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An MMO i played from 1999-2007 shut down in I think 2017. I still remember the landscapes and landmarks and it is really strange knowing the shared experiences in those places are just flat gone. Inscribed items with messages to other players: deleted.
I have emulated the game world but only fragments were saved by collective efforts in the community before shutdown. Regardless there's simply no people or things to interact with so it feels even more soullessly dead and empty.
Technically 100% do, games that require the Internet require the Internet, which means by design you're relying on someone else hosting servers which means it may not be available, 50, 100, or even more years into the future. That's not the case with single-player/offline-available games.
As the graph breaks down, some games are patches by companies to allow them to function offline or to enable self-hosted servers. Mostly its fan efforts to reverse engineer the server code, though.
The point of the stop killing games campaign is to legislate by law that going forward, developers/publishers would have to account for a way to allow the player to host a server or patch the game to run offline when they become unprofitable and are shut down.
My point was more that games that require the Internet itself, and not just LAN-capable servers, are games that are inevitably going to disappear.
It may seem like I'm splitting hairs but what I said is technically true.
I still miss GhostX.
There ought to be a law...
That's why the first thing I do when I buy a new game is to turn off the internet and boot the game. If it doesn't boot or work offline, I refund it. And I just don't buy games that have Denuvo.
...Dead games, which means no one on Earth can currently play the game. It's not possible...
...At-risk games, which means these games are currently working, but they're designed in such a way that the second the publisher ends support, they will become dead games without some sort of intervention...
...Dev Preserved, which means the game would have died, but the publisher or developer implemented some sort of endof life plan, so now the game is safe...
...Fan Preserved, where the publisher did nothing or practically nothing to save the game, but fans managed to either hack it to remove dependencies or reverse engineer a server emulator so that the game was saved in spite of the publisher actions.
Why doesn't that graph show at risk games?
These are the total numbers and includes the at-risk games. Which may not be helpful to some, since the fate of those games is unknown.
Out of curiosity what are the 16 dev preserved ones?