“Although Sweet Bandits had to close their doors, we don’t believe Deceive Inc. should quietly disappear because the services behind it aren’t sustainable forever,” the unsigned post reads. "We’re actively rebuilding Deceive Inc.’s backend to be sustainable indefinitely and support community-hosted dedicated servers.
Good guy devs and count me in for self-hosting a dedicated server.
Oh nice, I still play this with a few friends from time to time so this is great news :3
They also could have just done that from the start. Look, this is good news, but the reason you design your servers like that in the first place is because you have the hubris to think you’re going to make Fortnite money. Hopefully their next project isn’t built with the same naivety.
This is just not the case. There are many reasons to have a centralized model, especially for a small studio who has to focus their efforts.
If you want to have a ladder, a matchmaking system, unlockable content, or even just to guarantee a smooth user experience, then you need the server to run on your own trusted hardware.
Literally no MMO could work without a centralized model. Destiny relies on this. Every competitive shooter, or extraction shooter relies on this.
And when you’re a small studio, and you have “support the server that won’t be distributed publicly” and “support the server that will be distributed publicly”, one of those requires an order of magnitude more effort just for validation. When you have to crunch for a deadline, sorry, the primary user experience is going to get priority.
They are doing voluntarily what I want a Stop Killing Games initiative to require from all studios: just ensure the game continues to work.
Hopefully their next project isn’t built with the same naivety.
You understand they’re out of business, right?
They can have a ladder and matchmaking while still providing a server browser that goes to self-hosted servers. Even then, these are things that you set up with the assumption that your game is going to have a massive population, which is the foolish assumption all these live service games make. MMOs have been self-hosted for as long as pirates have been reverse-engineering the code. The only thing stopping it from happening more is the rights holders’ willingness to allow it. Competitive shooters started from server browsers and self-hosted servers.
They are doing voluntarily what I want a Stop Killing Games initiative to require from all studios: just ensure the game continues to work.
If they wait until the game is a failure and about to close shop, I have no guarantee that this update will be its fate. But let’s say I know in advance somehow that the game is going to survive the servers’ decommissioning; I still end up with all the other negative side effects of an always-online game in the interim. Server queues, downtime that I can’t do anything about, no ability to play LAN with friends in a place with lousy internet, etc. SKG is looking for a minimum of preservation that I can get behind, but I don’t think it would be enough for me as a customer unless it was never always-online.
You understand they’re out of business, right?
Looks like I missed it as I scrolled by a block on that page trying to recommend me other articles, as I was looking for the rest of this article.
They can have a ladder and matchmaking while still providing a server browser that goes to self-hosted servers
True, but I explained that for a small team who has to choose where the spend their resources, supporting both can be prohibitively costly
these are things that you set up with the assumption that your game is going to have a massive population
False, I listed several features a game of any size might reasonably want.
MMOs have been self-hosted for as long as pirates have been reverse-engineering the code
That’s irrelevant to the discussion for multiple reasons, but the part that is relevant relates to the control over content, and an intended user experience. No one on a community MMO server is able to play alongside people on official servers, which is literally the point of an MMO. They can’t because there’s no control over the content; admins of those servers can (and do) hand out 100x the gold, XP, and top level gear, which is not the intended experience. Allowing the servers to exist is a completely separate legal matter (using a fully reverse engineered backend should not be a problem, but distributing copyrighted IP, much less charging money is a problem), but you can’t demand that a dev dedicate resources to support an unintended user experience.
If they wait until the game is a failure and about to close shop, I have no guarantee that this update will be its fate.
It would be as simple as saying, “if you can’t release a proper server binary, then you have to make your source available to license holders” (There may need to be an audit step when selling a game in a country to prove that they have the legal ability to open source their backend if it comes to that, but that is tenable.)
I still end up with all the other negative side effects of an always-online game in the interim.
Then make your own game. That’s an absurd demand. That’s like going to a theater or buying a bluray, and then demanding the director re-shoot various scenes on your behalf. They made the experience they made, they’re willing to sell you a license to experience what they made. No one is forcing you to buy it, and we should force them to ensure the license never expires and that experience can always be experienced.
You are correct, and to expand upon that, it also shows they learned from their mistake and are trying to make good on that implied promise 🤞
It shows that they’re trying to keep the game in a state where they’re spending no money and still potentially making money, but that may not be mutually exclusive with what you said.
They’re spending a lot of resources to get the game to a state where they wouldn’t need to spend money on it. I’d be surprised if they recouped those costs.
Studio is shut down anyways. They are literally just leaving their legacy alive instead of allowing it to be buried with them. I don’t think any costs are gonna be recouped.
Honestly good to hear and I wouldn’t be surprised if it actually makes the game more popular than before for those that own it. I actually really enjoyed this game when it came out but it died so quickly that within a few weeks the player count went down so low that it was impossible not to get into a lobby with the sweatiest players in the whole game which made me drop it completely. There are so many games that suffer from this that could have been way more successful. Not every game can be Fortnite
The game while fun suffered the same exact issue that Wild Gate did, where any new player trying to join in gets smothered.
There just was way too much power difference between items that you have at the beginning of the game and items that you gain at the end of the game. Combined with a relatively low player count, meaning that you can’t really have skill-based or level based matchmaking, just cold cuts your new players
I wonder if Steam could build a standardized notice for games like this. Right now, it makes sense to just delist it. But if it’s a functioning product dependent on a third party piece of work, then that could still be worth a purchase to some people.
Kind of like buying a broken appliance, or a spare part for that appliance.
That would also help if not everyone at the studio is okay with their work being given away for free in the case of their commercial failure. That could build systems that push towards failure.
So if seems like the peak of Good Guy Game Devs (but who still need to make money) would sell the game to normal gamers, but also offer the ability to buy a server build license.
From there, if they company goes under, they prepare to open source the game and server code in case the open source community wants to maintain both.
Is there anything else I’m missing in that assessment?
As well as technical issues about how and what code you could hand over, there are likely to be issues around the IP of both the front and backend code, but also of whatever franchise the game is part of. If it’s a good, or at least milkable, franchise concept, they’ll likely need to sell it to recoup sone of their costs. Then, any code they bought in, either as a pre-existing package, or as a subcontracted unit, would be unlikely to have the sort of licence that lets them redistibute it, which means the code will likely be missing key components even if they do distribute it.
Building a basic server that does enough for a small group of players to enjoy is likely to be the simplest approach as they can control what IP goes into the server code, and by not changing the client, they avoid difficulties in that area.
They’d need to be forward thinking in which technologies they use such that they can be handed over to customers. Open source is always nice but isn’t strictly necessary, and it’s far less likely to happen whenever middleware is involved.
