Danger of server based gaming

Most of us here enjoy playing the thousands of classic games on systems that have been commercially dead for years. With emulation we can still run them and enjoy them long after the real systems are long gone.

But current trends of gaming (and the internet as a whole) is to take everything online into a community based environment where we can all interact and play together. The problem is, what does that mean in the future? Many games won't even function these days without being able to find a connection to their parent server to check for updates, connect to vital files and to be given the thumbs up from the server telling the game it can run.

How can we preserve such games (and internet services) for the future? To archive them for future reference as a piece of history? We can't! Do the big developers even care about their games after they outlive their shelf life?

Our only hope to preserve such games for future historical reference could ironically be in the hands of the crackers who often manage to hack online games so they can be played on custom private servers, or even offline.

This is something that's always put me off the current batch of games. If it's almost exclusively based on the multiplayer aspect without any offline mode I won't buy it.

Some game developers will hand over control of the servers to a fan-community to support (I know Westwood/EA did this with C&C Renegade which still has a thriving online community) but others (including other EA games) just shut it down and expect you to move on to their latest game.

Quite amusing that as you say it could, as in the case of the Amiga, be the crackers that end up preserving the games.

This is one reason I don't have Steam. Means I've missed out on Half-Life 2, but I just don't like the idea of the publisher suddenly banning your account, or ceasing the service. Unless they provide a patch so you can continue to play the single player game (not likely).

Not had a MMORPG close down on me yet, but I’m not looking forward to the months/years of playtime being wiped out.

You can easily use a crack to stop Steam being needed for any of the games that use it. So that isn't really a problem.

And I've had an MMORPG server close down while I was playing it. Earth and Beyond. It was still a good lively community but once Westwood was bought out by EA they decided they didn't want to continue E&B so just closed it down. I had been playing that for over 6 months.