Server Death is a Bigger Problem than Pay-to-Win

The gradual decline of multiplayer servers is secretly turning £45 games into rentals, which is bad for consumer rights 

AdvGamer

About 10 percent of the human race plays online video games, with multiplayer being a huge chunk of that market. Multiplayer games work because developers like Blizzard and Treyarch, who make the games, provide things called ‘servers’, which are essentially big computers located at the developer’s HQ. Players around the world use the magic of the internet to connect these servers to their PlayStations (or inferior devices), which allows them to chit-chat, blow each other’s heads off, or build objects out of cartoon cubes. It’s like going to a public park to walk around and play football. The difference is that this particular park is owned by a tyrannical government that’s going to take away all of the grass because the new shopping centre down the road needs the foliage to make the water fountains look nicer. 

Let me explain. When games are new, their servers are healthy, mainly because there’s huge demand to keep them running. In these early stages, lots of players are playing the same games because everyone else is playing them too, which means that manufacturers pour huge resources into keeping the servers running smoothly. However, older releases aren’t so lucky. When it becomes less profitable or less viable for a gaming company to keep dedicated servers online, they decline steeply until the developers close them down. The servers for Little Big Planet (a classic for the ages) have shut down in Japan, and it was recently announced that the Gran Turismo 6 servers are going to meet the same fate in March 2018. In some cases, especially with annual sports titles, the servers barely last a year. 

Servers are dying. Not only that: they’re dying faster now than they used to. For years, independent number-crunchers have been gathering data, monitoring peak daily traffic on Steam, a popular online gaming platform and a reliable finger-on-the-pulse for player goings-on. Their findings illustrate the dramatic fall in online traffic. Let’s take a well-known example: Call of Duty.

Data: callofdutyview.net

In late 2009, when Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was released, it quickly became one of the world’s busiest multiplayer environments. For about two months after its release, a peak of 100,000 players were online at any one time each day. This dropped to around 70,000 for the next eleven months, and then hovered between 30,000 and 40,000 for roughly seven months after that. Since then (from about June 2011) the game’s online servers have suffered a slow, lingering death. Daily peaks below 10,000 became a regular feature from mid-2012, and by 2016 they rose to a meagre maximum of three to four thousand per day. In other words, it took about seven years for player traffic to dwindle to three percent of what it used to be. These are the peak figures, not even the low ebbs. 

The decline of Modern Warfare 2 was quite slow compared to how steeply the franchise’s more recent titles have been tumbling. Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare experienced an even quicker drop in player traffic, falling to daily peaks of three or four percent of the original in only one year, not seven. Its predecessor, Ghosts, took two years for the same to occur. Server death is happening across the gaming spectrum and it's probably becoming more rapid everywhere.

Declines becoming more rapid over time. Data: callofdutyview.net

As such, a few problems have become commonplace, not least of which are drops in quality. Servers can be hacked because, again, they're basically just big computers. Hackers can easily overrun sparsely-populated systems because developers tend to ignore them and pour security resources into their more recent and more popular creations. Usually, hackers are just there to cheat the game, but they still ruin things for the rest of us and they could potentially pose a bigger threat.

Even without hackers, a thinly-populated server is harder for players to connect to, simply because games need to search further and wider for other players to engage with. When Modern Warfare 2 came out, every kid on the block was playing it. But nowadays, you have to reach out to players on the other side of the planet just to find seven other people who want to shoot each other. This means that connection speeds become slower, play becomes glitchy and things are generally horrible.

As we’ve seen, developers may simply close the servers down entirely if nobody is using them. Call of Duty manages to keep its struggling servers online despite their poor state of repair because it’s still relatively big. But when it comes to slightly smaller titles, it’s a totally different story. In the shooter genre, MAG was a big one-off game released in 2010, which only lasted four years before its servers were entirely culled.

A real-life dead server. Source: EnterpriseITnews

The decline of servers is bad, but the general problem is bigger than it seems. To cut a long story short, the culture of gaming is changing as private, single-player modes decline and the industry moves towards the public face of the internet. The new generation of consoles seems determined to keep us connected to the internet all the time. And just take a look at the games themselves. In the past, games used to feature a story mode that players could use whenever they wanted to, as well as an online multiplayer mode that they could use if they had an internet connection. But MAG and Overwatch are examples of a new breed of games that feature no offline play and depend entirely on the health of the servers. 

According to the new paradigm, a game’s online features will soon be, or perhaps already are, the main factor in a customer’s mind when they buy it. The way things are going, online gaming will soon only cater to what’s new and changing. As people get bored with one game, they’ll move on to others. That may not seem hugely different to how it's always been, but the difference is that now, when people stop playing, the game itself will cease to exist. 

The big issues, then, relate to consumer rights. The new deal is essentially that we are forced to throw something away, even if we don’t want to. You could argue that it’s a textbook case of capitalism running wild: a prevailing short-term, throw-away culture in which constant consumption isn’t just optional but is increasingly necessary. You’d be right. But there’s another, perhaps sadder aspect to all this. With games being given secret ‘expiry dates’, we are currently witnessing the declines of long-term replay value and the age-old art of collecting. Remember the days of buying a cheap DVD rack from IKEA and slowly building your collection of games until it fills all 25 available slots? Alas, no longer! Our houses will now be full of clutter that’s useless, rather than clutter that can be used to destroy our social lives in a fun and functional way. 

An endangered Collector spots the crew. Source: Kotaku

People aren’t being told what’s happening. That’s a problem, especially because many games are aimed at kids who don’t know how to tie their own shoelaces and whose parents think that Infinity Ward is a hospital for eights. Some older, wiser cookies are smart enough to figure it out for themselves. As someone called Black_Knight_00 pithily put it, online-only games “are essentially just rentals…[that] generally possess the depth of a shallow puddle.” 

'Tis but a catch, for sure. But it's a big one. It shouldn't be the public’s job to figure out for themselves when they are being scammed. Upon purchase, it’s at least implied that we can access all the areas of the game indefinitely, and that the manufacturer will keep the multiplayer function available forever. Nobody says otherwise and there’s no public service announcements telling us about it either. In something as big and rich as the gaming industry, this should be a high priority. At the moment, it isn't, because game developers have no incentive to change anything or to be up-front about what’s going on. 

So, what can be done? First off, developers could change the type of server that they use and invest in measures that make server maintenance easier and cheaper. Bots and artificial intelligence could be used to this effect. However, in both cases, the technology isn’t there yet, and servers will still be beholden to player traffic. As such, some gamers are calling upon developers to allow players to set up their own servers in order to keep games' online functions operational. Some have even succeeded, using this technique to keep old titles like Team Fortress 2 running for years. 

These are all great ideas, but they are also rather ad hoc. They wouldn't lead to any kind of systemic, structural change in the gaming industry, and consumer rights would remain under threat even if some game developers did make the necessary tweaks. 

This is where the government can swoop in to protect us. First things first, it needs to provide better public information regarding which games are liable to expire. That could be done with something as simple as a warning sticker on video game boxes. It also needs to regulate the gaming industry more, setting either minimum requirements on the lifespan of servers or pushing game developers to compensate players for server death. Finally, game developers should be forced to allow players to open up their own dedicated servers after (or preferably before) the main ones are eventually shut down. In the same vein, if console manufacturers were forced to give the next PlayStation or XBox comparable abilities to computers when it comes to connecting with player-made dedicated servers, then players wouldn't feel so ripped-off.

Why are they all in the same room?... EGMNow

People generally don’t want to throw away their old games every twelve months, even though they may stop playing them. Revisiting an old favourite every once in a while is really fun, and we should at least be warned that our property may become unusable. As such, it’s probably worth kicking up a fuss next time someone says that Overwatch is cool. That, and the fact that... well... Overwatch is kind of a nonsense game anyway. (Have at you!)