“Although Sweet Bandits had to close their doors, we don’t believe Deceive Inc. should quietly disappear because the services behind it aren’t sustainable forever,” the unsigned post reads. "We’re actively rebuilding Deceive Inc.’s backend to be sustainable indefinitely and support community-hosted dedicated servers.
Good guy devs and count me in for self-hosting a dedicated server.
Bummer their company didn’t work out but good on them for not screwing over their customers!
Un-live? I like the sound of this!
They also could have just done that from the start. Look, this is good news, but the reason you design your servers like that in the first place is because you have the hubris to think you’re going to make Fortnite money. Hopefully their next project isn’t built with the same naivety.
You are correct, and to expand upon that, it also shows they learned from their mistake and are trying to make good on that implied promise 🤞
It shows that they’re trying to keep the game in a state where they’re spending no money and still potentially making money, but that may not be mutually exclusive with what you said.
They’re spending a lot of resources to get the game to a state where they wouldn’t need to spend money on it. I’d be surprised if they recouped those costs.
Studio is shut down anyways. They are literally just leaving their legacy alive instead of allowing it to be buried with them. I don’t think any costs are gonna be recouped.
By they I meant the publisher. The studio is shut down but the rights are owned by the publisher and considering the article mentions the studio coming to an agreement with the publisher it’s very likely the publisher is footing some (if not all) of the bill.
Understood, thank you for clarifying.
This is just not the case. There are many reasons to have a centralized model, especially for a small studio who has to focus their efforts.
If you want to have a ladder, a matchmaking system, unlockable content, or even just to guarantee a smooth user experience, then you need the server to run on your own trusted hardware.
Literally no MMO could work without a centralized model. Destiny relies on this. Every competitive shooter, or extraction shooter relies on this.
And when you’re a small studio, and you have “support the server that won’t be distributed publicly” and “support the server that will be distributed publicly”, one of those requires an order of magnitude more effort just for validation. When you have to crunch for a deadline, sorry, the primary user experience is going to get priority.
They are doing voluntarily what I want a Stop Killing Games initiative to require from all studios: just ensure the game continues to work.
Hopefully their next project isn’t built with the same naivety.
You understand they’re out of business, right?
They can have a ladder and matchmaking while still providing a server browser that goes to self-hosted servers. Even then, these are things that you set up with the assumption that your game is going to have a massive population, which is the foolish assumption all these live service games make. MMOs have been self-hosted for as long as pirates have been reverse-engineering the code. The only thing stopping it from happening more is the rights holders’ willingness to allow it. Competitive shooters started from server browsers and self-hosted servers.
They are doing voluntarily what I want a Stop Killing Games initiative to require from all studios: just ensure the game continues to work.
If they wait until the game is a failure and about to close shop, I have no guarantee that this update will be its fate. But let’s say I know in advance somehow that the game is going to survive the servers’ decommissioning; I still end up with all the other negative side effects of an always-online game in the interim. Server queues, downtime that I can’t do anything about, no ability to play LAN with friends in a place with lousy internet, etc. SKG is looking for a minimum of preservation that I can get behind, but I don’t think it would be enough for me as a customer unless it was never always-online.
You understand they’re out of business, right?
Looks like I missed it as I scrolled by a block on that page trying to recommend me other articles, as I was looking for the rest of this article.
Looks like I missed it as I scrolled by a block on that page trying to recommend me other articles, as I was looking for the rest of this article.
The first three words of the title are “closed game studio.”
Fair enough, but the fourth is “returns”.
They can have a ladder and matchmaking while still providing a server browser that goes to self-hosted servers
True, but I explained that for a small team who has to choose where the spend their resources, supporting both can be prohibitively costly
these are things that you set up with the assumption that your game is going to have a massive population
False, I listed several features a game of any size might reasonably want.
MMOs have been self-hosted for as long as pirates have been reverse-engineering the code
That’s irrelevant to the discussion for multiple reasons, but the part that is relevant relates to the control over content, and an intended user experience. No one on a community MMO server is able to play alongside people on official servers, which is literally the point of an MMO. They can’t because there’s no control over the content; admins of those servers can (and do) hand out 100x the gold, XP, and top level gear, which is not the intended experience. Allowing the servers to exist is a completely separate legal matter (using a fully reverse engineered backend should not be a problem, but distributing copyrighted IP, much less charging money is a problem), but you can’t demand that a dev dedicate resources to support an unintended user experience.
If they wait until the game is a failure and about to close shop, I have no guarantee that this update will be its fate.
It would be as simple as saying, “if you can’t release a proper server binary, then you have to make your source available to license holders” (There may need to be an audit step when selling a game in a country to prove that they have the legal ability to open source their backend if it comes to that, but that is tenable.)
I still end up with all the other negative side effects of an always-online game in the interim.
Then make your own game. That’s an absurd demand. That’s like going to a theater or buying a bluray, and then demanding the director re-shoot various scenes on your behalf. They made the experience they made, they’re willing to sell you a license to experience what they made. No one is forcing you to buy it, and we should force them to ensure the license never expires and that experience can always be experienced.
I think you’re conflating a few things of what I said here. I know what SKG is asking for, and I’m not suggesting they change it.
What I personally want is a game that survives offline today, tomorrow, and indefinitely, for the reasons I’ve stated.
And I think that regardless of whether or not anything changes legislatively, it’s such a losing bet to design your infrastructure for online matchmaking only, since most populations drop off extremely quickly, that you end up with costly retrofits like this in a best-case scenario after that point, so you may as well prepare for low population instead. This game, for instance, went from thousands of concurrent players to hundreds in just two months. It’s not an absurd demand to get a game built for offline play. They still make those. No one is forcing me to buy a game that isn’t built that way, but it’s really fucking hard to know which is which sometimes, even when doing research. The only thing that necessitates a central server that only the company controls, even for an MMO, is the business model, and them not wanting you to remove opportunities for them to sell you subscriptions and microtransactions. Nothing needs one, especially when the odds are your game will end up with low pop in no time at all.
I know what SKG is asking for, and I’m not suggesting they change it. What I personally want is…
So, yes, there may be a breakdown in terminology here. When I hear someone say they “demand” something from someone, for ex.
It’s not an absurd demand to get a game built for offline play
I’m hearing that you want legislation to require offline play. To me “demand” means non-negotiable.
If you aren’t saying that you think SKG should introduce legislation to make your preferences legally mandated, and instead just indicating what you would like to see from devs, maybe a better word to use is, “ask”. I don’t think it’s an absurd ask for a game to be built for offline play. But for games where offline play doesn’t make sense, it’s absurd to make it mandatory.
it’s really fucking hard to know which is which sometimes, even when doing research
Agreed, and there’s no legislation requiring devs to lay out their plan ahead of time, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable for the people to demand that information.
The only thing that necessitates a central server that only the company controls, even for an MMO, is the business model
I disagree. By releasing a dedicated server binary for a game, you are inviting a fractured playerbase. “Given the opportunity, players will optimize the fun out of a game”, and sometimes, letting players host their own game server gives them that opportunity. It is difficult enough to get people to play your game to begin with, it can be a deathknell to your intended experience if you allow players control over hosting your game.
I’ll give a tangible example: I played Sea of Thieves several years ago. The intended experience is that you are sailing on an open sea with your crew, collecting treasure, and always with the possibility of running into another crew. Sometimes those other crews would be friendly, and you’d team up and complete content with them, or maybe just pass each other by while keeping a sharp eye on them. Other times they would be openly hostile, and you’d immediately be thrust into a ship battle. But most interactions fell in the middle somewhere. They might help you defeat a boss, only to then turn on you and take the treasure for themselves. Because you’re pirates. That tension of not knowing who you can trust was core to the game.
But for the entire life of SoT, players complained about running into pirates in their pirating game. “Just give me a way to do the PvE content by myself” they would complain. Eventually, they caved. They were likely losing too many players to inconvenient experiences with other players. The result is that now all the peaceful players isolate themselves, never to experience any random human interaction in game ever again, and the vast majority of people playing on open seas are just cutthroats trolling for blood. You end up with, what I believe is a less interesting experience for everyone, none of it is the original intended experience. IMO, by allowing players more choice, they chose money over the novel experience I loved the game for.
But even though I don’t play any more, the moment SoT decides they’re done hosting their servers, I don’t care what they do, as long as I can still play that game with other people. I can’t demand that they preserve the experience I liked; that’s their art and they’ve done what they want with it. But I can demand that my license to play the game never expires for any reason.
So, yes, there may be a breakdown in terminology here. When I hear someone say they “demand” something from someone, for ex.
In some cases one, in other cases the other, so that might be what you’re reading. In at least one of these cases, we’re talking about consumer demand, what I want as a customer, the customer is always right, yadda yadda.
I’m hearing that you want legislation to require offline play.
Legislatively, I support what SKG is after. My personal desires are for more than that, because the product doesn’t offer enough value to me compared to one that works offline from day 1. And I think whether customers can articulate that well enough or not, they’re making a similar evaluation of the product in front of them, which explains the culture around people making a lot of noise about Steam charts, prematurely declaring “dead games”, and so on. A game like this one that launches as anything other than a phenomenal success looks like a bad investment if other people didn’t already sign on in droves.
Agreed, and there’s no legislation requiring devs to lay out their plan ahead of time, and I don’t think it’s unreasonable for the people to demand that information.
Without legislation, they could tell me the offline binary is ready to release and all they have to do is hit the button, but I’d have no reason to believe them.
By releasing a dedicated server binary for a game, you are inviting a fractured playerbase.
This is exactly why I believe it wouldn’t fracture very far. It’s going to be far easier to get up and running and playing the game by connecting to official servers. But it will sure be nice have to a safety net.
As for the intended experience, how much does it bother developers that their customers play offline games with mods? Or back in the day we’d use cheat codes. Grand Theft Auto always had missions, but for at least the first four iterations of it, it was more of just a chaos sandbox where people would ignore the main throughline. My favorite way to play Factorio is with aliens turned off. Devs have all sorts of ways to tells us what the intended experience is, but deviating from that should be our choice. I’ll get more value out of a game that doesn’t take that away from me, and I think devs get more information about what their players actually want if they look at how many people choose the unintended experience over the intended one. It’s why Rockstar hired all of those roleplay server folks to officially integrate it into GTA6. The only reason the unintended experience is a detriment to them is because they see it as a threat to their business model.
It’s going to be far easier to get up and running and playing the game by connecting to official servers. But it will sure be nice have to a safety net.
It’s nice to have in the worst case, I agree. My only point in all of this is for you to agree that there are reasons beyond greed to centralize servers. It’s not always that they want to be the next Fortnite. There are practical budgetary and gameplay reasons to prioritize central servers. One does not simply ship a binary to the public and forget about it. It’s a whole product they need to support and test along with every update.
I think devs get more information about what their players actually want if they look at how many people choose the unintended experience over the intended one…The only reason the unintended experience is a detriment to them is because they see it as a threat to their business model.
Again, I disagree with this cynical take. Games worth playing are art, and art is not about giving the audience what it wants, it’s about an artist who has something to say that can’t be conveyed through words alone. I applaud a dev who has the guts to say, “I don’t care what you want, I’m making the experience I want people to experience”. I’ve seen too many games lose their vision, turn to their playerbase, and just do whatever the players tell them to. To me, that’s making escapism, not art. To me, the mark of a successful game is one where the creator makes exactly what they intended to, even if no one wants to play it.
The Factorio devs let you turn off aliens because that’s their intention for you to be able to do that, and that’s fine. And I defend your right to hack at any software running on your hardware to experience it however you want to, that’s fine. But it’s not an artist’s responsibility to help you achieve the experience you want, and we shouldn’t require them to. We can ask them to, but we shouldn’t require them to.
Not possible. They won’t be able to get any funding if it isn’t closed down, because the people who make the decisions are greedy fucks
The only recourse we have is to legalize game preservation, but unfortunately stop killing games got killed by the courts
I wish Amazon did this to New World.
It should be simply required by law of companies if you ask me and why I donate to groups like Stop Killing Games.
I wonder if this will happen to games like APB: Reloaded someday.
Honestly good to hear and I wouldn’t be surprised if it actually makes the game more popular than before for those that own it. I actually really enjoyed this game when it came out but it died so quickly that within a few weeks the player count went down so low that it was impossible not to get into a lobby with the sweatiest players in the whole game which made me drop it completely. There are so many games that suffer from this that could have been way more successful. Not every game can be Fortnite
The game while fun suffered the same exact issue that Wild Gate did, where any new player trying to join in gets smothered.
There just was way too much power difference between items that you have at the beginning of the game and items that you gain at the end of the game. Combined with a relatively low player count, meaning that you can’t really have skill-based or level based matchmaking, just cold cuts your new players
Oh nice, I still play this with a few friends from time to time so this is great news :3
I wonder if Steam could build a standardized notice for games like this. Right now, it makes sense to just delist it. But if it’s a functioning product dependent on a third party piece of work, then that could still be worth a purchase to some people.
Kind of like buying a broken appliance, or a spare part for that appliance.
That would also help if not everyone at the studio is okay with their work being given away for free in the case of their commercial failure. That could build systems that push towards failure.
So if seems like the peak of Good Guy Game Devs (but who still need to make money) would sell the game to normal gamers, but also offer the ability to buy a server build license.
From there, if they company goes under, they prepare to open source the game and server code in case the open source community wants to maintain both.
Is there anything else I’m missing in that assessment?
They’d need to be forward thinking in which technologies they use such that they can be handed over to customers. Open source is always nice but isn’t strictly necessary, and it’s far less likely to happen whenever middleware is involved.
As well as technical issues about how and what code you could hand over, there are likely to be issues around the IP of both the front and backend code, but also of whatever franchise the game is part of. If it’s a good, or at least milkable, franchise concept, they’ll likely need to sell it to recoup sone of their costs. Then, any code they bought in, either as a pre-existing package, or as a subcontracted unit, would be unlikely to have the sort of licence that lets them redistibute it, which means the code will likely be missing key components even if they do distribute it.
Building a basic server that does enough for a small group of players to enjoy is likely to be the simplest approach as they can control what IP goes into the server code, and by not changing the client, they avoid difficulties in that area.
