse. They don't even allow communication or rating. Isn't Epic also mayorly Chinese owned? And their constant pushing that I should install and run their service all the time, even try to trick me into installing it is also very suspicious. I will not run some game selling platform's service in the background all the time, even if it's just on a gaming machine. Bad enough my graphics drivers run harmful spyware in the background (nvidia). Then their return policy is the same as Valve's 2h and I have to waive my 14 day right of withdrawal from the purchase. Replace shit with more smelly shit.

> Isn't Epic also mayorly Chinese owned?

By Chinese you mean Tencent? Tencent is south-african owned.

Tencent is Chinese and has its hq in China.

> By Chinese you mean Tencent? Tencent is south-african owned. @est

> Founded in 1998 with its headquarters in Shenzhen, China,...

> ...Tencent has been listed on the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong since 2004.

> https://www.tencent.com/en-us/about.html#about-con-1

Since we are talking about how Epic was invested by Tencent, the same rule applies here:

https://www.ft.com/content/1270c7e4-95e4-406f-b712-c32341524...

South African internet group Naspers, Tencent’s biggest shareholder

In China, the government is more powerful than capital. No matter where their money comes from, Tencent is at its heart a Chinese company, with all the shenanigans that entails.

> the government is more powerful than capital

That depends how you perceive government. The Chinese government is just one of the the executive branches of CCP holdings.

That's a strange way to look at sovereign wealth. Their government has power far beyond the budget and no real checks and balances.

Tencent has a minority stake, Tim Sweeney is still majority shareholder.

Steam might not be perfect, but compared to any other option I can think of it's not only better, but far, far better.

Agreed. I haven't come across a store/library system in any ecosystem that I'd prefer. In fact, I feel like Steam is a model for other places like e-books, movies & tv streaming, etc.

Is Steam perfect? No. But Amazon Prime gives me the shivers after they arbitrarily pulled movies from libraries after purchase intentionally and without refund. Audible/Kindle tries selling me while I'm in my library, etc.

> Steam might not be perfect, but compared to any other option I can think of it's not only better, but far, far better.

What about GOG? Their client is optional, you can download full installers for offline archiving, no DRM.

First option that comes to mind that is clearly superior.

IMO GOG is great for single-player games. For multiplayer, the Steam integration for some a nice bonus and others a necessity.

I had to re-buy Stardew Valley on Steam because the GoG version only had "connect to IP" (I cannot run GOG Galaxy on Linux) and all of my friends were using Steam versions that had other connect options.

GOG is definitely superior as far as respecting the rights of consumers is concerned, but their web store and library client (Galaxy) doesn't offer nearly as many features as Steam. Things like hosting mods and making them super easy to download/install through Steam Workshop. Or things like streaming gameplay to a different device (or even streaming your normal desktop allowing you to use it from a different device so you aren't just limited to Steam games). Or WINE emulation on Linux with minimal configuration needed. Steam provides some legitimate value-add features that pretty much no one else does, making it much more than just a storefront.

The thing I was going to mention is the Linux compatibility layer. It's great.

GOG offers a superior license (DRM-free), perhaps, but not client.

Steam's integrated multiplayer makes online games seamless, cloud save works better, the autopatcher beats offline installers anyday, its integrated Big Picture mode is great for TV or phone play, the built-in streaming works well, the built-in text and audio chat is useful, the Workshop allows seamless and fast mod installs vs having to use something like NexusMods, the reviews system is well implemented and waaaaay more informative than Amazon's, Proton is a godsend for Linux and the Deck, the built-in web browser overlay is handy for looking things up in the game, Family Share + offline mode is awesome despite having DRM, the sales are incredible (especially from 3rd party Steam resellers on isthereanydeal.com), the support is fast and human and very fair, GeForce Now integration is great when you're away from the gaming desktop, Valve is a gamer-centric and innovative company (Index, Deck, Controller, etc.)

And that's just for the player side. From the dev side the Steamworks API takes care of a lot of multiplayer and other stuff that normally is a huge PITA to reimplement.

As a client, it's just a MUCH better offering than either GOG or Epic or Microsoft or any of the other crap launchers. Like, not even in the same league... the others are just 90s-style download managers, while Steam is its own ecosystem. Despite not being a monopoly, they still continue to dominate the PC gaming landscape because they are just THAT good.

GOG is a pretty good company with a good store and good management of classic games.

But steam, for a 30% cut of a dev's income, will provide; Free save backups, free multiplayer and friends list management and apis, workshop support for modding, free keys to sell on other platforms or give away, a store that actually managed to reduce it's serious junk clutter problems for many people, VR runtime, HUGE controller apis that bring incredible functionality for remapping and macros, a system for game streaming and remote coop play, easy steam deck distribution now, a complete patch management and distribution system etc.

Basically Valve exposes a lot of features to game devs when you release on their storefront, and a huge amount of those features are just straight huge wins for gamers and consumers.

Either developers are locking their users into Epic/Steam/Apple/PlayStation in exchange for services/users, or they're rolling your own solution with PlayFab/Nakama/Pragma and are stuck footing the bill once their game fades away. Both business models are bad for developers and gamers.

Now for the sameless self plug: we wanted to solve these problems but with a business model that primarily serves developers at Rivet (W23).

Instead, we offer cross-platform console-like services as a REST API for free (friends, parties, leaderboards) and only charge for services that help developers build/grow their games (multiplayer servers, matchmaking, CDN, database). Our #1 priority is providing the best services possible to developers. There's no incentive to rent-seek or lock in your users since we're a services company, not a platform company. Any data your users generate is yours to keep.

Regarding operating legacy multiplayer servers: We plan to let users pay for their own game servers instead of developers fronting the cost. This way, developers can operate legacy games at no cost by letting users "own" their servers and easily enable custom game servers. It's like allowing users to self-host games but without having to open-source your software. Plus, many games can't run as a standalone binary and need the supporting infrastructure.

We're still in closed beta, but there's more info here if you're curious: https://rivet.gg/developer/

Steam doesn't feel anti-consumer to this consumer.

It's a host DRM, and many games also integrate with steamworks, making it an embedded DRM that can prevent your games from launching without a connection even if they otherwise wouldn't need one. As others have said, this is inferior to both GOG, and physical media, except a large percentage of physical media now also does not function without the aid of online DRM.

inferior to digital media my ass, DRM on digital media hosing my linux partition is what pushed me to exclusively use steam and gog.

I'd say the cd key and cd check of physical media is more anti-consumer than Steam. Of course there were third party patches to remove the cd check, but that's no different than making a way around steam drm.

The DRM built into steam is pretty purposely nerfed. Supposedly it is trivial to bypass, which is why many game companies put 3rd party DRM in as well. If valve dies tomorrow, it will be way easier to revive most of my steam library than anything on origin or EA whatever-its-called-this-week.

They also just have like 20 years of clear results, consumer non-hostility, and goodwill

I get it, I understand, but I like the product they've given and I like that it continues to improve.

Epic Games gives a free game every single week and has done so for the past couple years at least. Many of these are fairly big titles. Around Christmas they have done a free game every day.

They’re very pro indie dev on the unreal side. I don’t mind steam but epic is clearly the better choice for me.

Give a game... take a game...

Shrug.

I’ve enjoyed Civ 6, Control, Dead By Daylight, Darkest Dungeon, 20XX, Remnant, Pathfinder Kingmaker, Star Wars Squadron, Hitman, Tomb Raider, Enter the Gungeon, Darkwood, Gloomhaven, Terraforming Mars, Blair Witch, XCOM 2, Scythe, Verdun, Ring of Pain, and many other titles all for free.

I don’t like them dropping support for these games but it’s still a huge net positive for me, and I’d try to buy everything on epic if I’m going to buy it accordingly.

> alternative to Steam. Steam sucks... @lakomen

Steam is the best content delivery platform for games. Developers have spoken with their content and users have spoken with their accounts.

It's not as good as it could be, sure... But, what is?

Even EA brought back titles they'd removed from Steam, as it hurt their bottom line.

Players prefer Steam over all other CDNs. The numbers assure us of this.

Valve will refund games past the 2h window if you have a reasonable reason. I had to the other day when I just couldn't get a game running despite following all of the community suggestions. Ended up going over the 2h window without realizing it and they approved the refund without issue.

Valve's refund policy before they made it better was probably the closest to anti-consumer you could call them. In many countries it was straight up illegal and had to get put through court before they would give you the rights you had as an australian citizen for example.

This is sad. I would love that every company running multiplayer game servers publish the server code / binary so anyone can host it. Some of those games still have big communities and now they will be unusable.

Also, this issue is even worse with game updates. You cannot even play single-player games when critical updates are no longer available. Now that games are sold without finishing them, game updates are required unfortunately.

If I buy a game and a company effectively breaks it by turning off my ability to play it, is that not theft?

I don't think it would count as theft, but if the original advertising/product information included the online components as a feature, then they could be sued for that. I remember when Sony pulled the Linux support from PS3 as that was a similar situation although even more anti-consumer.

If unlicensed copying is theft, than switching off a required server is murder, I guess.

When do we get to put companies on trial for gameslaughter?

Probably only after we elect Ross Scott for president.

I guaranteed whatever license you never agreed to doesn’t actually say you bought the game. More like a license to play the game as long as parent company sees fit.

I guarantee the marketing says "buy".

In any case, you can't commit fraud in your marketing then 'correct' it in obscure clickwrap license terms.

Companies are constantly redefining what things mean. “Buy” is just a license to use as long as the company likes. “Unlimited data” means 30GB data. “Made with mozzarella” means that something is made with something that remotely tastes like cheese.

No, buy means buy. Companies pretending otherwise are just lying.

Limited license.

They don't want to offer things like that because consumers won't all go for it, they want to get more money by deceiving prospective users/customers.

That's why we (supposedly) have regulator agencies. Unfortunately, like every other part of government, they have been wholly captured by industry and work against citizens and consumers, rather that for them.

What exactly are they stealing from you? If you bought a car in the 1970's and the company doesn't make parts for it anymore is that theft? What obligation do they have to maintain?

That is a poor analogy as you could still pull parts from other cars and repair and continue to use the car after the manufacturer stops creating replacements.

A better analogy would be: If you bought a car in 1970 and the company stopped making the super special fuel blend that they have a patent on and no one else is allowed to produce, making your car unusable. Is that theft?

>you could still pull parts from other cars and repair and continue to use the car after the manufacturer stops creating replacements.

Same can be said about software. People create aftermarket parts just the same as they create third party server implementations.

And then people who create third party server implementations get sued into oblivion. https://www.eff.org/cases/blizzard-v-bnetd

physical analogies make absolutely no sense in the digital space.

They do make sense as almost all laws are written with physical things in mind.

IP laws address non-physical things.

Consumer Rights Act (UK, 2015) has specific inclusion of digital goods. We can't be the only country doing that.

They make perfect sense in this scenario. A game company is paying for physical hardware, electricity, bandwidth, etc. to run the game server(s). Hardware fails and older OS may not work on new HW. Or the game server software may not work on newer OS, especially if there is custom C++/networking code that was compiled against an older OS version. Maybe they are looking at very long list of security vulnerabilities that are un-patched because shit is old.

Its irrational to think a company is going to keep game servers running forever and that somehow they are "stealing" from you because you purchased something nearly 20 years ago.

I think yours is a good analogy. Original creators have no obligations whatsoever, they have to maintain the server part for a time, and that's it. People might be up about it, but they should realize that this is part of the original deal. Closed source and software as service models naturally work like this, and it's not entirely the manufacturer's fault that people get the short end like this. They had the short end to begin with. And it's not like it's unreasonable to sunset a game from the early 2000s, with server and other features right in the open. People can and do run the stuff themselves just fine.

Nobody's forcing them to maintain anything. They're the ones keeping it hostage and stopping others from maintaining it.

More like, they decide to stop supporting the car, so they come to your house and take the distributor cap (ECU would be a better analogy) and there response is "well you should have known we only license the distributor cap".

You buy a car in the '70 and when they stop making parts, they come to your house and crush your perfectly working car.

Yes, doesn't make sense, then again not less than your analogy.

"effectively breaks it"

Who breaks it though? For example Hatoful Boyfriend haven't been updated for years, Macs moved to 64bit only so it was essentially unplayable on modern Macs.

Is it the devs fault, are you obliged to update your game forever?

Is it Apple's fault for the lack of backwards compatibility?

Epic was selling a broken game so they must remove it.

Btw that happened on Steam too now they only sell the Windows version.

The game almost certainly had compatibility promises, eg 'runs on MacOS# with X MB RAM'. It should still do that.

The fault would be whoever designed it so a single player (or local multiplayer) game wouldn't run on said system in perpetuity.

Mind you, some time in the future an AI will be able to watch Let's Play-style footage and generate the game for you.

That's a different issue. These games are written to require an online component that Epic are rescinding access to. This isn't about what Epic is selling either, it's about them effectively bricking what they've already sold.

Assuming Hatoful still works for the users who bought it on the hardware/OS that they bought it for then it's not a good comparison.

It feels different when a game has a server and a client component. I can choose to airgap my ancient Macbook and never update it if I want to keep playing that particular game on that particular computer.

I can also play it on Linux, and Linux can run on Mac hardware.

All of that sounds like a pain in the ass, and if the game is not worth the trouble I'll just not go through the trouble. But I am the one who makes the choice, not the owner of some proprietary server.

I can play the game in the hardware that it was advertised to work at the time, 32bit(?) macs, the same way I can play a ps2 game on a ps2 but not a ps5.

Removing official servers when there is no alternative means I can't use the product on the platform it was listed to work at.

But this isn't about updates, it's about turning off a cloud component for which the software isn't available to otherwise self-host.

Depends on the EULA.

EULA is not a law.

It's a wishlist of the company.

Don’t buy a game that requires constant intervention from the maker to run, if you’re concerned about that.

Would be nice if games for which time-limited licenses were being sold told you upfront so you could choose.

Not sure how you're supposed to know a game has been designed to be remotely deactivated?

GOG.com

The few that require online connection (like purely multiplayer gwent) there is a notice.

If the game requires an internet connection, it's a time-limited license.

And what about games like minecraft, where the requirement for an internet connection was added later, after the game was sold?

Stay on the last internet-free version.

I remember when games were sold and that was it, you didn’t get regular free updates.

It's so easy for someone who doesn't care about games to say "just don't play those games"

What if I like those games? What if I barely have a choice because 95% of multiplayer games released today work like that?

>What if I like those games? What if I barely have a choice because 95% of multiplayer games released today work like that?

Then you (and countless consumers like you) have guaranteed that the greedy assholes forcing always online DRM etc. win. Vote with your wallet, life is too short to give money to people who hate you and who don't respect your rights.

"Vote with your wallet" is a stupid concept that makes no sense because there was never any vote in the first place.

> life is too short to give money to people who hate you and who don't respect your rights

Okay, so where are the people who don't hate me and respect my rights? I don't see them anywhere.

My choices here are 1. Play DRM-ridden always online garbage or 2. Stop playing games entirely (or at least multiplayer ones)

>Okay, so where are the people who don't hate me and respect my rights? I don't see them anywhere.

GOG, and plenty of indie devs and smaller devs. There's a whole world of games out there beyond $FlavorOfTheMonthFPS. Or you could just continue your preferred method of "Don't question, just consume product and then get excited for next product."

Then you give up any chance of playing what I'd call "modern multiplayer games" for (presumably) decades, so that maybe a different generation can get better games.

A noble cause, but no thanks I think I'd rather just feed the greedy companies and play some games then.

Unless of course you can enjoy some other game almost as much, then it's a small sacrifice to stick it to the greedy companies. But I'm not enjoying indie or retro games much at all.

I agree that life is too short, but I arrived at a different conclusion, which is that it's too short to care about DRM that much. I set up a separate operating system only used for gaming, and so they can have all the intrusive anti-cheat and DRM and whatnot, because it's effectively an empty system, not even knowing my real name. As far as I'm concerned, the greedy assholes have already won, I won't really make a difference here. But I can have a good time, and that good time will be more or less on my terms.

I do care about games. I play lots of games. I play some that have online components and I play knowing that it could all disappear out from under me. That'd suck but that's a risk I'm willing to take.

Other games I choose to not play because of the online requirements.

Lastly, they're just video games. It's nothing critical like food or housing. Not having video games is not a humanitarian crisis. I've been playing WoW since launch and if Blizzard shut it down and my characters I've had for 18 years vanished, it'd suck for like a minute, then I'd go do something else.

My personal answer to this is "adapt". I shifted my thinking of games as experiences, with a limited time offer. Like a ticket to a theme park, or to the movies. Let's pay for it now, make good memories, connect with each other in the context, and properly let it go, when the time comes. And remember when buying, that the button might say "buy", but you effectively license, or rent. The time will come when they will change the experience, and that'll be it. So make the most of it while you can.

The problem is they offered you a service that was unsustainable in the first place. You can't offer a one time sale for a product that requires continual maintenance.

In all cases where this is being offered with a product, for example, a game with developer maintained multiplayer servers/lookup services, all app portals like the apple app store, steam, etc. There is either a runway of funds built in that will expire in so many years or it's propped up by other people buying the game like a kind of a Ponzi scheme.

Eventually, somehow the bill to run these services becomes an issue and there are only a few ways to maintain it: ads, buyout with more runway, cutting access or charging for it again.

So I wouldn't say it's theft, it's a business run by people who have no clue how to run a long term business plan. Or fraud if they know all of this and do it anyway.

Well, some hosting costs also go down over time. If the backend server doesn't need a GPU and is just there to facilitate matchmaking for example, what used to be very difficult and required dedicated companies (like Gamespy) can now just be trivially and cheaply/freely rolled into Steamworks or similar matchmaking APIs.

Ongoing patches and updates are another story though, especially if new Windowses or DirectX versions have breaking changes.

If you pay $20 for a game on sale and it works for half a decade and has multiplayer and updates throughout, is it really necessary to complain about it...?

Uhh, why are UT, UT2003 and UT2004 on the list? Are they shutting down server browsers for them?

Yep. No idea why. Cost cutting, even if costs are minimal? Open source them ffs if you're not going to sell them.

The community will figure it out. If it still exists, that is. If not, perhaps it deserves to die. Would be a pity though, I really liked UT2004, better than UT3.

May not be minimal to maintain and patch legacy C++ code against various security vulnerabilities. The risk/benefit of doing imperfect patching might obviously indicate shutting it down.

Meanwhile, open-sourcing is usually inhibited by 1) licenses of middleware in the tech stack and 2) sketchy code that's not ready for public sharing. It truly is a ton of work to open source commercial code!

If they opensource the older server code, someone else can build a new compatible version with say, golang or rust, that can end up leaner & faster but also a bit more secure as it can be updated.

I’m sure that’s a big consideration, but they really could just dump whatever code they own the rights to, in whatever state it’s in, and people would be thrilled.

Although, now that I write that out, I bet determining the code they have rights to is, sadly, more work than they’re willing to put in.

Edit: also, if some of the code is used elsewhere in current games, this could inadvertently reveal security bugs in them.

Wow I'm surprised they're pulling Hatoful Boyfriend too. That is a great philosophy simulator disguised as a dating simulator where you try to court birds.

just Mac and Linux? Tim Sweeney IIRC hates everything not PC

Let's not succumb to the redmondian propaganda that Linux isn't PC.

I thought the Windows=PC "othering" was more of an Apple initiative, like in the "Get a Mac" campaigns

Should have said 'not Windows'

I meant the Mac and Linux version was removed from Steam too

The game haven't had any meaningful update for years and it was unplayable on modern Mac since they moved to 64bit only https://steamdb.info/app/310080/patchnotes/

They just pull out of date downloads. There's not much info on Proton and Wine compatibility, because of the originally existing Linux version I guess, but I think there's a good chance that it will run fine.

Back in 2015 when I was at AppDynamics, we sold a bunch of APM into Xbox. The Autopilot-based IaaS there (NOT Azure), their own web server (NOT IIS) and a huge mess of interconnected services proved to be a really steep climb for us but we sure had fun.

One of the use cases that we explored was how to enable the minimum level of care and feeding for all the services for the games that are still out but no longer hot, like something that's 5, 10, 15 years old. Nobody there wanted to touch those AT ALL, but it had to be maintained for contractual reasons. Operating in this proverbially dusty and cobwebbed areas of the code was very interesting. You had to move really carefully to not disturb anything, because often there was no original engineers left anymore who could fix things if they broke.

So I am not surprised that Epic turns old stuff.

Developers should be required to develop a mechanism to run a server outside their networks after the game has been discontinued.

The publishers should put the source code for the server into escrow under the condition that the code gets released with appropriate open source licensing if the company no longer runs any available servers.

I'd really like to run my own servers for some of the MMOs I played as a kid. But they're mostly from Taiwanese/Chinese/Japanese companies...

Does anybody have some resources on running your own custom servers? For example, how private WoW servers work, were they reverse engineering?

I've been following this community [0] which has unofficially relaunched a Korean online game which originally only lasted from 2003 to 2007 [1] and I played when I was a kid. It's amazing to be able to login into the same UI/UX and play the same game almost 15 years later.

[0] https://www.spgenerations.com/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_Project

https://www.getmangos.eu/forums/topic/9974-how-did-the-dev-t...

The publishers usually can't publish their games' source code, because of various library and middleware dependencies which are not free or open-source.

Same issue with cheap IoT gizmos. Even if the retailers wanted to publish an implementation of their backend servers, they probably bought (rented) much of the functionality from a third party, under a license which forbids redistribution of the third party's IP.

Or, as another option, gamers should have the right to refund the game if it becomes not as described. Developers then have a choice -- either continue to run servers or be ready for incoming refunds.

Years ago I bought a great new PC. “But does it play Crysis” I thought. So I bought Crysis 1 on Steam on a big special, daydreaming about finally maxing out those settings. Turns out it doesn’t play Crysis, because there’s some mandatory anti cheating thing that phones home, but that company no longer exists.

This is why I'll never be against piracy especially in gaming. I personally buy all the games I play but, I've run into situations similar to the one you just described with Crysis 1.

FTA: The following titles will have all online services disabled on January 24, after which players can continue playing single or local multiplayer modes offline:

- 1000 Tiny Claws

- Dance Central 1-3 (Note: Dance Central VR online multiplayer will remain available)

- Green Day: Rock Band

- Monsters (Probably) Stole My Princess

- Rock Band 1-3 (Note: Rock Band 4 online multiplayer will remain available)

- The Beatles: Rock Band

- Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars

- Unreal Gold

- Unreal II: The Awakening

- Unreal Tournament 2003

- Unreal Tournament 2004

- Unreal Tournament 3 (Note: We have plans to bring back online features via Epic Online Services in the future.)

- Unreal Tournament: Game of the Year Edition

Man, I bought a dozen songs for Rock Band just a year ago because I brought it out to play with friends. Guess I'll never get to play those again :/

I know it's not reasonable to expect companies to keep their online infrastructure up forever, but I wonder what the actual operating costs of most of these servers are. I can't imagine most of them are operating at a scale much larger than my personal home server at this point.

Damn, I'll miss Unreal Tournament 2004 and UT:GOTY online multiplayer matches.

UT99 is already managed by the community, so it'll be fine. They'd need to update some master server list possibly, but I don't think that's impossible.

I wonder if this opens up some interesting opportunities though. Supposedly some members of the community have sufficient access to source code to issue (unofficial?) patches, but were instructed by Epic to only make changes that don't break vanilla, out-of-the-box UT99 - I guess so that you could buy the game on GoG and start playing using the official servers. If they're cutting it loose, this might free the community up to make some changes they've been keen to do - for example apparently the netcode is pretty janky but has been off-limits so far.

Will need to pester my friend who knows about this better than me, but in short: UT99 isn't going away any time soon.

Low gravity instakill is awesome.

Sad.

First they kill the new Unreal Tournament. Now they're killing off the rest of it.

Unreal Gold Unreal II: The Awakening Unreal Tournament 2003 Unreal Tournament 2004 Unreal Tournament 3 Unreal Tournament: Game of the Year Edition

So 4 games will be completely unusable, while the others "will have all online services disabled on January 24, after which players can continue playing single or local multiplayer modes offline".

If I buy (licence) a game from epic that requires servers they maintain to function ... so they have to give me back the money now that they have rendered the game non-functional?

You don’t have a perpetual license, so no.

Is there any minimal duration requirement? Or is the developer allowed to publish the game and shut down the servers, say, a month later?

If you bought the game, and the seller didn't make it exceedingly clear that you were renting instead of buying, then yes, you do own a perpetual license.

Just because the developers write "actually you didn't buy it even though we said you did, tough shit" in the EULA doesn't make it true.

Can't run your own server? I don't want the game, no matter how great it is. Nothing like having your game and DLC go poof when the servers get the old rug pull.

I don't care about Epic specifically, but I do care about some other games that have been made dependent on central servers.

I don't want to the publishers of those other games seeing Epic get away with this, and thinking that they too can shut down necessary central servers.

How costly does the expected legal and PR fallout have to be, that publishers won't try to do this?

This was a regular practice when I worked on services at EA. Old games had online components shut down or de-registered. The utilization of the game was always a factor, but games that were 2-3 years old, particularly in sports, got discontinued regularly - with player communication involved.

I have an idea for "Sunset Matchmaking". The concept benefits companies by reducing their costs and benefits players by allowing them to find a game provided another person (somewhere in the world) wants to play too.

I'm not convinced it would be a viable SaaS but might work as an opensource project.

I remember when Unreal 1 out. Network play sucked - contrary to what they had been hyping. Mark Rein did a chat event ( was it planetunreal?) and I asked him to promise that Epic would fix it and not roll the fixes into a new game. About 2 months later Unreal Tournament was announced.

Full circle.

Just wish they'd open source UT2k4. Why wouldn't they at this point?

As a game developer working for a large AAA studio myself - it's usually not because people don't want to, it's because companies are usually opposed to spending any money on things which aren't strictly necessary. The topic of open sourcing some of our older games(and I really do mean older, like 20 years plus) keeps coming up every now and then, but each time it's shut down because legal would need to do full assessment of everything surrounding it, like maybe we could release the code but not the assets like music or models used, in the grand scheme of things it wouldn't cost a lot or money or time, but in general anything above 0 on a project that won't bring any money in is too much(as sad as that is). And even the code itself might need cleaning up, 20 years ago the programming culture was very different and there is plenty of plainly inappropriate comments in the code and you'd want someone to make a full pass on the code and clean this up first. And finally - after 20 years we might not even have the code and/or full assets available. I spent a long time trying to find the source files used to render the cutscenes in the game but they are all gone. And we are 99% sure that the code we have for one of our games is not actually for the master version that shipped, but for a revision just before. So you could open source that, but it wouldn't build the same game that people are playing right now.

I can't speak for Epic here of course, but I imagine the reasoning here is somewhat similar - any developer put on this project is a developer not working on something else.

> won't bring any money in is too much(as sad as that is)

Depends on what your measure is: capitalistic -profit and shareholders above everything else- then yes, if you take a "good for society as a whole" into account not so much.

You should consider it to have free PR value. Its not just cost unless you lack imagination.

You know why artists don't usually accept payment for their work in "exposure", right? Because yes, it's not worthless, but it also doesn't pay the bills. I don't think the people in charge lack imagination - it's that the cost of legal + development work is a real thing that has to be balanced against other costs, while "PR Value" has to be specifically budgeted for.

Disclaimer: again, I'm not defending it - just pointing out that as a regular "grunt" developer I have very little impact on these things.

id software managed to pull it off. They used to open source their games a few years after they were released.

I do get it though, bigger companies tend to optimize very strongly towards reducing liability and maximizing quantifiable profits. Having even 1 employee spend a couple of days or a week combing through things as a quick pass could be time working on something else if you're making resource allocation decisions based on a spreadsheet. Personally I'd make a case that id's openness in everything (how their games can be modded and it being open sourced) had a really big impact on their success both for gaining diehard fans and profits.

>>id software managed to pull it off. They used to open source their games a few years after they were released.

Well yes, because it was John Carmack's personal belief that this is the right thing to do and he kept pushing for it every time. According to "Masters of Doom" it's something his legal team was always massively against, but being the company owner he could do it anyway. I don't think such strong belief in open source exists at the top of our company, so any such request has to be started from the bottom then be approved by 20 different layers of organisation - which makes it very difficult to actually happen.

>> Personally I'd make a case that id's openness in everything (how their games can be modded and it being open sourced) had a really big impact on their success both for gaining diehard fans and profits.

I agree, and such arguments have been made internally.

Assuming they still have the source code, do you have an 18-year-old build system with all the dependencies up and running?

VM or Docker or similar.

Besides - someone would port it to the latest.

If people would have the code, they'd figure out the rest.

"They" would figure "it" out even without the code, if they really wanted to.

They do! My point is that open sourcing is a benefit for the people, even if the build instructions are missing. It's a major boost to not have to reverse engineer.

Even if it didn't cost them any effort to do so, it would still compete against their other games while producing no revenue. For the majority of companies, that's enough reason not to bother.

I wish we had some kind of regulation that required companies to release something to keep old games up even if it's just technical details if someone wanted to create their own.

Mandatory link to the excellent "Dead Game News" series from Ross Scott: https://www.accursedfarms.com/videos/dead-game-news

Ross's exhaustive reporting & ideas on the topic are both grounded AND funny.

For a TL;DR of the main ideas and potential legal paths, see his "'Games as a service' is fraud" video: https://www.accursedfarms.com/posts/other-videos/gaasfraud

> Unreal Tournament 2004

Ow :(

Oh FFS! How much does it really cost them to keep the Unreal Tournament servers running?

And this, kids, is why you don't buy anything that has been touched by Epic.

It's not worth buying pc games if they have to launch through epic

Unreal tournament 2003 is still online? Didn't expect that.

In the cloud era, why not spin these servers up on-demand?

Because you still need a human to take care of operational stuff.

Tough love time. If you buy a game that depends on someone else's servers in any fashion (even just a server browser), you are accepting that it will be shut down at some point.

This has been shown to be the operating model of modern games for over a decade now. Even if it costs a penny to keep running, they will eventually shut it down. The outliers - those who will keep them up - are exactly that: outliers.

I wish it were otherwise, but this is a purely capitalistic move that will never get enough support to be regulated; and so it will never change.

And there goes unreal master servers

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