“Although Sweet Bandits had to close their doors, we don’t believe Deceive Inc. should quietly disappear because the services behind it aren’t sustainable forever,” the unsigned post reads. "We’re actively rebuilding Deceive Inc.’s backend to be sustainable indefinitely and support community-hosted dedicated servers.
Good guy devs and count me in for self-hosting a dedicated server.
They also could have just done that from the start. Look, this is good news, but the reason you design your servers like that in the first place is because you have the hubris to think you’re going to make Fortnite money. Hopefully their next project isn’t built with the same naivety.
You are correct, and to expand upon that, it also shows they learned from their mistake and are trying to make good on that implied promise 🤞
It shows that they’re trying to keep the game in a state where they’re spending no money and still potentially making money, but that may not be mutually exclusive with what you said.
They’re spending a lot of resources to get the game to a state where they wouldn’t need to spend money on it. I’d be surprised if they recouped those costs.
Honestly good to hear and I wouldn’t be surprised if it actually makes the game more popular than before for those that own it. I actually really enjoyed this game when it came out but it died so quickly that within a few weeks the player count went down so low that it was impossible not to get into a lobby with the sweatiest players in the whole game which made me drop it completely. There are so many games that suffer from this that could have been way more successful. Not every game can be Fortnite
The game while fun suffered the same exact issue that Wild Gate did, where any new player trying to join in gets smothered.
There just was way too much power difference between items that you have at the beginning of the game and items that you gain at the end of the game. Combined with a relatively low player count, meaning that you can’t really have skill-based or level based matchmaking, just cold cuts your new players
I wonder if Steam could build a standardized notice for games like this. Right now, it makes sense to just delist it. But if it’s a functioning product dependent on a third party piece of work, then that could still be worth a purchase to some people.
Kind of like buying a broken appliance, or a spare part for that appliance.
That would also help if not everyone at the studio is okay with their work being given away for free in the case of their commercial failure. That could build systems that push towards failure.
So if seems like the peak of Good Guy Game Devs (but who still need to make money) would sell the game to normal gamers, but also offer the ability to buy a server build license.
From there, if they company goes under, they prepare to open source the game and server code in case the open source community wants to maintain both.
Is there anything else I’m missing in that assessment?
They’d need to be forward thinking in which technologies they use such that they can be handed over to customers. Open source is always nice but isn’t strictly necessary, and it’s far less likely to happen whenever middleware is involved.
