We appreciate the passion of our community; however, the decision to discontinue online services is multi-faceted, never taken lightly and must be an option for companies when an online experience is no longer commercially viable. We understand that it can be disappointing for players but, when it does happen, the industry ensures that players are given fair notice of the prospective changes in compliance with local consumer protection laws. Private servers are not always a viable alternative option for players as the protections we put in place to secure players’ data, remove illegal content, and combat unsafe community content would not exist and would leave rights holders liable. In addition, many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only; in effect, these proposals would curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create. We welcome the opportunity to discuss our position with policy makers and those who have led the European Citizens Initiative in the coming months.
I don’t have a problem if someone wants to turn a battle royale into a 4 player game.
If someone wants to host something bigger, that’s cool too.
I think there would be room in the market for a group to host servers for abandoned games.
It’s not terribly difficult or costly to set up a cloud host if you remember to put the cost restrictions on, so there’s one more option for multiplayer games.
That’s for games in the past, games going forward could be designed better. But for games that have already been made, there’s no reasonable way to redesign games that have already been published. Any redesign will change the game instead of preserving it, and you’ll never get the original devs back together with the original tech stack in order to do any major changes. But smaller things like getting old games to be able to point to different servers isn’t a big problem.