 When games that are live service, or rely heavily on servers get cut off, they should at the very least release the server code so others can continue hosting it. Stop being afraid of open source and embrace it. Too many games will be lost to greed. Duelyst is a wonderful recent example of how to do it right. 11 comments
 @gamingonlinux They could even just drop the code as is, without any support or cleanup, and people wouldn’t care, and still use it. It would cost them 0 and would gain them tons of good will. It’s insane how formatted these people must be to not even see that solution… @gamingonlinux  @gamingonlinux Even if they don’t open source the server making a downloadable version of it already helps a lot. If there is interest the community can reverse engineer it at some point and then new development can happen.   @gamingonlinux My all time favourite game S4 League (released in 2007) had its last official server shut down in 2021. In my case, I got lucky. There's an (incomplete, but with most popular game modes working) publicly available reverse-engineered server and a small handful of private servers. I can still play my favourite game to this day. But the sad reality is that many games don't end up attracting the type of people who can reverse engineer this. And they're lost forever. I weep for them. @gamingonlinux damn right, if your company deems it no longer wants to patch/support, hand it over, don't burn it to the ground ! @gamingonlinux I can think of many games, especially some games from my childhood, that would benefit extremely from this. Just Survive, if anyone remembers that game, is one. @gamingonlinux just take all the source ports of DooM, Quake 1, 2 and 3 and rebase them on the Unreal engine 1. Jokes aside we owe a lot to John Carmack. |
Gregory's Server
Imagine instead of the complete brutal removal from stores and shutdown that Epic Games are doing with Unreal Tournament, if Tim Sweeney fully open sourced the original. Imagine the fun people could have with such gaming history.
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2022/12/epic-games-are-killing-off-a-bunch-of-classics-like-unreal-tournament/