Games don't have to die.
Every time an online game goes offline to that big server in the sky, there are shouts of dismay and wringing of hands wondering why the game can't be continued in some fashion. While I'm not privy to the backoffice costs and revenues of the games, it is easy to think that keeping a game online with even a modest group of subscribers should be a no-brainer. Alas, that is not the case and games do in fact close (see Asheron's Call2, Auto Assault and Earth and Beyond). A new ground swell may be rising towards games becoming open source (I say new, but the grass roots movement has been around a long time). This week, Stropp's World took on the topic and clearly draws the lines of pros and cons of why games may or may not go open source. From his blog:
" Its always been the case that, aside from the employees of a defunct game developer, its the players who lose out when a game developer turns out the lights in the server room. Not only do they lose the characters theyve created when the game servers go down, they also lose the relationships that theyve built up in the game, and the sense of community that MMO games encourage."
From Asheron's Call2 to Hellgate: London, Stropp weighs in on the current state of affairs and the push for open sourcing games versus the IP owners keeping the games private. Read the rest of the story on Stropp's World.
