Which brings me around, at last, to the point I think I was aiming for when I started out this wall of text, which is what does this mean for new games in the genre. As an example, literally every Pokemon DS/3DS title has lost its online support.īut if you want to play The Sims Online or Dungeon Runners or most any past title, there is probably a project out there for you. Of the ones I can, anything over a certain age that had some form of online support has probably lost that aspect of the game. Yes, nostalgia farming has arrived in the rest of the industry and we have some remasters and 4K remakes of older games, but I cannot go back and play every game. Think of all the video games you played over the last 25 years and how many of them are viable and playable still today. Nearly everything that ever was is out there in some form. And if the game is going to be running in some form with or without the studio, the studio might as well keep its hand in and make some money from an official version rather than losing what control they do have. It almost isn’t up to the company anymore because the fans will take matters into their own hands if the developers won’t cooperate. It is their experiences and histories now and they won’t let it go. (Because, it turns out, they’ll make emulators for that too if you won’t provide it yourself.) So we have EverQuest progression servers, WoW Classic, Old School Runescape, Aion Classic, and others out there serving that portion of the user base.Īs Jennings pointed out, these games have come to belong, emotionally at least, far more to the fans than the companies. We have reached a point in the genre where farming nostalgia for the old days and the old ways and the old experiences is a certified path to keep the fans on board and paying. Club Penguin maybe? Is there a Club Penguin emulator out there? I would suggest that it is easier to list shuttered titles that don’t have some sort of emulator or server project running except that I am not sure I could even list one title. The fans, unwilling to let go themselves, will build their own private/pirate servers just to prolong the experience. ![]() The only sure exit is to stop being profitable, and even that is no sure exit. ![]() Scott Jennings gave a presentation at IDGA Austin back in 2014 titled Let It Go – A Modest Proposal, which I would link to if I could find it again (maybe here or here), which suggested that maybe these games shouldn’t hang around forever, that maybe it doesn’t make anybody happier or healthier to perpetuate these games past a certain point, that maybe there ought to be an exit strategy, a denouement, an end to the story. But games that make the transition to success and achieve financial stability tend to stick around forever. That is, of course, a core aspect of the MMORPG space, games as a service, where players have an ongoing relationship with your game as it grows and evolves. I mean, EA owns it (Broadsword just has a contract to run it), so if it isn’t making some sort of return it wouldn’t be around. It has been hanging out all this time, holding onto a group of players that might otherwise have gone off to explore other games… or maybe they have and then returned… and generally holding its own in a corner of the market. Unlike M59, it is still there, ready to play. Leaving aside M59, the next game on the list is Ultima Online, which will turn 24 years old come September. But the real problem is that old games don’t go away, or at least not fast enough. ![]() Fans of the genre tend to bemoan its stagnation and blame WoW or free to play or whatever for the fact that things can seem stale. But M59 was an early, commercial, 3D world MMORPG and, to the point of this post, while I haven’t seen anybody running a server for a while, the code is out there and the game could reappear if somebody felt the need to bring it back.Īnd that is kind of the problem here.
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