I think nostalgia plays a bigger part in people saying they want Vanilla servers of a game than the actual desire to pay and play them. I know there is a market out there for Legacy servers. Heck, I even play on one in EQ2, yet the rose colored glasses still come out when people talk about the days of yore. I agree with @SBFord on this one. My desire is to move forward and play in new worlds, with new lore and new characters. Not relive the glory days in a game that has it's best days behind it.
I tried out Vanilla WoW expecting the same thing. I have gone back to many games and found them lacking compared to what I expected. WoW was different. I really enjoyed many of the elements that were removed for convenience. While I found the run time bad, the progression was better IMHO as well as the pace and feel of accomplishment. The world seemed larger and more important because of it and there was more interaction between players. I have tried several "old versions" of games I loved SWG, UO etc. and bailed pretty quick but not Vanilla WoW. I also disliked the very first expansion though so maybe that is also why. I like low fantasy.
NCsoft had a way out. Several groups offered to buy the IP, and according to what I read, the offer from MWM was supposedly quite good. They could have looked like heroes, releasing their dead IP to another company that would take care of their fan base. And they would not have to support the game in any way, shape or form. So why did they not accept any of these offers?
Maybe they wanted to keep thier IP?
Ya know, I would love to think that NCsoft is planning a sequel based on the CoH IP. But I really doubt it. There has not been the slightest peep that such a thing is being planned.
IMO they are holding onto the IP to avoid the embarrassment when the new IP owners start making buckets of money; in other words, proving that they gave up on CoH before they should have. If that is the case, why should we, the gaming public, give them a nickel of our money? I would think the money they get for selling the IP would more than make up for a slightly reddened face...
The world is going to the dogs, which is just how I planned it!
There are few games that could work this way. City of Heroes (people will love that), Star Wars: Galaxies, Matrix Online. To be honest emulators fail to deliver level of support original companies had. Not to mention CoH and MxO are unavailiable at all.
The US passed a law last year that said that any program/ application/ game that is unusable because you cannot access a login service (usually because the a/p/g was shut down) could be emulated legally. That is why the SWG private server, amongst others, is not being contested.
The reason why CoH has not been emulated yet is because the code for the game is a wreck. Matt Miller called it 'a bowl of spaghetti'. I'm not sure if anyone that does not have their hands into the code day and night could do anything with it.
If all I could get was an emulated CoH server, well, that is what I would play Even with lack of support I would still play it.
Care to link that or at least give some specific information?
I find it hard to believe that the US Government would ignore copyright law.
Well, I found the article. And the follow up.
Damn. The law excludes games where the player's data was stored on the IP owners servers; in other words, MMORPGs...
The importance for players - maybe, but is there enough money in it that's worth the effort for the dev studios?
That's the real question for legacy servers.
If money > effort of cost doing it = maybe
Old code has exploits and bugs that get fixed with patches so it's a pain in the ass to do legacy servers properly - I know most devs don't want to look at fixing code thats 10 years old.
Again IMO it's simply not worth if for most studios.
Sometimes things should be done because it's the generous thing to do, not only when it turns a profit.
Call it generating "goodwill" or remembering who made you.
Easy to say when it is not you putting in the extra work.
Actually where I work on many occasions we've provided our customers a product they've asked for even if not terribly profitable.
It was done so they would look to us as their single source for service, rather than let them flirt with another vendor.
Same situation applies here, Blizzard doesn't provide the service, people look elsewhere.
The trick is, its very hard to measure the business you didn't get due to a loss of goodwill, but it is a very real factor which companies ignore at their peril.
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
I think it's dubious to assume that legacy code always still exists.
I wonder how many corporations maintain code backups for outdated patches. On the dev server, they're well ahead of the current live content patch, not behind it.
We can hope that someone saved the final versions of CoX. But it's extraordinarily unlikely that a corporation would make the effort to save "a snapshot of what the code was eight years ago, CoH v0.99" while they're busy shutting the game down.
Yet somehow private servers manage to put up older versions of the code, how is that possible?
All for free at that, and the better ones even patch in content never seen in the live version.
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
I think it's dubious to assume that legacy code always still exists.
I wonder how many corporations maintain code backups for outdated patches. On the dev server, they're well ahead of the current live content patch, not behind it.
We can hope that someone saved the final versions of CoX. But it's extraordinarily unlikely that a corporation would make the effort to save "a snapshot of what the code was eight years ago, CoH v0.99" while they're busy shutting the game down.
Yet somehow private servers manage to put up older versions of the code, how is that possible?
All for free at that, and the better ones even patch in content never seen in the live version.
We know how some people are getting the actual source code (as opposed to reverse engineering it).
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what
it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience
because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in
the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you
playing an MMORPG?"
I think Blizzard's biggest fear may be that what if they release legacy servers and they become insanely successful. It is possible. A handful of volunteers proved that legacy servers can be successful with Nostalrius. Blizzard went after them because it has been successful, while ignoring other not so successful servers for years.
You might ask why Blizzard should fear such a success. I think they may fear because successful legacy servers may make it look like they screwed up big time with the direction of WoW. Add to it the fact that WoW lost ~60% of its' playerbase since the end of Wrath, and it is not difficult to see how the wisdom of the bigwigs at Bliz may look questionable at best all of a sudden.
Keep in mind that folks at Blizzard have careers, jobs, the next promotion, a possible pay raise, and possibly big egos to worry about. And looking incompetent, true or not, does not help any of those.
Legacy servers are generally popular for one reason, free.
Yeah, thats why my friends and I donated money to our favorite DAOC shard, because free is (not) all that matters.
Oh, wow, you and a couple friends pitched in a couple bucks, your anecdotal evidence is assuredly representative of the hundreds of thousands on private servers.
Also, in WoWs case it would definitely be a case of "give them an inch and they will take a mile".
If Blizzard relents and releases a Vanilla server then others will demand a TBC server, then others will demand a WotLK server, then others will demand a progression server. All the while with the justification " it's only one more server, you're making billions so you can afford it ".
Meanwhile, Blizzard has to juggle all these different server types with different states and different QA and CS needs because the average gamer had no idea what it takes to run an MMO server.
I think it's dubious to assume that legacy code always still exists.
I wonder how many corporations maintain code backups for outdated patches. On the dev server, they're well ahead of the current live content patch, not behind it.
We can hope that someone saved the final versions of CoX. But it's extraordinarily unlikely that a corporation would make the effort to save "a snapshot of what the code was eight years ago, CoH v0.99" while they're busy shutting the game down.
Yet somehow private servers manage to put up older versions of the code, how is that possible?
All for free at that, and the better ones even patch in content never seen in the live version.
Some of them. Yes, but titles that traded producers several times?
The assumption that the code still exists in a workable state on a backup made eight years (or more) ago is still not a great bet.
Tape backups circa 2004... You could make an entire thread from speculation on that alone. "Which safe deposit box did we stow those in ten years ago, Sam?" "Don't know, I think Dave controlled the backups back then." "Yeah, but Dave got shitcanned in '06, so George would have got them after that?" "George was Cryptic, not Paragon." "Oh, right. Well, who did get control of them?" "Umm..."
When the production changed physical locations (at least once), how much more tempting to not box up the fifteen-patches-old backups and bring them along? "Screw that shit, I won't even have a job next month, no one will miss them." So they're left at the original location, which eventually gets cleaned out and thrown away by the maintenance staff...
"Hey, do we still have a tape drive that'll read these things?" "Naw, we switched to optical in '08, think they junked the old drives."
"We've got the tapes, but most of them are bad. How many times did they overwrite these same tapes? You can read through the oxide."
A decade plus is a long, long time to make a solid wager against entropy and human error.
Meanwhile, Blizzard has to juggle all these different server types with different states and different QA and CS needs because the average gamer had no idea what it takes to run an MMO server.
Blizzard will either do it and get legacy revenue at lower profitability due to high maintenance costs or won't get that revenue at all.
Those players don't give a &*$@ anymore about current WoW and won't give about future expansions because they know that Blizzard cannot cater to their expectations in future as it would alienate current WoW customers.
Meanwhile, Blizzard has to juggle all these different server types with different states and different QA and CS needs because the average gamer had no idea what it takes to run an MMO server.
Blizzard will either do it and get legacy revenue at lower profitability due to high maintenance costs or won't get that revenue at all.
Those players don't give a &*$@ anymore about current WoW and won't give about future expansions because they know that Blizzard cannot cater to their expectations in future as it would alienate current WoW customers.
Your second paragraph is exactly right and what people need to look at from a business point of view ..
If you own a business , do you..
A.. Cater to 99.86% of your customers (that are currently paying all the bills mind you)
B.. or the .014 % pissing and moaning they want Vanilla product ...(that are paying nothing and trying to find ways to steal and misrepresent your product)
It seems the answer is quite obvious , if you want to stay in business.
It's really quite simple. Make the legacy versions open source in the sense that they give you the code with the stipulation that you cannot make a profit by hosting the game nor can you alter the original code outside of bug fixes.
Imagine all those private WoW servers with the final code released to them instead of them trying to dig up old patches from wherever and trying to make them work. A good number of bug fixes where in place just as the next expansions were due to be released. So in essence, the legacy servers would be in a better place than they are currently.
But if you take Blizzard at their word, they deleted the legacy content outright, have no backups containing said code, in essence, the version running on private servers is actually acquired from the internet, not Blizzard. IMHO, if they are being truthful, then how is a private server illegal when it is running a version of the game that the developer no longer has? Are they demanding the return of said property? No. They don't want it back. They just don't want you to be playing it because they deleted it and they want it to remain deleted. It's been 10 years since vanilla WoW has been playable on a Blizzard server. For 10 years it's existed on private servers. That's 10 years of interest in a game that Blizzard, and many of you, think there has been no interest in.
Denying players access to games they paid to play doesn't negate the desire to play said games. In this case, I believe the players are the ones being robbed, not the IP owner. They had 10 years to offer said version up to the masses, they chose to pass. It's time it went open source to the public.
i can play all the old games that I purchased. Even old Amiga titles run on an emulator. The only ones I can't are MMORPG's and that's only because the makers don't want me to.
If the source code is lost. Then how could outfits like Nostralius be stealing it?
As far as I recall, Blizzard have said its not so much that they wont, but that they cant go back with their code. I dunno how true that is, but there you go. For a company who have so often given in with their design decisions to the vocal minority, they have been VERY stubborn over this.
I doubt the problem is commercial at this stage, I think its either A resource management or B they really dont have the ability to do it.
The other thing is, for COH, for Vanilla wow and such, while hosting a server might be cheap, there is still a need for maintenance of said server. There is still a need for people to work on Account and billing problems at the very least (support). Most people would expect GM support for such a game and technical support too. The game would need to be updated to work on newer drivers as they come out and new OS builds.
Its not as simple as just sticking a server up and leaving it be, otherwise every MMO developer out there would have a Legacy server for each MMO at each expansion end state, because if it didnt cost anything and it brought money it, the ROI alone would be a no brainer.
Now, lets assume that the numbers for the recently closed wow server are accurate. They claimed I think 120,000-150,000 active accounts, ok, thats a good number. Lets not factor in Churn of players (which is what most MMOs actually base financial projections on, because with a player pool this size, the churn would likely be negative)
We have heard in the past that conversion rates on Free services to paying player are around the 8-10% mark, so lets be generous and say 10% thats 12,000 to 15,000 accounts.
Lets say these accounts were all willing to pay a full price subscription to a legacy server, so thats a decent chunk of change right?
225,000 American Dollars a month. So you need to pay for a few devs at the very least, some Account support, some in game support, IT and Network techs to keep the thing running, facilities staff those people need to eat, have the office cleaned and powered too etc. So this would rapidly eat up that budget with even just a maintenance team (Based on numbers from Glass Door and other employment sources) and pay for the hosting services for that game. Sure costs could be saved by using up hosting resources currently allocated for future proofing of other games, but that has an opportunity cost associated with it.
In order to keep the servers running they would need to market them, they would need to keep a player base that would be pretty quickly content starved amused. I mean look at how much wows subs drop after a years content gap. Never mind playing on a server you know is NEVER going to get new content.
Before long the player base dwindles, the cash flow dries up, in order to keep it going you either need to move it forward to the next expansion, or add new content, suddenly your maintenance costs spike upward and you need more cash to fund the operation.
Do you honestly think they would be able to meet the service expectations of todays gamers?
Nostalgia servers will happen when there is enough demand for them. The problem is "enough demand" for them is an equation that has to compute to include money lost from live servers. Even then, there has to be an abundance of clear evidence that the nostalgia server will remain vibrant for years.
If Lucas Arts or .. Disney I guess .. thought that opening a server for SWG would make them money, they would do it. Unfortunately, it would probably take a few million dollars up front to convince them that it would make them money.
Really though, no one cares what the community wants, they only care about what the community will pay them for. It's really got much less to do with whether or not a third party server makes money. It has everything to do with that third party server taking profit away from Disney, or Blizzard, or whomever. I could be wrong but I bet that the mindset isn't "close the servers because we don't want people making money off of our IP". The mindset is "Close the servers because their existence reduces our profits."
You can say "Well I don't play WoD, but I would play Vanilla WoW", but the reality is, you are much more likely to play WoD if a vanilla wow server doesn't exist. At least that is the psychology under which most companies work.
Post edited by azmundai on
LFD tools are great for cramming people into content, but quality > quantity. I am, usually on the sandbox .. more "hardcore" side of things, but I also do just want to have fun. So lighten up already
Nostalgia servers will happen when there is enough demand for them. The problem is "enough demand" for them is an equation that has to compute to include money lost from live servers. Even then, there has to be an abundance of clear evidence that the nostalgia server will remain vibrant for years.
If Lucas Arts or .. Disney I guess .. thought that opening a server for SWG would make them money, they would do it. Unfortunately, it would probably take a few million dollars up front to convince them that it would make them money.
Really though, no one cares what the community wants, they only care about what the community will pay them for. It's really got much less to do with whether or not a third party server makes money. It has everything to do with that third party server taking profit away from Disney, or Blizzard, or whomever. I could be wrong but I bet that the mindset isn't "close the servers because we don't want people making money off of our IP". The mindset is "Close the servers because their existence reduces our profits."
You can say "Well I don't play WoD, but I would play Vanilla WoW", but the reality is, you are much more likely to play WoD if a vanilla wow server doesn't exist. At least that is the psychology under which most companies work.
It's pretty similar to DRM.
You can release your music without it (let the pirates swap it around, generating more interest and--eventually--more actual buyers) or release your music with it (try to safeguard every sale and peg every penny of royalty).
With books it's not even a contest, unless you're one of the Big Name Authors, having some non-DRM unprotected IP in circulation is actually beneficial to sales of all of your titles.
Or you could just not deprecate most of your content in the first place. I didn't pick up Guild Wars 1 until after Nightfall was out, but I was able to play through Prophecies and Factions just fine even after that without being stupidly overleveled for everything.
There was an interesting fair use case that was brought up not too long ago. I think this was being applied to a non-MMO Electronic Arts title. This may gave been the case but I'm not certain, I can't find the original article I thinking of (think it was from EFF)
The premise went like this: - You paid for the client software (this was a few years ago, when that was still pretty common) - The server was provided by the company as part of the software service (for subscription or otherwise) - The server has since been shut down, rendering the purchase useless
It may would be considered fair use if someone were able to reverse engineer a server, provided: - The server contained no stolen code or client assets - the server had to be 100% original. - You didn't sell access to or otherwise profit from the use of the server
I think it lost in court, as EA was able to successfully argue that older versions of their software still in use would hinder sales of newer versions, and that made the case fail the US definition of "Fair Use".
Or you could just not deprecate most of your content in the first place. I didn't pick up Guild Wars 1 until after Nightfall was out, but I was able to play through Prophecies and Factions just fine even after that without being stupidly overleveled for everything.
This was one of my favorite points about early Everquest - expansions were still pertinent for a long while. I hated when WoW came around and turned expansions into total game overhauls.
Comments
Wa min God! Se æx on min heafod is!
IMO they are holding onto the IP to avoid the embarrassment when the new IP owners start making buckets of money; in other words, proving that they gave up on CoH before they should have. If that is the case, why should we, the gaming public, give them a nickel of our money? I would think the money they get for selling the IP would more than make up for a slightly reddened face...
The world is going to the dogs, which is just how I planned it!
Damn. The law excludes games where the player's data was stored on the IP owners servers; in other words, MMORPGs...
http://blogjob.com/oneangrygamer/2015/10/dmca-law-changed-to-allow-for-abandonware-drm-circumvention/
The world is going to the dogs, which is just how I planned it!
거북이는 목을 내밀 때 안 움직입니다
It was done so they would look to us as their single source for service, rather than let them flirt with another vendor.
Same situation applies here, Blizzard doesn't provide the service, people look elsewhere.
The trick is, its very hard to measure the business you didn't get due to a loss of goodwill, but it is a very real factor which companies ignore at their peril.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
All for free at that, and the better ones even patch in content never seen in the live version.
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
"True friends stab you in the front." | Oscar Wilde
"I need to finish" - Christian Wolff: The Accountant
Just trying to live long enough to play a new, released MMORPG, playing New Worlds atm
Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV
Don't just play games, inhabit virtual worlds™
"This is the most intelligent, well qualified and articulate response to a post I have ever seen on these forums. It's a shame most people here won't have the attention span to read past the second line." - Anon
We know how some people are getting the actual source code (as opposed to reverse engineering it).
Epic Music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vAigCvelkhQ&list=PLo9FRw1AkDuQLEz7Gvvaz3ideB2NpFtT1
https://archive.org/details/softwarelibrary_msdos?&sort=-downloads&page=1
Kyleran: "Now there's the real trick, learning to accept and enjoy a game for what it offers rather than pass on what might be a great playing experience because it lacks a few features you prefer."
John Henry Newman: "A man would do nothing if he waited until he could do it so well that no one could find fault."
FreddyNoNose: "A good game needs no defense; a bad game has no defense." "Easily digested content is just as easily forgotten."
LacedOpium: "So the question that begs to be asked is, if you are not interested in the game mechanics that define the MMORPG genre, then why are you playing an MMORPG?"
You might ask why Blizzard should fear such a success. I think they may fear because successful legacy servers may make it look like they screwed up big time with the direction of WoW. Add to it the fact that WoW lost ~60% of its' playerbase since the end of Wrath, and it is not difficult to see how the wisdom of the bigwigs at Bliz may look questionable at best all of a sudden.
Keep in mind that folks at Blizzard have careers, jobs, the next promotion, a possible pay raise, and possibly big egos to worry about. And looking incompetent, true or not, does not help any of those.
Also, in WoWs case it would definitely be a case of "give them an inch and they will take a mile".
If Blizzard relents and releases a Vanilla server then others will demand a TBC server, then others will demand a WotLK server, then others will demand a progression server.
All the while with the justification " it's only one more server, you're making billions so you can afford it ".
Meanwhile, Blizzard has to juggle all these different server types with different states and different QA and CS needs because the average gamer had no idea what it takes to run an MMO server.
The assumption that the code still exists in a workable state on a backup made eight years (or more) ago is still not a great bet.
Tape backups circa 2004... You could make an entire thread from speculation on that alone. "Which safe deposit box did we stow those in ten years ago, Sam?" "Don't know, I think Dave controlled the backups back then." "Yeah, but Dave got shitcanned in '06, so George would have got them after that?" "George was Cryptic, not Paragon." "Oh, right. Well, who did get control of them?" "Umm..."
When the production changed physical locations (at least once), how much more tempting to not box up the fifteen-patches-old backups and bring them along? "Screw that shit, I won't even have a job next month, no one will miss them." So they're left at the original location, which eventually gets cleaned out and thrown away by the maintenance staff...
"Hey, do we still have a tape drive that'll read these things?" "Naw, we switched to optical in '08, think they junked the old drives."
"We've got the tapes, but most of them are bad. How many times did they overwrite these same tapes? You can read through the oxide."
A decade plus is a long, long time to make a solid wager against entropy and human error.
Those players don't give a &*$@ anymore about current WoW and won't give about future expansions because they know that Blizzard cannot cater to their expectations in future as it would alienate current WoW customers.
If you own a business , do you..
A.. Cater to 99.86% of your customers (that are currently paying all the bills mind you)
B.. or the .014 % pissing and moaning they want Vanilla product ...(that are paying nothing and trying to find ways to steal and misrepresent your product)
It seems the answer is quite obvious , if you want to stay in business.
Imagine all those private WoW servers with the final code released to them instead of them trying to dig up old patches from wherever and trying to make them work. A good number of bug fixes where in place just as the next expansions were due to be released. So in essence, the legacy servers would be in a better place than they are currently.
But if you take Blizzard at their word, they deleted the legacy content outright, have no backups containing said code, in essence, the version running on private servers is actually acquired from the internet, not Blizzard. IMHO, if they are being truthful, then how is a private server illegal when it is running a version of the game that the developer no longer has? Are they demanding the return of said property? No. They don't want it back. They just don't want you to be playing it because they deleted it and they want it to remain deleted. It's been 10 years since vanilla WoW has been playable on a Blizzard server. For 10 years it's existed on private servers. That's 10 years of interest in a game that Blizzard, and many of you, think there has been no interest in.
Denying players access to games they paid to play doesn't negate the desire to play said games. In this case, I believe the players are the ones being robbed, not the IP owner. They had 10 years to offer said version up to the masses, they chose to pass. It's time it went open source to the public.
i can play all the old games that I purchased. Even old Amiga titles run on an emulator. The only ones I can't are MMORPG's and that's only because the makers don't want me to.
If the source code is lost. Then how could outfits like Nostralius be stealing it?
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
거북이는 목을 내밀 때 안 움직입니다
I doubt the problem is commercial at this stage, I think its either A resource management or B they really dont have the ability to do it.
The other thing is, for COH, for Vanilla wow and such, while hosting a server might be cheap, there is still a need for maintenance of said server. There is still a need for people to work on Account and billing problems at the very least (support). Most people would expect GM support for such a game and technical support too. The game would need to be updated to work on newer drivers as they come out and new OS builds.
Its not as simple as just sticking a server up and leaving it be, otherwise every MMO developer out there would have a Legacy server for each MMO at each expansion end state, because if it didnt cost anything and it brought money it, the ROI alone would be a no brainer.
Now, lets assume that the numbers for the recently closed wow server are accurate. They claimed I think 120,000-150,000 active accounts, ok, thats a good number. Lets not factor in Churn of players (which is what most MMOs actually base financial projections on, because with a player pool this size, the churn would likely be negative)
We have heard in the past that conversion rates on Free services to paying player are around the 8-10% mark, so lets be generous and say 10% thats 12,000 to 15,000 accounts.
Lets say these accounts were all willing to pay a full price subscription to a legacy server, so thats a decent chunk of change right?
225,000 American Dollars a month. So you need to pay for a few devs at the very least, some Account support, some in game support, IT and Network techs to keep the thing running, facilities staff those people need to eat, have the office cleaned and powered too etc. So this would rapidly eat up that budget with even just a maintenance team (Based on numbers from Glass Door and other employment sources) and pay for the hosting services for that game. Sure costs could be saved by using up hosting resources currently allocated for future proofing of other games, but that has an opportunity cost associated with it.
In order to keep the servers running they would need to market them, they would need to keep a player base that would be pretty quickly content starved amused. I mean look at how much wows subs drop after a years content gap. Never mind playing on a server you know is NEVER going to get new content.
Before long the player base dwindles, the cash flow dries up, in order to keep it going you either need to move it forward to the next expansion, or add new content, suddenly your maintenance costs spike upward and you need more cash to fund the operation.
Do you honestly think they would be able to meet the service expectations of todays gamers?
If Lucas Arts or .. Disney I guess .. thought that opening a server for SWG would make them money, they would do it. Unfortunately, it would probably take a few million dollars up front to convince them that it would make them money.
Really though, no one cares what the community wants, they only care about what the community will pay them for. It's really got much less to do with whether or not a third party server makes money. It has everything to do with that third party server taking profit away from Disney, or Blizzard, or whomever. I could be wrong but I bet that the mindset isn't "close the servers because we don't want people making money off of our IP". The mindset is "Close the servers because their existence reduces our profits."
You can say "Well I don't play WoD, but I would play Vanilla WoW", but the reality is, you are much more likely to play WoD if a vanilla wow server doesn't exist. At least that is the psychology under which most companies work.
LFD tools are great for cramming people into content, but quality > quantity.
I am, usually on the sandbox .. more "hardcore" side of things, but I also do just want to have fun. So lighten up already
You can release your music without it (let the pirates swap it around, generating more interest and--eventually--more actual buyers) or release your music with it (try to safeguard every sale and peg every penny of royalty).
With books it's not even a contest, unless you're one of the Big Name Authors, having some non-DRM unprotected IP in circulation is actually beneficial to sales of all of your titles.
거북이는 목을 내밀 때 안 움직입니다
The premise went like this:
- You paid for the client software (this was a few years ago, when that was still pretty common)
- The server was provided by the company as part of the software service (for subscription or otherwise)
- The server has since been shut down, rendering the purchase useless
It may would be considered fair use if someone were able to reverse engineer a server, provided:
- The server contained no stolen code or client assets - the server had to be 100% original.
- You didn't sell access to or otherwise profit from the use of the server
I think it lost in court, as EA was able to successfully argue that older versions of their software still in use would hinder sales of newer versions, and that made the case fail the US definition of "Fair Use".
*edit*
found the EFF link:
https://www.eff.org/files/2015/02/09/2014-07_eff_gaming_exemption_comment.pdf
This was one of my favorite points about early Everquest - expansions were still pertinent for a long while. I hated when WoW came around and turned expansions into total game overhauls.
거북이는 목을 내밀 때 안 움직입니다