Servers are mortal, games are eternal

On my hatred of a certain term

Games have always been an enduring element of culture. It doesn’t matter how old your chess set is, all you need is one other person to play with. As long as there are two people interested in playing, chess will remain. Video games are no different, the technology involved does make set up more involved, but the principle remains the same.

Yet when it comes to multiplayer video games, it is common for someone to be told that the game they like is dead and nobody plays it, despite having just played it wth other people.

There are games that can die, ones which depend on servers that will go offline at some point. Once that happens it is impossible to play the game, and countless games have fallen victim to that fate.

Most people throwing around the label dead game don’t mean those games, they mean ones which fail to meet a vague metric of popularity. Strangely these declarations never come from people who actually play whatever game they label as dead.

The equation of dead and unpopular by some people could be seen as a product of the games as service era. Free to play games and the like depend on popularity to keep running, or more accurately how much money they make. Which is why those games have daily missions and other incentives to ensure people will play them whenever they can.

Between the daily missions, season passes, battle passes, and update roadmaps, it has become oddly easy to forget that games are something you can put down and pick up whenever you feel like. So, maybe it isn’t too shocking that players of those games treat not being trendy as equal to death, as though it stops the game from being playable.

In contrast to this, there’s a part of the fighting game community that revels in finding old games that were never popular, that have been discarded by the current era, and making guides on how to play certain characters in them. Or even setting up a tournament for one of those games. That is greatly helped by Fightcade, a central hub for fighting game emulation.

Avengers in Galactic Storm (henceforth AiGS) is not an arcade game I expect you to have heard of. It was made before the Avengers were popular, didn’t get the best reviews, and you probably won’t even recognize some of the Marvel characters in it. But, I ended up watching a tournament for it as part of an event for niche fighting games, and got interested enough to try out the game for myself.

This year has seen the start of a monthly tournament series for AiGS, Galactic Storm Sundays, and the creation of a section for AiGS on Mizuumi wiki, a website dedicated to gameplay info on niche fighting games. All of this development happened with a player count well below that of games that regularly get labeled dead.

Any old game can get this kind of treatment, you just need a group of interested players. Even that is far more than what’s needed for a game to be ‘alive’. Two people playing a particular game every now and then is plenty of life for a game, because the game is getting played.

When compared to the zeitgeist of transient online only games attempting to become esports, going back and giving attention to forgotten old games is somewhat rebellious. There are no balance patches or DLC, there’s no money to make off of winning tournaments or streaming, there are no built-in incentives to play every day. It’s about the game itself.

Games don’t die, they merely become dormant, waiting to awaken when the next player comes upon it. The loss of that immortality is the price paid by games that become services.