‘Spellbreak’ Developer Gets It Exactly Right In ‘Shutting Down’ Its Game
from the to-the-wilds dept
We’ve been talking a lot about video game preservation and strategies for maintaining as much of this cultural output as possible in an industry where the norm is to sunset games after a certain period of time. Most recently, we discussed the comments made by legendary game designer John Carmack, prescribing how game publishers and developers could take steps to ensure their games live on long after they are no longer supported and/or hosted by them directly. At a high level, his suggestions all amount to something that some publishers and developers have a hard time doing: giving up control in order to keep their games alive.
But some developers embrace this sort of thing completely. Proletariat is the publisher of Spellbreak, a PC game published in December of 2020. Proletariat announced months ago that it would sunset support on the game and shut down the servers that hosted the online, PvP game. But then Proletariat went one important step further.
The following is part of the last announcement of the game shut down the publisher released:
Hi Breakers!
Like many of you, we were sad to see the development of Spellbreak come to a close. In order to help memorialize Spellbreak and allow players to continue to enjoy the Hollow Lands, we created a standalone version where players can host their own servers, play with their friends, and explore the game-space at their own pace.
Thank you for playing and being a part of the wonderful and passionate community that allowed us to bring Spellbreak to life. We wish you all the best!
-The Spellbreak Dev Team
And there you have it. Simple, clean, and awesome. The company simply decided that, since it wasn’t interested in continuing to host the game themselves, they would do a little extra work and create a method for fans of the game to host it themselves.
If every game developer and publisher did things this way, it would solve a huge chunk of the problems about game preservation that have been raised. Oh, and it would also make their games more valuable to the public, since it would remove from the cost-calculus when buying games the concern that the game would be a lost purchase should it be sunsetted in the way that most games are today. And the goodwill being generated by doing all of this for Proletariat is a nice bonus.
Hell, the company has even bothered to teach the public how to do all of this.
To host a server, download “spellbreak-community- version-server-windows.zip”
- Read the contained “How to Host a Server” pdf for a step by step guide of how to run your own server.
Note: You do not need the .pdb to play or host.
- The .pdb contains debugging information for the client and server .exes.
Chef’s kiss. No notes.
Filed Under: spellbreak, standalone, sunset, video games
Companies: proletariat
Comments on “‘Spellbreak’ Developer Gets It Exactly Right In ‘Shutting Down’ Its Game”
Shame that basically every other company shutting down a live service game as of late won’t follow through like this. Fuckin’ capitalism, man.
In other news, Elden Ring sold 20 million copies, proving once again that gamers will buy a single-player game that doesn’t also plan on nickel-and-diming them to death with paid piecemeal DLC. That said game is also harder than the average NES platformer is what makes the news that much better.
Re: I assume...
That this group has not been infected by video game MBA executives. Those guys consider any game ever released a possible competitor to their new game.
EA felt this way so badly they bought all the old studios. Now a days this wont work, but I assume EA will still buy a studio just to ensure their next xyz game will succeed if they can just to shut down a game.
Re:
On a related note, God Of War Ragnarok has sold 11 million units in the three months since its release.
God of War from 2018 hadn’t even hit that after a year, but is now sitting at a comfortable 23 million units sold.
Will top game executives look at this and learn from it? I’m not counting on it.
Re: Re: Big short-term profits vs Bigger long-term profits
Probably not and I suspect the reasons are a mix of one-time sales versus a steady stream but more importantly the fact that if you want to sell that many copies you can’t just half-ass it, you need to provide a game that is worth the price and that’s expensive compared to just throwing out something half-baked and using micro/macro-transactions as your source of profits.
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Elden Ring is absolutely not harder than the average NES platformer and I’d be surprised anyone familiar with both would say this. It is certainly not harder than Shovel Knight, and even that is not anywhere near harder the games that it was inspired by.
If anything, Elden Ring shows that one way to make a popular hit game is to gather a reputation of superlative quality but also difficulty, obtuseness and harsh gameplay through more than a decade of games in the same genre, and then slightly change the formula by making a new game significantly more accessible and easier.
I think it is obvious that one of the reasons why this works is that as FROM garnered the praise of hardcore gamers, people who sat next to them were eager to try these games but afraid of the difficulty. With a new installment proving much more accessible, it sort of opened the floodgates of people who had been reluctant before. The complete opposite of Sekiro, which despite being tighter gameplay-wise, didn’t see the same kind of commercial success because it is almost entirely skill-based and thus much more limited in audience.
And this is not me bashing on Elden Ring, it is in my opinion one of the best games FROM has released. Fact of the matter is, if you play without arbitrary restrictions, Elden Ring is only slightly more difficult than a modern open world game.
Re: Re:
Malenia begs to differ.
A toast to video game preservation
The one thing the devs in Proletariet could’ve done in addition was release the standalone software (including both the code and the assets) under libre licenses. But so long as the developers don’t sue people for modding the game, I’m not going to look a gift horse in the mouth.
Re:
I was thinking the same thing.
However, while I don’t know any detail about their software stack, it may be they used/licensed 3rd part software that would effectively prohibit libre-sourcing the code[1].
Further more after support has been discontinued for a game: as “continued business/revenue stream” plan, it would be cool if companies could release the source, and then just make their asset packs be a (much smaller) purchase. The overhead of keeping that in a store should be negligible.
[1] This one may be a bit of a stretch, but if they used something like a library, with the API under NDA releasing the source could would likely be a violation. There are probably other ways you could get into legal trouble for opening up the source of software you otherwise hold the copyright on.
That sound you hear is Tero Pulkinnen grinding his teeth, angry that someone else’s game is played more than his glitchy, laggy tech demos.
Re:
You say that like it’s a high bar to clear. He doesn’t spend his time developing tech, he mostly spends his time here whining to people who are very clearly never going to give his spaghetti scripting the attention he wants.
How to build and keep a fanbase
While the game itself apparently didn’t stick around long the fact that the devs are willing to let fans support and play it even after official support has ended is a great way to ensure a healthy fanbase for future games as players will know that any time and money they spend is not just going to be thrown to the bin as soon as a game dips in player numbers.
The main reason for this happening is most likely that Proletariat, Inc. published the game themselves.
If they had been beholden to almost any major publisher, this probably wouldn’t have got the green light.
Re: Always-online DRM ruining gameplay
Exactly, and major publishers tend to ruin things. For instance, Square Enix published Power Wash Simulator, but its always-online DRM means that whenever I take my Steam Deck into the Subway (which doesn’t have wi-fi except in the stations), I can never play the game on the train, thus hindering its core functions. If only the idiots at SE ever considered that when it came to testing the game, but as usual, pirates are unaffected…
On code
I encourage my mentees to keep a CVS (Concurrent Versions System) repository, and a executor with the password, or leave the password with their attorney for anything they write that isn’t a work for hire. Anything that is a work for hire, the employer should have a system for that.
If you remember the old SCO V Linux cases, Novel basically set up a RS-6000 with the CVS of Xenix/OpenServer on it. I heard they never got that system back. It was one of the mid-range of the mid-range systems IBM sold at the time.
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More recent products in the version repository space are Git (including GitHub and GitLab) and Subversion. (And, of course, a multitude of proprietary products.) Your reasoning is sound, though, even though I quibble about the specific system one should use.
But definitely having something that records date/time of creation of content on an ongoing basis is valuable.
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Cripes, do you encourage them to open up Netscape and do a Yahoo search for it?
‘If every game developer and publisher did things this way, it would solve a huge chunk of the problems about game preservation that have been raised’
will you please STOP trying to bring common sense or otherwise into the equation! doing something to please fans/users has never, isn’t and never will be the manufacturers intention! only making money and pissing the players off is!!
Re: FTFY
“Manufacturers” should be replaced by “Publishers” because game devs sure as hell are passionate about the interests of the gamers. The bean-counters and publishers not so much.
So my question is, is the debugging information of value? Is Proletariat releasing the game on a CC or other open license such that the players can modify the game – whether to fix bug or to extend it?
Or are users (legally) limited to “debug if you like, report bugs to us if you like, but we aren’t going to publish updates.”
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If you’re including a PDB, you want an application will be reverse-engineered in short order. Normally an executable will be mangled during compiling (not as an attempt at obfuscation, just due to optimization and similar transformations). If you include a PDB it helps to demystify a good chunk of things.
Copyright protection extends to the non-awesome as well.
Now we just need to phrase “EA shutting down game servers” as “big tech censorship” and maybe we can make a difference.
It would solve a large chunk of the preservation problems if game publishers simply stopped threatening legal action every time someone tried to resurrect a game that they’d abandoned.
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Reverse-engineering code and sharing ROMs are acts of preservation. Making an unofficial sequel to Chrono Trigger is not.
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Square-Enix may be worse than Nintendo in some respects.