I just finished watching this video by one of my favorite YouTubers, and he brings up some very valid points about purely online games. I reccomend you guys listen to his commentary about these sorts of games. His main thoughts start at about 1/3 (10:22) of the way through it, but I feel that a lot of these could really be taken to heart by us fans/devs of Boundless.
Cautionary NSFW warning though, there’s lots of swearing if that matters to you.
Who plays a game over 4 years if it isn’t like Lol or Wow… or MC… like…
Not many games are still good after a year to 2 years
THAT IS INCREDIBLY WRONG xD
some of my favs are (i still play)
Legend of Zelda and the Windwaker
Fallout
Fallout 2
Fallout 3
Fallout New Vegas
Morrowind
Skyrim
COD WAW
CoD BO1
CoD BO2
Don’t Starve
CS
7DTD
Minecraft
Halo Reach
Halo Wars
Lotr, Battle for Middle Earth 2
list goes on and on i just need to get a bus rn
if you are an actual gamer you will continue to play them, if your a mainstream casual gamer you probably won’t play old games
too long. didn’t watch.(but I did. why did I do that?!) But like seriously this guy made a 30 minute video? who watches 30 minute videos? (evidently I do now) I also found his video very hard to relate to as he’s using rts games as his examples. Rts has always been one of the hard-cor-est mediums of game.
Anyways, what every gamer needs to understand, is that eventually your videogame will die. Death is a part of all games. The better a game is, the slower it decays. Some, like legend of zelda, are games that I will inevitably come back to every 5 or so years to replay, but slowly they lose replay and nostalgia value, until I will no longer play them. You WILL become bored of whatever game you choose to play, eventually. You need to accept that. Just as we need to accept that all our buildings now will eventually be deleted. So I say dont focus on trying to make the game playable offline or something, focus on making it as much fun as possible, so it lives the longest and fullest life it can live. Don’t live in fear of the inevitable people.
There are 4 things in my experience that can give games a long time value:
1.) developers can manage to increase storyline / fresh content to discover for years (like wow)
2.) it has esport qualification. People who played games for “sports” know what I am talking about, because usually you want to get real good and for getting real good you need lots of lots of gaming hours
3.) achivements: Look at blizzard games (WoW also is an good example), they know how to implement them. Some people are only motivated by catching titles, pets or gifts by these achievements. It can motivate for a lot of time.
4.) the collect principle (bit connected to the achievements): take hearthstone as an example. To have all cards you need tons of time (or pay a lot to buy them all). And carsds are necessary to play the game. So people of course have a big motivation to get them all.
To support your game and make people find your game contineously, you need a good, permanent marketing.
I know my examples are with 1 company. But they are the masters of long time games in gaming community. I know no company who ever managed better. And their marketing is overwhelming, think of Blizzcon and all the other events they participate in.
Since I haven’t heard of a single point that isn’t already covered/thought of to be covered, I think we already have taken these to heart.
But awareness is always good.
Not sure what category you mean^^
MMOs? Well a lot of people play many non-MMOs years or even decades after release.
Sandbox games? Even they can get boring if not properly made.
Tell that to my roommate who plays the same pokemon game over and over again. Without diminishing fun as it seems^^
Yeah, these are pretty true. I’m just saying that a big problem with online games is that no game will be online forever. Once the servers go down, nobody can play them again, even if it was someone’s most favorite game.
If the game is good there are usually privately run servers when the game shuts down, for example Lunia, SWG, and some other games.
True but the point is that companies don’t provide the serverside software even if they shut the game down.
They even make it increasingly difficult to reverse engineer that part.
But Boundless on the other hand adresses all these issues already which is pretty neat^^
I hope there is plans for Single player! 
I’ve heard about companies not providing the software, but never making it difficult to reverse engineer. What games did this?
I don’t know of one explicitly but that’s what he said in the video.
And honestly it would make sense to keep some stuff on the servers to increase the difficulty of pirating even if it hurts the game in the long run.
I hope not^^
Case study on a game that died a terrible death: Lego Universe
Lego Universe was a pretty fun lego themed mmo. I was involved with the beta process of it, and played it all the way through to it’s death. The problem that lego universe had was a lack of content, and a plethora of glitches. It featured some pretty fun team gameplay, but it’s rewards were random and hard to get, requiring you to farm the same boss many times over. the game struggled to find the player base it needed, and hemoraged money until it died. LU had a fantastic property system though, allowing you to build lego forts out of any block, and then explore them from a mini figure’s perspective. I really enjoyed this part of the game, but as the game grew, it started neglecting one of it’s core elements in building. Anyway the game went under because it couldn’t get a solid membership base and couldn’t pay for the servers. It had a monthly subscription model.
Case study on a multiplayer game that refuses to die: TF2
I joined the tf2 bandwagon well after it’s release. I was 5 years late to the party! Lo and behold, tf2 is still thriving, thanks in part to regular updates, purchasable crates, hats, keys etc and a competitive scene.
Valve games show us the ideal model for a game to be good
-Quality game that is well balanced
-Room for competitive play and room to keep improving skills
-Aesthetic (and
Not sure that’s an apples-to-apples comparison. TF2 is all about shooting the other guy, and if 17 years of online gaming has taught me anything, it’s that gamers like shooting the other guy. Gun-control advocate by day, DeathTriggerOfDoom by night, these folks.
Yeah, I went there.
Releasing the Boundless server seems to circumvent the issues raised in this vlog. This would allow players to continue enjoying a version of the game (if we were ever unable to continue running it).
Additional: Our server and modding tools (world builder) all run on Windows, OSX and Linux so this would allow all players to run servers. I mention this because some online only games may be locked to a particular hosting architecture + platform.
I participated in Lego Universe as well. I thought that game was fantastic, albeit (like you said) somewhat glitchy. It was almost heartbreaking to see it end, since I thought it had a lot of potential.
This seems like a very simple, yet elegeant solution. It’s good to see that we have a contingency plan for a technically unreleased game 
Why object on something so simple that adds more residual value to the game I like supporting games that have options and if single player or lan co-op is included it provides longevity for the game – if the game flops or the servers are shut down then the game was pointless and not memorable.
Well first I’d rather have them put more effort into the actuall MMO instead of a single player. It’s not called MMO just for fun.
And second, why should a server shut down make the game pointless and not memorable? A singleplayer MMO is pointless. But if the official servers shut down there will be private servers for sure. At least if the game becomes what I imagine it to be^^