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There is an alternative to shutting down classic online games like Unreal Tournament
A studio is probably looking at around $20,000 to $100,000 per year to keep a game alive, which often
isn’t profitable Mathieu Duperre, CEO and founder of Edgegap
8 | MCV/DEVELOP January 2023
AT THE START of the year Epic Games pulled online services for over 20 of its games, ending an era of shooting holes in your friends across the Unreal Tournament franchise or shredding plastic guitar controllers in Rock Band’s online modes. Epic’s explanation for removing online support for these games is due to these games having ‘out- of-date online services and servers’. Of course, it’s not unusual for studios and publishers to remove online features from titles once they reach a certain age and their player base drops. Ubisoft decommissioned its online services for a massive library of titles last October, including the unique competitive multiplayer mode from early Assassin’s Creed titles which saw players hunting and killing assigned targets while simultaneously evading pursuers. Saddened fans from the Assassin’s Creed
subreddit arranged ‘Farewell Sessions’ to give the games one last hurrah. One user, Lothronion, said: “I feel as if I lost an old friend. I have not played for two years, had so much to do. But it pains me that I will never be able to play it again! It is one thing knowing it is there, and another it ceasing to exist.”
Games based on other popular IP have been
affected, with fans of anime like Dragon Ball Z and Naruto brawling their last online fight in Bandai Namco’s Jump Force when servers shut down last August, just three years after its release. That said, at least fans of those games received plenty of notice so they could sink in some extra hours before the shutdown. Unlike the case of Warhammer 40,000: Regicide, which had its seven-year lifespan suddenly end when it was shut down and delisted from Steam and mobile storefronts last October without warning. All of these reactions from the gaming community show the amount of love for these old
franchises, but we’re yet to see anything surpass the reaction from fans following Microsoft’s announcement to shut down servers for the original Xbox in 2010. A small group of Halo 2 fanatics were so determined to keep the game alive that they played it for weeks on end to delay the shutdown, highlighting the extreme lengths that some players will go through to keep their favourite games online. So, after pouring hundreds upon thousands of hours into creating these games, why are so many publishers and developers taking their games offline? Especially if there are still audiences for these games out there?
IT’S ALL ABOUT THE MONEY In short, it all has to do with the costs of maintaining the server infrastructure and the human resources needed to keep these games online. Older games may only have a small player base, but they still require an infrastructure to run their limited number of game servers. Then the game might also require other game services such as a matchmaker and several hours of attention a week from an engineer to keep things running smoothly and securely.
For an average older game, that means a studio is probably looking at around $20,000 to $100,000 per year to keep a game with a small user base alive, which often isn’t profitable when most players have moved on to newer titles. An alternative would be to move the hosting of these old video games over to an automated infrastructure deployment solution, such as the Edgegap platform, which is ideal for titles with a small player base as they work on demand. That means if there are no players around then no servers will be active, with studios only being charged for what they use.
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