5 ms·

A lot of it is due to companies centralizing games and putting up huge barriers to even make games functional without their black box servers. After many of the

A lot of it is due to companies centralizing games and putting up huge barriers to even make games functional without their black box servers. After many of these games die off population wise, the companies just drop them instead of giving back to the community to preserve it. Look at TF2--it could foreseeably be modified and anyone can run a server for it. It may be possible to preserve it. Blizzard's Overwatch on the other hand, which is somewhat of a successor to it, they won't let the game to work at all without their servers since it's a gigantic, centralized black box. Those servers might go away. The only reason WoW is preserved for the future at all with third party vanilla servers is because during the beta they made a mistake and leaked a ton of debugging info and world data early on. Ideally (from the company's perspective), we wouldn't even had that and one of the biggest blockbuster MMOs in history would simply be lost. Not picking on Blizzard in particular, but they've gone from a decentralized model in the Diablo 1, War 2 BNE, and Starcraft 1 days to massively centralized. If there isn't a profit to be had, I think they'll be very happy to let the history die there, which is very unfortunate and seems to be a model many AAA game companies are taking at this point, not just Blizz.

xg15 10y ago
The irony is that a lot of games before the era of centralisation have active preservation communities and will probably live on - but a lot of newer games likely won't, for the reasons you described. I think it's very likely people will still play Tetris, Final Fantasy IV and Star Craft in 50 years. Star Craft II and Final Fantasy XV? Not so much.
- moonshinefe 10y ago
  Exactly right, we're looking at a hole in modern video game archival history with the way the industry models their games these days. The older games aren't nearly as hard to preserve.
- TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
  And that's just single-player games. Will MMORPGs like Final Fantasy XIV still be playable?
- degenerate 10y ago
  Life, uh, finds a way. As long as you have talented people that love a game, they will find some way to preserve it. Even though Blizzard is still running Battle.net to this day (bless them for that) -- people have created spin-off servers for Starcraft by analyzing the netcode and mimicking the servers: https://freeablo.org/ https://freeablo.org/ (diablo) https://shieldbattery.net/splash https://shieldbattery.net/splash (starcraft broodwar) http://www.openwow.com/ http://www.openwow.com/ (world of warcraft) If Blizzard ever shut down battle.net 2.0 there will be a group of people putting their heads together to mimic the server. Or, if needed, recreate the entire game engine from decompiled code or scratch. Look at OpenRA and OpenBW for these examples: http://www.openra.net/about/ http://www.openra.net/about/ http://www.openbw.com/ http://www.openbw.com/ And if that's not good enough, game preservation might become a new industry just like art preservation. We already have GoG releasing classic titles by working with publishers and digital rights holders to re-release classic games; this model can be extended to those "black box" games where the server code is saved in a repository for years but never released until someone like GoG comes along and revives the game the legal way: https://www.gog.com/ https://www.gog.com/ So, if a game is loved by enough people it will live on.
TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
Anyone can run a server for TF2. In fact, official servers for it are a new thing.
- moonshinefe 10y ago
  Yes. And if they can patch out the connecting to steam requirement for TF2, it can be preserved even if Steam dies eventually. Unfortunately for Overwatch, a battle.net account / connection and their centralized servers makes it a far harder task. They've moved toward a model where the reverse engineering and ingenuity involved to get it to work outside of their control is increasingly prohibitive. These things often take volunteers hundreds of hours to figure out and are illegal according to terms of service agreements (followed by lawsuits no less--if you look into "bnetd" and "fsgs" starcraft alt servers, and WoW bots, Blizzard is not afraid to go this route). If it's just too much work for said hackers, it likely will not get done, especially if legal action against the volunteers is a probability.
  - zer0t3ch 10y ago
    I like to imagine that if Battle.net ever died, they would release a patch for overwatch that would remove the battle.net connectivity.
    - rarec 10y ago
      That's one strong imagination.
      - zer0t3ch 10y ago
        Never said it was likely, just hoped for.
    - throwaway7767 10y ago
      I like to imagine good things too, but I suspect if that happened it would be because company would be in bankruptcy proceedings. The trustee appointed will have a mandate to extract the most money from the carcass of the company, and arranging for work to be done to release a DRM-free patch is definitely not part of that, and I doubt he could legally do it even if he wanted to. There is also quite some history showing that DRM-content providers do go under, and people do lose access to their "purchased" (rented) items.
emodendroket 10y ago
The appeal is obvious though. These games are actually impossible to pirate.
- moonshinefe 10y ago
  I feel any game is possible to pirate given enough resources. However, point taken, there's definitely a certain drop off point where the resources required to do it aren't very likely to be marshaled when it becomes sufficiently prohibitive. It's preferable to a company trying to squeeze all the profits possible out of their games, but certainly not for preserving gaming history many years later when profits aren't much of a factor.
  - emodendroket 10y ago
    I mean, I guess it's possible to reverse engineer and implement the entire server side. But it wouldn't really be different from implementing a clone of a game as a way of "pirating" it at that point.
- jasonkostempski 10y ago
  Not sure if there's a game that does this already but if I ever made an MMO, I'd try a business model of open source server and client and compete on paid hosting. Minecraft sort of has that going with realms but closed source and centralized accounts. Both of those have been circumvented with the Java code but the C++ based version is the future and the Java code with eventual get feature freeze. Edit: Now that I think about it, this is pretty much the same as the current business model for many development platforms, open source tools and cross platform support, compete on hosting.
  - shinymark 10y ago
    Isn't the hosting the commodity part of the equation and the creation of the game where the valuable IP is?
M_Grey 10y ago
How many of these newer games though, frankly deserve to be kept around? Most of them are just the nth iteration of the original which made their name, and bring little or nothing to the table. If .1% of today's games survive, you'll have a really good idea about the other 99.8% with .1% left to surprise you.
- Vaskivo 10y ago
  That is irrelevant. "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder". Everything should be preserved. And given that games are a digital medium, it's probably one of the easiest to preserve.
  - M_Grey 10y ago
    "Everything should be preserved." In what perfect world? In the real world, triage is a thing.
    - prophesi 10y ago
      Except that doesn't really apply here. If these servers weren't black-boxed, it'd be trivial to preserve them. But I understand why companies don't want this, however. Why would you want people playing your game for free on private servers instead of your own?
      - goda90 10y ago
        Or, once they stop making money on a game, why would they want people playing it for free instead of playing their new games?
        pm90 10y ago
        Because newer games are usually better in every way except one: nostalgia. Even though diablo 3 is available the only game I play regularly is diablo 2 despite its horrible graphics, simply because it brings back fond memories of childhood.
muse900 10y ago
"The only reason WoW is preserved for the future at all with third party vanilla servers is because during the beta they made a mistake and leaked a ton of debugging info and world data early on. Ideally (from the company's perspective), we wouldn't even had that and one of the biggest blockbuster MMOs in history would simply be lost" I'll disagree with this one right here. I've been part of the wow emulation community at its very early stages and it was in fact some inside info that a few people got. (Angry employees etc you name it) The earliest wow emulator is from late vanilla. The world data also exist on the client side making its easier to use them. Blizzard has found more ways of countering decrypting actual packets from the server to the client but of course as always at some point the c3-c4 packet algorithms are leaked by an unknown source.
- moonshinefe 10y ago
  Yeah, I think my memory may be inaccurate / hazy since at this point, it's been almost 13 (!!) years. Boy, I feel old now. I think I was referring to: http://www.eqemulator.org/forums/archive/index.php/t-11175.html http://www.eqemulator.org/forums/archive/index.php/t-11175.h... and similar. So not even an emulator, just a leaked, crippled version of the game earlier on. Thanks for the correction.
hkmurakami 10y ago
I wonder what'll happen with app store, even if the developer doesn't use centralized servers. From what I understand, old unupdated games will soon be removed from app store and it won't even be possible to download them?
overcast 10y ago
The last company I would worry about servers going away is Blizzard. People are still playing the first Starcraft and Diablo 1 and 2. How many years later is that? WoW has been around forever as well. All of their "worlds" are lasting.

xg15 10y ago

The irony is that a lot of games before the era of centralisation have active preservation communities and will probably live on - but a lot of newer games likely won't, for the reasons you described. I think it's very likely people will still play Tetris, Final Fantasy IV and Star Craft in 50 years. Star Craft II and Final Fantasy XV? Not so much.

moonshinefe 10y ago
Exactly right, we're looking at a hole in modern video game archival history with the way the industry models their games these days. The older games aren't nearly as hard to preserve.
TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago
And that's just single-player games. Will MMORPGs like Final Fantasy XIV still be playable?
degenerate 10y ago
Life, uh, finds a way. As long as you have talented people that love a game, they will find some way to preserve it. Even though Blizzard is still running Battle.net to this day (bless them for that) -- people have created spin-off servers for Starcraft by analyzing the netcode and mimicking the servers: https://freeablo.org/ https://freeablo.org/ (diablo) https://shieldbattery.net/splash https://shieldbattery.net/splash (starcraft broodwar) http://www.openwow.com/ http://www.openwow.com/ (world of warcraft) If Blizzard ever shut down battle.net 2.0 there will be a group of people putting their heads together to mimic the server. Or, if needed, recreate the entire game engine from decompiled code or scratch. Look at OpenRA and OpenBW for these examples: http://www.openra.net/about/ http://www.openra.net/about/ http://www.openbw.com/ http://www.openbw.com/ And if that's not good enough, game preservation might become a new industry just like art preservation. We already have GoG releasing classic titles by working with publishers and digital rights holders to re-release classic games; this model can be extended to those "black box" games where the server code is saved in a repository for years but never released until someone like GoG comes along and revives the game the legal way: https://www.gog.com/ https://www.gog.com/ So, if a game is loved by enough people it will live on.

TazeTSchnitzel 10y ago

Anyone can run a server for TF2. In fact, official servers for it are a new thing.

moonshinefe 10y ago
Yes. And if they can patch out the connecting to steam requirement for TF2, it can be preserved even if Steam dies eventually. Unfortunately for Overwatch, a battle.net account / connection and their centralized servers makes it a far harder task. They've moved toward a model where the reverse engineering and ingenuity involved to get it to work outside of their control is increasingly prohibitive. These things often take volunteers hundreds of hours to figure out and are illegal according to terms of service agreements (followed by lawsuits no less--if you look into "bnetd" and "fsgs" starcraft alt servers, and WoW bots, Blizzard is not afraid to go this route). If it's just too much work for said hackers, it likely will not get done, especially if legal action against the volunteers is a probability.
- zer0t3ch 10y ago
  I like to imagine that if Battle.net ever died, they would release a patch for overwatch that would remove the battle.net connectivity.
  - rarec 10y ago
    That's one strong imagination.
    - zer0t3ch 10y ago
      Never said it was likely, just hoped for.
  - throwaway7767 10y ago
    I like to imagine good things too, but I suspect if that happened it would be because company would be in bankruptcy proceedings. The trustee appointed will have a mandate to extract the most money from the carcass of the company, and arranging for work to be done to release a DRM-free patch is definitely not part of that, and I doubt he could legally do it even if he wanted to. There is also quite some history showing that DRM-content providers do go under, and people do lose access to their "purchased" (rented) items.

emodendroket 10y ago

The appeal is obvious though. These games are actually impossible to pirate.

moonshinefe 10y ago
I feel any game is possible to pirate given enough resources. However, point taken, there's definitely a certain drop off point where the resources required to do it aren't very likely to be marshaled when it becomes sufficiently prohibitive. It's preferable to a company trying to squeeze all the profits possible out of their games, but certainly not for preserving gaming history many years later when profits aren't much of a factor.
- emodendroket 10y ago
  I mean, I guess it's possible to reverse engineer and implement the entire server side. But it wouldn't really be different from implementing a clone of a game as a way of "pirating" it at that point.
jasonkostempski 10y ago
Not sure if there's a game that does this already but if I ever made an MMO, I'd try a business model of open source server and client and compete on paid hosting. Minecraft sort of has that going with realms but closed source and centralized accounts. Both of those have been circumvented with the Java code but the C++ based version is the future and the Java code with eventual get feature freeze. Edit: Now that I think about it, this is pretty much the same as the current business model for many development platforms, open source tools and cross platform support, compete on hosting.
- shinymark 10y ago
  Isn't the hosting the commodity part of the equation and the creation of the game where the valuable IP is?

M_Grey 10y ago

How many of these newer games though, frankly deserve to be kept around? Most of them are just the nth iteration of the original which made their name, and bring little or nothing to the table. If .1% of today's games survive, you'll have a really good idea about the other 99.8% with .1% left to surprise you.

Vaskivo 10y ago
That is irrelevant. "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder". Everything should be preserved. And given that games are a digital medium, it's probably one of the easiest to preserve.
- M_Grey 10y ago
  "Everything should be preserved." In what perfect world? In the real world, triage is a thing.
  - prophesi 10y ago
    Except that doesn't really apply here. If these servers weren't black-boxed, it'd be trivial to preserve them. But I understand why companies don't want this, however. Why would you want people playing your game for free on private servers instead of your own?
    - goda90 10y ago
      Or, once they stop making money on a game, why would they want people playing it for free instead of playing their new games?
      - pm90 10y ago
        Because newer games are usually better in every way except one: nostalgia. Even though diablo 3 is available the only game I play regularly is diablo 2 despite its horrible graphics, simply because it brings back fond memories of childhood.

muse900 10y ago

"The only reason WoW is preserved for the future at all with third party vanilla servers is because during the beta they made a mistake and leaked a ton of debugging info and world data early on. Ideally (from the company's perspective), we wouldn't even had that and one of the biggest blockbuster MMOs in history would simply be lost" I'll disagree with this one right here. I've been part of the wow emulation community at its very early stages and it was in fact some inside info that a few people got. (Angry employees etc you name it) The earliest wow emulator is from late vanilla. The world data also exist on the client side making its easier to use them. Blizzard has found more ways of countering decrypting actual packets from the server to the client but of course as always at some point the c3-c4 packet algorithms are leaked by an unknown source.

moonshinefe 10y ago
Yeah, I think my memory may be inaccurate / hazy since at this point, it's been almost 13 (!!) years. Boy, I feel old now. I think I was referring to: http://www.eqemulator.org/forums/archive/index.php/t-11175.html http://www.eqemulator.org/forums/archive/index.php/t-11175.h... and similar. So not even an emulator, just a leaked, crippled version of the game earlier on. Thanks for the correction.

hkmurakami 10y ago

I wonder what'll happen with app store, even if the developer doesn't use centralized servers. From what I understand, old unupdated games will soon be removed from app store and it won't even be possible to download them?

overcast 10y ago

The last company I would worry about servers going away is Blizzard. People are still playing the first Starcraft and Diablo 1 and 2. How many years later is that? WoW has been around forever as well. All of their "worlds" are lasting.