Velan Studios suggests that developers offer private servers for their end-of-life games
, by Thibaut
When an onlinetitle is not as successful as expected, publishers often announce the definitive closure of servers. The game in question then becomes unplayable, which can disappoint many around the world.
During GDC 2024, Josh Harrison, Marketing Director of Velan Studios, made an interesting proposal. Indeed, when the Knockout City servers were shut down in June 2023, the American company had chosen to set up private servers, allowing users to access multiplayer games or play against bots, and all this with almost no intervention from the developers.
Harrison has suggested that studios with the means to implement it should go for this when official servers close.
"There are small but mighty communities that are still going, built around this private server months after shutdown by playing games daily, hosting their own tournaments where they’re raising their own prize pools, and more [...] It got great press, got great reactions from players, and ultimately, it keeps the game that everybody at the studio worked so hard on alive forever, even with the live servers offline."
Source: videogameschronicle.com