There are many great games out there that had to shutdown because they couldn’t fund their servers (for smaller player bases, 100 US$/mo. should be ok). I know someone personally that wanted to downsize the server because of costs, but that would mean fewer max players in the server, which would mean snowballing is gone and the hype dies. I personally know a few myself, and generally died due to DDOS, one due to constant security threats or other general lack of technical know-hows.
There are also many open source games out there that just needs some extra nudge. So the three thresholds that makes it hard for such games are
- Funding/sustainability
- Reaching critical number of players
- Content creation/marketing
So how about a donation-based community (mostly for server costs), where the community tries a new game every week or month (like a flash mob), and maybe have fun make some videos about it? This is more cost efficient at least in terms of server costs, because potential capacity would be utilised better with multiple games. Just simple social hang place out where we stick it up to the AAA game studios while we breathe some new life into the old games that didn’t deserve to die.
Would you join such a community?
Are you talking about MMO games, or anything with persistent worlds? Because anything that is match based doesn’t really need those kinds of dedicated servers to be revived.
The thing is that big companies killed P2P, DirectTCP from their games because that allowed pirates to play online, even if limited.
It can be any game. The idea just stemmed from these problems. I mean, who’s to say no other types of games will face similar fate in the future?