Life After MMO Death

[GaliemVaelant]

I created this thread to bring up something I've thought of many times over the years, but have yet to see happen.

When an MMO dies, the servers shut down, and I'd bet the hardware is even wiped to be liquidated with the company's other assets or used for another project -- assuming the company owned it to begin with. From my perspective, it seems like a dead MMO has pretty much all evidence of its existence erased from the world.

Wouldn't it make more sense for companies to sell a server edition of the game?

From the company's standpoint, that's a bit more income from a title. I don't know how often box or download sales don't meet development overhead, but I'd bet that in most cases simply selling a server version of the game would help to reach it where box sales might have fallen short.

From a player's perspective, if an MMO server package were to include a world editor or construction set a'la The Elder Scrolls, then players themselves could fix what the developers couldn't get right. I can think of more than a few MMOs that had great potential that could have been realized, had this occured. Think of what could be possible with SWG or EQ!

On top of all of this, studying what players do with world editors would help developers to keep from making the same mistakes over and over. They'd have a product die and by examining the successful servers a little while after a server version is released, they'd see firsthand what they could have done to save the product. Next time, it would be hard for them to make the same mistake.

The reason that I created this thread is that over the years, I have not been able to think of even one reason why this shouldn't be done with dead games. It stands to reason that someone here can, or would at least have a guess at why this has not yet been done.

[nicuss]

If they give away the server then people would continue to play for free on private servers instead of subscribing to other games from the same publisher.

[Gecko]

Given that the popular MMos have emulators, what would be the point? Also, you'd have to package and market a product to sell it. If they can't get enough people to play a commercial MMO, how many would be interested in the server side software? Very few, I'd wager.

What I'd prefer is MMO teams that go under open source their software. That would be a much better benefit than trying to do a Neverwinter Nights 2 MMO package with that wouldn't really work.

[Cybsled]

Games dies, but the IP lives. Most publishers or developers would be loathe to essentially "sell" that off.

[GaliemVaelant]

Emulators are often buggy and incomplete.

I like the open source thought a lot though. If players could spot a problem, go into the code, find it, find a fix, and say to the developers, "Here's your answer to that bug," then that would be pretty ideal. The downside is that it would at least at first lead to a lot of cheating.

Liscensing by the developer/publisher to external teams so that commercial servers are diverse would be awesome too. It has the same benefits of open source, without the cheating if the teams were cut into sub profits.

I'd just like to see more player involvement in MMO development. Considered as a technology, MMOs are starting to feel more like a platform and less like a genre to me.

Thanks for the insights!

[Mist]

The difficult problem would be that failed (read: bad) games probably were built with bad toolsets. Failed products are 99 times out of a 100 bad through and through. So even if you end up giving those tools away with the server, they're probably mostly useless.

What they should do is open source the stuff.

[Cantatus]

Typically, when a MMOG dies, it's because they have such an abysmally small subscriber base (eg AC2, Auto Assault, etc.). By the time the decision is made to pull the plug, it's unlikely the publisher wants to pump anymore money into trying something like this.

I'd agree that it would be nice to see, however.

[Jerrith]

While a server version could be a possibility, I doubt you'll see an open source version any time soon. The main issue is that every MMO I've seen makes use of some external code that they license, and the terms of that license don't permit it to be made available, even years later.

[Hatorade]

Originally Posted by Cantatus

Typically, when a MMOG dies, it's because they have such an abysmally small subscriber base (eg AC2, Auto Assault, etc.). By the time the decision is made to pull the plug, it's unlikely the publisher wants to pump anymore money into trying something like this.

I'd agree that it would be nice to see, however.

Still to this day sad to see AC2 go. We all know why but the core of the game was damm good.

[GrobbeeTrull2.0]

I have little to contribute other than to say that I'm not sure we've hit that point yet, have we? Have any "popular" games shut down? Even SWG is still going in an albeit limited form. Fuck, even MxO is going.

Assburgers!!!