On 7/17/2022 at 10:58 PM, daisekihan said:But like, what if no one is even willing to run such a server in the first place? I mean, we're not talking about erasing the full game, but just the multiplayer aspects of a game you can still play. The company can't run the servers forever, so the proposed other option is to turn multiplayer servers over to the fans. But someone will have to run and pay for those servers. That's just not going to happen every time even if the company does allow it.
We're not talking about perpetually hosting a dedicated master server or anything, we're talking about the bare minimum to play the game at all.
Like, SRB2, the Sonic game built in a dead fork of the Doom engine, will always be playable in multiplayer, because you can run the server yourself even if the multiplayer master server (which, for perspective, has run for fifteen years on a non-profit fangame) were to be taken down completely. It doesn't cost anything for me to open my ports to play co-op with my friends.
A few months back, darkflame released their own custom software to run private Lego Universe servers specifically because there were legal issues with trying to host a public one. That game is now officially rescued from being dead, whether or not anyone actually uses that software.