Game Server Shutdowns

This is a common rebuttal but does not pass the sniff test. Alternatives to shutting the servers down:- patching the game so it does not require a server. Many GaaS are single player games, and are online-only as a form of DRM- release a closed source binary of the server so that people can run it themselves- release documentation so people can implement their own backend- release the server as open source- be legally required to put a large sticker on the box saying "THIS GA

Multiplayer games where the game servers are never released?

"People played [...] for hours on end before their game crashed" - aaa, what?And you conclude from that that the game does not need the servers (explicit DRM or not)?

> If the game relies on servers for data, online play, or other things that is a completely different beast. That isn't just, "oh it was rendered unplayable". No it was an online game and the servers were shut down. It sucks but thats the nature of moving away from p2p online games.A non-exhaustive list of games I have operated servers for: Freelancer, Team Fortress 2, Half Life 2, Counterstrike, Space Engineers, Minecraft.We know how to solve this problem. Companies don&

Well, many games won't work when the servers go down so... Just pirate them :D

You can't run a server for yourself for most games. You have to sign into a proprietary service to download/run games. We already lost this battle. I'd like to at least get some advantages like less cheating!

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 w

It would be better to have server side tools released to host a personal instance of a given game. Too many games become lost forever when the companies stop hosting them. People who get banned could just pay AWS or something to host their own games.

At least then you could run your own server with whatever settings you wanted. Now instead you are left with unplayable games because the developer or publisher decided to shut down the servers.

Just consider this list of ~250 dead mmos:http://www.mmorpg.com/gamelist.cfm/show/dead/Cancelled-MMORP...Also consider the case of games like Starsiege: Tribes, where, to my recollection, it was perfectly possible to set up online game servers, but the master server was hard-coded in the executable, so anyone wishing to play this