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Aeran · 12-11-2007, 07:08 PM

Today I read that Asheron's Call 2 had run for 3 years and then been cancelled due to too few subscribers(). It made me start ponder. Game as service like mmrpg might sound fun but we might also be fooled by it. Would we buy Microsoft Office as a service which servers could be closed at the whim by the company - possibly taking online documents with it? Most people would be very mad if such thing happened. To a mmrpg this can happen as well. Players lose the work they have performed in the online world. They lose a game they liked. So in a way upgrading from singleplayer games(non service based ones) to mmrpg(service based) might actually be a downgrade.

To me it feels unethical of a company to sell a game to a customer and then make it impossible to play it. As there's no AC2 servers running anylonger the customers cant use the product they bought. Even if you look at it from the perspective that the customer bought a license to play the game it feels to me like there's something wrong somewhere. Perhaps the server software should be released to a mmrpg if it is about to get closed down? Then again I doubt many companies would want to do that as it could be making competition between your new mmrpgs and the old one.

The charts at can be interesting to look at. We see that AC2 "only" reached 50K subscribers before it started to decline. It's also interesting that AC1 had 120K subscribers a while but then dropped down to about 15K subscribers. One could argue that AC1 is closed next.

What does everyone think? Is games as service good or bad? Perhaps there's better models that should be used instead like some hybrid mmrpg with both offline and online mode?

12-11-2007, 07:08 PM	#1
Aeran Member Join Date: May 2005 Posts: 208	Games as service Today I read that Asheron's Call 2 had run for 3 years and then been cancelled due to too few subscribers(). It made me start ponder. Game as service like mmrpg might sound fun but we might also be fooled by it. Would we buy Microsoft Office as a service which servers could be closed at the whim by the company - possibly taking online documents with it? Most people would be very mad if such thing happened. To a mmrpg this can happen as well. Players lose the work they have performed in the online world. They lose a game they liked. So in a way upgrading from singleplayer games(non service based ones) to mmrpg(service based) might actually be a downgrade. To me it feels unethical of a company to sell a game to a customer and then make it impossible to play it. As there's no AC2 servers running anylonger the customers cant use the product they bought. Even if you look at it from the perspective that the customer bought a license to play the game it feels to me like there's something wrong somewhere. Perhaps the server software should be released to a mmrpg if it is about to get closed down? Then again I doubt many companies would want to do that as it could be making competition between your new mmrpgs and the old one. The charts at can be interesting to look at. We see that AC2 "only" reached 50K subscribers before it started to decline. It's also interesting that AC1 had 120K subscribers a while but then dropped down to about 15K subscribers. One could argue that AC1 is closed next. What does everyone think? Is games as service good or bad? Perhaps there's better models that should be used instead like some hybrid mmrpg with both offline and online mode?