01 - The problem
Modern gaming has a problem. In fact, it has many of them but the one I am going to focus on in this essay is one of capitalism and what happens when a game is no longer economically viable to support.
You might think this affects multiplayer-only games, but this rot goes across all game types. Some of the culprits are DRM softwares, that require access to a license server to 'activate' a game on install, or games that have single- and multi-player elements, but the single-player game stops working when the servers disappear. Or it could be full multiplayer-only games where the studio has never released the server binary to the community before turning the lights off.
To start, I'm going to list games that I played in my youth, which I either paid for then or more recently on GoG or Steam and still work perfectly on modern machines. I am going to list them by year of release.
| Year | Game |
|---|---|
| 1971 | Star Trek |
| 1980 | Rogue |
| 1984 | The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy |
| 1992 | Catacomb Abyss |
| 1992 | Wolfenstein 3D |
| 1992 | Space Crusade |
| 1993 | Moraff's Dungeons of the Unforgiven (Shareware) |
| 1994 | The Perfect General 2 |
| 1995 | Descent |
| 1996 | Terra Nova |
| 1997 | Final Liberation |
| 1998 | Chaos Gate |
Some of those are older than I am. Remember that the criteria was that I personally played these games in my youth - there are a wealth of good games I have missed out.
Yes, there is a lot of Games Workshop in there. That doesn't automatically make the game good, but the GW games from that time were awesome.
These games have 2 things in common - they are both amazing games and they still work. Compare that to Test Drive Unlimited 2, released in 2011 and had the servers turned off in 2019. Even though I only ever played that game single-player, the fact it had to connect to servers to start meant I paid for at most 8 years of time with the game. The servers were shut off without my consent and I had no say in whether I would be allowed to play this game I paid for.
(Yes, there is now an effort to revive it, but between 2019 and 2021 it was just dead in the water.)
I do have great sympathy ... OK, not so much, but not on this point ... for companies like Blizzard who have had their server code stolen and private servers set up - while the main game world is functional. They even bent to player will and re-released 'classic' WoW as that was the excuse the private server owners were using. If a game exists and is runnable, you pay for a copy. It's not hard.
If a game is not runnable - well, what the company has done is to hype the game to get your sales $$$ then when it is "not economically viable" any more they take it away. To me that seems like a fundamental change to the product and is liable for a refund. Except that their shyster lawyers have probably written "we can take your stuff away at any time, sucks to be you" into the EULA that nobody reads.
A special shout out to NCSoft - the Guild Wars 1 servers are available after being released in 2005. It feels like there is only 1 server remaining and it's unplayable due to the lag, but I sometimes log in and wander the world for nostalgia's sake. That's a dead MMO with a current population of about 20 players, still running 19 years after release.
The rest of the games? Totally unplayable without a crack for single-player and multi-player games are pretty much fucked. And so far, we keep allowing this to happen.