It's growing messily inside the gaming environment. Developers are getting more and more in the habit of developing games, even single-player adventures, that essentially require a constant internet connection. It may seem like nothing more than a small inconvenience at this point, but the dark side is: when the cost of keeping those servers alive exceeds profit, the games simply disappear.
Gamers and preservation groups are pushing back to survive these digital experiences, but the effort seems Sisyphean, and many titles seem destined to drift into the purgatory of digital ghosts.
An organization that calls itself 'Stop Killing Games' examined the issue recently, and the results are quite grim. The picture is stark: approximately 70 percent of games that require constant online play risk being lost to history. Why? Because when the servers close down, that's usually the end of the road. Developers seldom return to program an offline mode or patch a game to work with an offline connection. In the end, their study observed that less than 5 percent of games of this type have ever been given such a patch. The rest? They simply die the moment power is cut off.
If you want a real-life case study of how this works, then look to the case of The Crew original. Back in 2023, Ubisoft announced the considered server closure of the immensely popular racing title. The game, rather than simply providing players with an offline mode to enjoy a game they paid for, would remain inert. To compound the situation, the company has reportedly begun to retract the game from the digital libraries of its owners. Widespread outrage ensued, and already, fans had taken legal action against Ubisoft.
A very worrying trend indeed, raising the question of how many of today's 'always online' hits will be unplayable and utterly forgotten in just a few years?
