Stop Killing Games are a self-described consumer movement who are aggrieved about all the games with online requirements that become partly or completely unplayable, once publishers end official server support. They’re trying to persuade larger advocacy organisations like The European Consumer Organisation to propose new laws that put a stop to such shenanigans.
To support their campaign, they’ve carried out a survey of games with online requirements to work out how many are “dead”, dying or enduring thanks to developer or fan-implemented “end of life” plans, such as patched-in offline functionality. The resulting Google spreadsheet has 738 entries, of which a whopping 70% are apparently no longer playable or destined to become that way.
You can view the spreadsheet here. Beware that Google might badge it “suspicious”, because it harbours a bunch of links to publisher websites – it’s possible some of those publisher websites have naughty code, but it could also be simply that Google considers giant walls of links innately untrustworthy. One of the Stop Killing Games organisers, Youtuber Ross Scott, has also put together a video discussing the survey methodology and summarising the highlights.
Watch on YouTube
The survey sorts games into four broad categories: those that are no longer playable, those that are “at risk” for want of plans to maintain them once official support has ended, and those that have been “saved” by means of, say, the public release of the server code.
The volunteers found that of the 738 games included, 299 games were “dead”, with 313 games set to meet the same fate in the absence of publisher action. 110 of the games surveyed have been preserved by industrious players, following the cessation of official support, while just 16 had been salvaged by the developers.
The criteria for inclusion are a little blurry, admittedly. SKG have made some “judgement calls” about proof-of-concept fan emulators that launch the game in a minimally playable state, which they’re currently categorising as “dead”. The list also includes offline single player games that have online multiplayer components, such as Mass Effect 3. Scott strenuously makes the argument that these should be counted alongside always-online games, because it’s not like you can opt out of paying for multiplayer when you buy the game. He adds that, in any case, even if you strip away the games with offline single player components, 68.77% of the games that remain are still categorisable as either gone or going under.
The video notes that publishers can be frustrating elusive and unreadable on whether a game with an online requirement will be spared from demolition. A game might be said to support private servers, for example, theoretically allowing you to play it without official server support, but actually require you to access those private servers via the publisher.
There are many, many online-required live service games currently in development, despite some high profile disasters and much discontent about live service as a concept. The fact that so many games with online requirements are “dead” is hardly surprising. Large publicly traded companies are, after all, fuelled by profits rather than goodwill. They gain little from ensuring that those games remain playable, once they’re no longer part of the active portfolio. Still, you do come across the odd team or community that have successfully reconfigured a game to survive the apocalypse.
A few members of the Stop Killing Games team are hoping to set up a wiki of online games that face extinction, based on this research. If you fancy pitching in, you can get in touch by emailing [email protected].
