I'm posting this again with a different title and without an image because people didn't get the point of my original post.
https://www.txchainsawgame.com/hub/tcsm-update
There have been threads around the internet talking about the end of support for this game, but what caught my eye in this post was the statement "You can still expect a few more patches in the future in order to transition towards peer-to-peer matchmaking".
Aside from the fact that the game had a controversial life cycle, I think that preserving your game like that is pretty impressive and commendable in this day and age, where live-service games constantly come and go and get killed with the servers when the player numbers dwindle down. I feel like this should be the standard for all multiplayer games where a p2p solution is feasible.
Of course, they haven't gone p2p yet, at the moment it's only a promise.
Thoughts, positives, negatives?
10 Comments
It’s the same publisher as Friday the 13th, they did this with that game too but eventually fully shut down the online.
Seems like inevitably due to licensing issues the game is going to be shut down permanently at some point. I think it’d be nice if more studios did this with dying multiplayer games if possible. Or at least what Battlefield does where people can pay for their own servers to play on.
shame
“Peer to peer matchmaking” doesn’t mean much when the actual matchmaking is going to still be done on servers they control, the only benefit is that matchmaking is a much cheaper service to run because it uses much less bandwidth and server capacity than running a match on a server does. So while the game will still be playable it’ll still eventually be unplayable whenever they don’t feel like paying for those matchmaking services anymore.
Unless they were to give out their server executables and/or rework it to use Steam/PSN/Live for matchmaking. Both of those are a pretty hard ask because of the work involved and the latter would involve losing crossplay, but it’d be the best way they could preserve the game for a much longer amount of time.
3rd game in a row this studio killed. Seems like they do not want games to exist for long. They Just create game that can be interesting for couple of weeks, collect money, kill it and going for next project. This studio isnt getting any of my money in the future
This game was cool for the first week it came out
I played this game so much when it released. My buddies and I played everyday. But eventually the burnout came and never really left. We played so much Friday the 13th too. A little disappointed that like Friday this won’t be getting anymore content or support. It could use quite a bit polish to make it a better and more enjoyable game
It’s something I always worry about as a gamedev. Having web-based features (multiplayer, cross-progression, etc) is really great for a lot of games, but the likelihood of a given game, or even an entire studio, surviving in the long-term is incredibly low. So what happens if a studio can’t afford to keep running anymore? Web stuff creates a constant cost, so if a studio shuts down the web stuff must also.
Finding some kind of transition from studio-hosted to peer-to-peer, or open-sourcing the things required to run a service, is the way to keep a game from dying completely, and ideally any studio would make efforts to do that. The details matter a lot, though. Web infrastructure can get really complicated, so the dev resources to make the switch probably just aren’t available in scenarios where a studio is shutting down a game (or its entire self).
I do hope they manage to do it in a way that lets players not need a centralized service at all.
Not surprised, these single IP asym games don’t last sadly. Just a matter of time for Killer Klowns. I’m not a fan of seeing people dev games like this, but I’m happy they’re at least going to try to keep the game playable
That’s so decent of them. As long as they can make sure it’s secure and functional then that’s a brilliant thing to do.
I guess it’s a shame it’s not just what’s normal and expected since so many major publishers are content to let their games become unplayable, but this is absolutely commendable.