Taylor (a pseudonym), who worked on Hyper Scape, said via email they “try not to get too attached to anything in game development, as its nature is fleeting and things often get cut or reworked. That being said, this was the first game I was on were a lot of my work remained intact, and it does suck that none of it will survive.”
Games fail for all sorts of reasons, many of them beyond the control of developers. But a failed single-player game still exists to potentially be stumbled across by new fans. A dead online game is just gone, millions of dollars and thousands of hours of work up in smoke.
Game writer Mikko Rautalahti, whose credits include Alan Wake, Quantum Break, and numerous dead or canceled titles, said during a phone conversation that the death of an online game is unique. “If you write a book, you can count on that being around, people can experience it later,” Rautalahti said. “Once those servers go down, what’s left is just a bunch of random YouTube videos where you can catch glimpses of the work we did. It feels like a shame to just let it slip past our fingers.”
That doesn’t mean these games aren’t worth making. Game designer Chris Morris, who worked on Lawbreakers, tells WIRED, “I don’t consider that work to have been wasted, it was a valuable experience and a fun project. It would have been great if things had gone differently and the game found an audience. I do wish it was still available to play today in some form.”
Narratives tend to form quickly around doomed games. Hyper Scape was criticized for sporting unbalanced weapons and a brutal learning curve, and by the time Ubisoft began addressing these concerns its troublesome reputation had calcified. For developers, it can be frustrating to see good ideas fall by the wayside.
“I think LawBreakers’ levels, movement, gunplay, and character abilities worked together in interesting ways,” Morris says. “I feel like there was a lot of untapped potential and depth. If the game had been able to stick around, I could see a future where the team would have continued to learn the game alongside players and found new ways to keep it fresh and interesting.”
But in an industry that’s always keeping one eye on the next quarterly report, struggling games rarely receive the time they need to turn around. Sometimes they aren’t given the chance to succeed in the first place.
“I constantly felt like management treated us like we were working on a single-player game,” Taylor says. “There were so many unrealistic expectations, a lack of planning, and way too many last-minute decisions. We had gotten praise post-launch about a playable character being a hijab-wearing Malaysian woman, praise I felt conflicted about because we couldn’t even be bothered to hire a voice actress who could speak Malay. I think it’s inevitable that not every live service game is going to be successful, but a lot more could’ve been done to set Hyper Scape up for success, and it just didn’t happen. It was disappointing and frustrating.”
Despite LawBreakers failing to survive a gauntlet of competitors that included Overwatch and Fortnite, Morris is bullish about the opportunity to work on another live game. All he can do, he says, is work hard and hope to produce something compelling, while recognizing that countless games are competing for a player’s time. As a fan, however, he has concerns.
“I wouldn’t want to see an increase in risk aversion just because a game might fail to find an audience. As someone who has always enjoyed collecting games, however, my concern is that more of these games could disappear completely. We don’t have any meaningful way to archive or access them.”
No medium is invulnerable—countless movies, for example, have been lost—but the gaming industry feels uniquely indifferent to its fate. Nintendo’s recent decision to shutter the WiiU and 3DS eShops, killing access to hundreds of digital-only titles, is just the latest instance of a chunk of gaming history suffering casual annihilation.
Morris would therefore love to see more live games including sunset plans. Whether that’s the ability for games to be played offline against bots or for fans to set up their matches and servers, it would mean the difference between a niche fandom getting to play a game for decades and having to watch it vanish forever.
While matchmaking systems and dedicated servers have their strengths—a massive game like Destiny 2 would be inconceivable without them—they also turn live games into time bombs. Offline modes and server tools wouldn’t be practical for every live game, but making them common would be a step toward keeping hard work from disappearing. Team Fortress 2, for example, only sees about 75,000 players a day, but those players have the tools to create their servers and enjoy the title indefinitely.
You must be logged in to post a comment.