Archived article: https://archive.md/HONwC
They’ll release one more update (my guess is whatever release-ready content they’ve already got), then the servers will shut down next Thursday.
“We don’t need player counts to be super huge in order to be successful” is starting to ring hollow.
If it’s unsustainable for you, release the server and game source code for someone else to host it and patch it. Why waste developers’ time and effort into making of this game?!
It’s insane that this isn’t a requirement for shutting down/delisting a game.
That’s literally what the “stop killing games” movement was/is pushing for, at least in Europe. Really hope it goes somewhere, but it’s kind of stopped making noise lately (at least that I’m hearing), what with the US speed-running fascism more and more every single week.
SKG (archived on their own YT channel not Ross) did a press conference recently and various politicals were there siding with the movement. It’s still slow but ongoing progress.
That’s good to hear.
As I knew it, it was about releasing binaries/selfhostability not source code.
Ah, good point, it didn’t require source code release so much as self-hostability in some form.
Whose requirement? Government game laws? Just don’t play this garbage.
Yes.
I’m convinced it is some sort of insurance fraud a la The Producers. They found a way to make more money by flopping HARD than getting middling success, and flopping hard is a LOT LESS work. If their choice is A) spend a lot of money and time making a really good game that will capture the attention of the entire market; or B) spend a bit of money and time making something that looks convincingly like a real attempt at making a good game to some corpo-fuckwits at an insurance company and then nuke it hours after release… Well. Yea, they’ll do the second one.
From how I understand it, TenCent pulled funding in the studio as soon as the game didn’t hit its metric goals, they fired all but 11 people working on the game last month. If they have time to Port it, that would be awesome to make it open source, but I have a feeling the skeleton crew left probably doesn’t have the ability.
I expect whoever made the decision is embarrassed and don’t want a visible monument to their hubris.
Nothing to salvage from that mess of a live-service slop.