[Gaming] What will you do when they close the servers of your favourite game?
Last month, one of my favourite games of all time closed its servers. When I was young, I played a game called Ragnarok Online for more than 5 years, and even produced some YouTube content for it from around 2009 till 2013, I guess, and at that time my videos were posted on some official forums since most of them were something like "how to become a thief" and were just me doing the quest.
This made me think about all the time and money I invested in it since I was young, but none of that made me mad, just sad. It's saddening to think that something you love, like a game, a server or even a franchise, could die at any moment and you're just a passenger, just like life or anything else that you don't have control over. So many memories were there, and the fact that anytime the server was available I could just download the game and hop into the server with all the items that I grinded and the money (zenny) I made there, was kind of relieving since I had this "yeah, everything is in order" feeling, even though I hadn't logged in for the last 3 to 4 years there.
This game truly forged me as someone who loves games and the RPG and MMO genres in general, and I started to relate a little bit more to those few people who recently invested time and money into 2XKO, that fighting game from RIOT Games. I play a lot of fighting games like Street Fighter (all versions), Granblue and Guilty Gear, but when I played the alpha version of 2XKO I remember thinking, "I don't know, but this tag team thing isn't for me I guess". Well, I don't think it was for many other people either. Less than one year on the market and the game is being shut down for "not meeting expectations", and this made me think A LOT about that, 'cause this was a game that had a LOT of potential and had been in development for so much time, and even though it failed and is being shut down like it was made by an indie developer that could not handle its difficulties, like, what the actual fuck is happening.
I kinda deviated from the topic I was writing about, so I will stop complaining about that, BUT I'll write a little bit more of my considerations about this case in a future text here.
Going back to the topic, the main thing this whole thing got me thinking is how much these companies and developers really care about the art of video games? Should they care about it? When you shut down something that thousands or millions played, you're preventing not just the people that played, but new ones from knowing it and having a little taste of it. How are we dealing with that and preventing games from just fading into the memory of those who played? This is a needle in a haystack kind of problem since the world is being ruined by climate change and war, but yeah, this doesn't keep me from thinking about it at least once per month, and every time I get sad about it.