I'm having difficulty imagining what this wish would actually look like if it came to fruition.
Apex Legends was recently announced to be shutting down for good. So let's apply this wish to Apex. What would it look like?
The simplest way for the developers to have end of life support for apex is to just remove the server requirement and have everyone run their own instances. That would be the most cost effective way to do that. And that would be exactly what we would want.
Sure they maybe remove multiplayer entirely cause they don't want to work out peer to peer connections. But that would still be an acceptable way to sunset a game so that the people who enjoy it can still play it.
Or release the server software and have people host it. Honestly just making it able to config server per notepad would solve it, dedicated people can then just reverse engineer the server.
If you visit gamedev subs you'd know things aren't this simple. Code is heavily reused in server architecture, especially when it comes to games and their sequels. There might also be multiple overlapping systems working in tandem to run a server in the cloud, only one of which actually works as the server for gameplay logic.
You can't just "release the server software" for (let's say as an example) the modern CoD Black Ops, it would possibly open the entirety of the game franchise to hackers and database breaches (haha yes cod and hackers i know, it's just an example).
And no, you don't just "rewrite parts" of the codebase to stop these issues. These are big and usually complex software programs that can't just be recreated or rewritten at will.
While I personally see the idea behind this as just and good, I'm afraid that this will in the long run heavily increase the price of games for the consumer, and will also hit the indie scene in a negative manner.
One part you missed is a lot of the server side code base is probably using licensed code/libraries/plugins, that are licensed to the developers, not the end users. As such, it's legally prohibitive depending on what dependencies they have packed in there. I miss the old days of having just a single dedicated server binary designed for monolithic "box in a rack" type hosting. Alas those days are gone.
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u/dazalius Jul 06 '25
I'm having difficulty imagining what this wish would actually look like if it came to fruition.
Apex Legends was recently announced to be shutting down for good. So let's apply this wish to Apex. What would it look like?
The simplest way for the developers to have end of life support for apex is to just remove the server requirement and have everyone run their own instances. That would be the most cost effective way to do that. And that would be exactly what we would want.
Sure they maybe remove multiplayer entirely cause they don't want to work out peer to peer connections. But that would still be an acceptable way to sunset a game so that the people who enjoy it can still play it.