“What is a fair end-of-life cycle for a game?” As Anthem servers are switched off, GOG weighs the “complicated riddle” of multiplayer game preservation

Polish digital game-shop GOG has built a business out of restoring classic games – those built for a different era of computers that have been rendered no longer playable. It has been finding a way to bring old classics back since it began operating 17 years ago. But in that time things have changed. New games released during that period became modern classics in their own right and found their way onto GOG, and the company’s remit slightly widened. And as time marches forward again, a new challenge in game preservation has emerged – the question of how we save or resurrect fallen multiplayer games.

Just this week, for example, EA switched off the servers hosting BioWare’s ill-fated multiplayer game Anthem, and without the servers the game can’t be accessed or played. It means that something BioWare spent several years making, and something some players spent several years playing, has now disappeared, blinked out of existence. Is this the sort of thing GOG might one day be able to restore?

I asked the company’s managing director Maciej Gołębiewski this question in an interview, to which he replied, “Game preservation is a very complicated riddle. I’ll just skim through the top-level riddles. There’s the IP and ownership riddle, there is the technical aspect of it, and there’s the third riddle of how to make the resurrection commercially viable, because no one can do it for goodwill because this is not how salaries are being paid.

“Resurrecting and bringing back multiplayer titles is something that’s very complex,” he added, “something that’s very difficult, but it’s very visibly becoming a matter of discussion among gamers, among regulators and publishers as well.”

A large part of that conversation is being driven by the consumer-led movements Stop Killing Games and its European offshoot Stop Destroying Games, which are petitioning governments and game-making companies in hope of establishing regulations to stop live service games like Anthem disappearing. Ubisoft’s shutdown of co-operative driving game The Crew was the catalyst for the movement beginning.

“There is a broader discussion to be had within the industry of what does an end-of-life cycle look like in games – what is a fair end-of-life cycle for a game?” Gołębiewski said. “Should it just be buried and killed and no one can access it any more, and people who spent five or seven years working on it cannot really look at their creation any more because the service turned off? There is a very interesting and very complicated discussion that Stop Killing Games probably kick-started out of frustration.

“At the same time, if we put too many barriers on game creators and what the end-of-life cycle looks like, we might get fewer games”

“We want to make games live forever,” he added. “At the same time, if we put too many barriers on game creators and what the end-of-life cycle looks like, we might get fewer games, because people will be scared of ‘okay now I need to put up the funds to create it, promote it, and then upkeep it for 10 years, 20 years, because the regulator said so’. That might in turn cause there to be fewer cool games for gamers.

“I don’t have the perfect answer yet,” he said, “but it’s good that the discussion is taking place.”

There are glimpses of possible solutions in what games like Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League did. All active development and support was ceased for the game but an offline mode was added to allow people to continue to play on – and online co-op is still supported.

But Anthem being a purely multiplayer game makes it more complicated in that it has to be played with other people. One obvious solution would be to let players host their own servers, and in fact, private servers were apparently supported and working for Anthem very close to its release, we found out this week. Theoretically, then, it’s possible, but it would require EA salvaging and restoring the code and handing it to the community, which is less likely to happen.

It’s also worth bearing in mind what Gołębiewski said about making a game’s resurrection commercially viable. EA didn’t turn Anthem off because it was making money, after all. It shuttered the servers because there weren’t enough people playing to warrant the server upkeep. Why would a game restoration service like GOG take that cost on at the risk of a similar outcome? Why also would a game restoration service like GOG attempt to resurrect a game I don’t think anyone would consider a classic? Nevertheless, the point of discussion remains: what to do about live service games at the end of their lives?

GOG recently separated from CD Projekt, the company responsible for the Witcher and Cyberpunk games, which it has been a part of since its inception. The deal seems to have been mutually beneficial, enabling CD Projekt to focus on making games and GOG to be freed from that all-encompassing focus. Nothing major is going to change – GOG will still specialise in restoring and preserving games and offering them DRM-free – but there are some new ideas for the future, such as a foray into publishing indie games.