The Reality of Keeping Online Game Servers Open: A Discussion on Dedicated Servers vs. Official Servers Shutdown

Although I am certainly in favor of making it possible to offer dedicated servers as soon as the official servers go down, it is realistic to leave the servers of every ‘online’ game open until the end of time if dedicated server tools are not possible is? In my opinion, it must remain realistic, because it is not just about keeping servers open, but also about keeping staff available for support, etc.

On the page you post it says nicely ‘,,,and had a playerbase of at least 12 million people.’, but that is a bit of a boast, 12 ~ million is the number of copies sold on multiple platforms, but how many of these 12 million people still play The Crew?

No more data is shown for The Crew on Steam:
https://steamdb.info/app/241560/charts/

If I can believe it, a peak of 187 players played The Crew via Steam in March, probably because of the page you linked, otherwise the player count is under 100 players per day. Now, combined with other platforms, this will probably be higher, but I suspect that this is far away from 12 million players…

New World is a more recent online only game (MMO), released 3 years ago and as far as I can see it has sold something like 17 million times, this game has attracted around 9000-15000 players per day in recent months, what would that be like with a game that was released 7 years before New World and is even a sequel?.
https://steamdb.info/app/1063730/charts/#3m

Then you see game developers choosing not to make online games anymore, except for free games here and there packed with microtransactions.

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“What about large scale MMORPG’s, isn’t it impossible for customers to run those when servers are shut down?”
A: Not at all, however limitations can apply. Several MMORPGs that have been shut down have seen ‘server emulators’ emerge that are capable of hosting thousands of other players, just on a single user’s system. Not all will be this scalable, however. For extra demanding videogames that require powerful servers the average user will not have access to, the game will not be playable on the same scale as when the developer or publisher was hosting it. That said, that is no excuse for players not to be able to continue playing the game in some form once support ends. So, if a server could originally support 5000 people, but the end user version can only support 500, that’s still a massive improvement from no one being able to play the game ever again.

A company will not continuously rewrite the server software for every game. After releasing an earlier iteration of the server software, this can be reviewed by bad actors to more easily find exploits that could potentially be abused in newer games. As a result, your enjoyment of newer games is taken away by cheaters/hackers.

…and what about (security) exploits, etc. in server software that they release to players after support ends? Are the developers expected to release updates for this years later without obligation so that cheaters can be stopped and your server cannot be hijacked via an exploit?

[Reactie gewijzigd door Kantenklaar op 12 april 2024 21:38]

2024-04-12 18:29:58
#Ubisoft #appears #removing #Crew #launchers #servers #offline