(This is a companion piece to my YouTube video on this subject. This article is a transcript with some additional context and fixes.)

With the turn of the century, and into the 2010s, video games became increasingly reliant on internet connections for new ways to play together, deliver content, and prevent digital piracy. But nothing lasts forever, and with the progression of time, technology becomes obsolete, servers shut down for good, and games are left without key features, or even in a non-functional, playable state.

But some developers, and fans, refuse to have that future.

In this article, I’d like to provide a series of video game case studies that I believe serve as great examples of a developer or publisher going the extra mile, and giving their older customers a proper end-of-life response. That way, the original purchased copy can still be played, long after it has been withdrawn from sale.

Context

I decided to quickly make this video (and article adaptation) after learning about the status of the ‘Stop Killing Games‘ public initiative. The most powerful campaign they are doing so far is to attempt to amass one million signatures for the European Union, which will obligate EU politicians to read and acknowledge their societal concern.

Unfortunately, a recent video from Ross Scott, the head organiser, tells me that, unknown to most of the video gaming public, the campaign has actually faced a huge public misunderstanding of what an “Initiative” even is, as well as the goal of acquiring signatures. Because of this, the campaign is about to face imminent failure; the Citizen’s Initiative is only open for signing for a limited period of time.

After looking through it myself, I realised that there was something I could provide for the campaign, which I felt was sorely lacking: Though a list of affected game material does exist, there didn’t appear to be any detailed, personal-level stories of games and their end-of-life plan.

Figuring out how to tell people that this whole thing is merely a “starting message” and not a bill is outside of my purview, but video game history? That definitely is.

(Compared to the video: In addition to this “Context” section, I have added “Similar Events and Further Reading” sections, and bolded the additional text.)

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Long-Term Support & Mods

Let us begin with a soft example: Team Fortress 2.

In software development, products are not immediately shelved when it’s considered feature complete, but are instead reduced to a skeleton crew, to maintain security updates. This can be seen as a kind of soft end-of-life, where in the case of games, no more expansion packs are being produced and sold.

Team Fortress 2
Valve Software
2007 – 2017
Status: Long-Term Support
Actions: Community Content and Source Release

Half of the games in this list have this status, but what’s notable for Team Fortress 2 is that major content updates still occur. They are instead made by the extensive fan community, and the skeleton crew also reviews and approves these products in regular cycles.

Valve Software has an excellent structure in place to give revenue back to these community creators as well, and in 2025, they went further and even released the entirety of TF2’s source code.

Similar Games with Dedicated Server Software, and Mod Selling

Half-Life series
Counter-Strike
Quake series
Doom (1993 original)
Skyrim & Fallout 4’s Creation Club (only for selling mods)
Minecraft

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DRM Removal

Copy Protection can take many forms, and with the move away from verifying the existence of a physical disc (since, naturally, we don’t use them anymore) the most common forms of DRM is accomplished by binding it to an account, or pinging a server. In the case of Fallout 3, your save data was also encrypted, using your online account as a key code.

Fallout 3
Bethesda Softworks
2008 – 2014
Status: Third-Party Server Malfunction
Actions: DRM Removed in 2021

Fallout 3 was likely the first example of save data encryption, and as a result was also the first to fail, as Microsoft’s authentication servers became out of date. Though officially announced for sunsetting in 2014, the service was not fully shut down until 2022, and Fallout 3’s publishers finally released a new patch bypassing the encryption.

Crysis
Crytek
2007 – 2015
Status: Third-Party Server Malfunction
Actions: DRM Removed in 2023

Similar ambiguous cases can and have occurred in other games that use DRM such as Crysis, where the third-party activation server simply stopped responding without notice, particularly on Windows 10 systems, which released in 2015. It was only several years later in 2023, that it was updated with a stripped version.

Similar Games where DRM failure forced the publisher to make an update

Dark Souls: Prepare to Die Edition
Grand Theft Auto IV
Resident Evil 5

Similar Events: The shutdown of the GameSpy multiplayer server service, with various publisher responses. Some disabled the menu option and error messages, some patched the game to point to a new set of Steam servers, and some did nothing.

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Free DLC from Data Loss

Dragon Age: Origins, and Mass Effect 2.

Dragon Age: Origins
Electronic Arts
2009 – 2022
Status: Legacy Server Shutdown
Actions: DLC Made Free

These two games were released in a transition period for online sales, where competitors were emerging and Steam was still trying to figure out the sale of additional material, such as DLC. Retail disc copies of games were also still being sold at this time, and to support both online and offline customer types, EA elected to sell their expansion packs on their own EA storefront.

These DLC packs were version agnostic. They were downloaded as separate installation files, and can be installed on both the Steam version, or a disc-based retail version.

Mass Effect 2
Electronic Arts
2010 – 2022
Status: Legacy Server Shutdown
Actions: DLC Made Free

However, in 2022, EA decided to sunset their original servers, and though user accounts were migrated to the new system, they elected to not keep track of sales data or DLC ownership. Instead, they simply… released all of the old install files. All of them, for free, tucked away on a special support page. So, owners of the original release version still have access to all content.

Similar Games with retroactive product upgrades due to server migration/legacy data loss

Half-Life (Sierra retail ver.)
L.A. Noire

Remasters are not included in this list.

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Independent Licencing

MMORPGs are the most vulnerable type of game where playing by yourself has very little purpose, due to the genre’s inherent nature of playing with others online.

City of Heroes
NCSoft
2004 – 2012
Status: Shutdown
Actions: Licensed Private Server in 2024

The shutdown of those servers after enough time, then, can be seen to be inevitable. For smaller group games such as Team Fortress 2, it’s a standard for server software to be distributed as well, to play only among friends. This not the norm for an MMORPG, and is considered illegal or ambiguous, as these require server emulators.

But things have begun to change.

Rose Online
Gravity Interactive
2005 – 2019
Status: Shutdown
Actions: Licensed Private Server in 2022

After the shutdown of City of Heroes and Rose Online, some fans who operated these ‘Private’ servers formed indie game companies, and managed to contact and acquire licences from the original publishers. Though not quite an ‘end-of-life’ action, the act of even selling a server licence was unheard of, for this genre in particular.

And yet here we are.

Similar Games where the Unlicenced Version became Licenced

No precedent.

Similar Events: Though not related to end-of-life scenarios at all, a small number of untranslated Japanese games were published internationally by contacting fans and using their unlicenced translation as a base. Example: Ys: The Oath in Felghana.

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Offline Conversion

Mega Man X DiVE
Capcom
2020 – 2023
Status: Shutdown
Actions: Offline Release
with Rebalance in 2023

Smartphone and Lootbox driven games, commonly referred to as ‘Gacha‘, are one of the newest genres of video game out there, and wholly relies on having a constant internet connection. These games often update on a near-weekly basis, with limited time events and experiences that follow the calendar holidays.

Mega Man X DiVE is one such example, and the company decided to preserve the game after shutdown, by re-selling it as an offline, one-time purchase. ‘Mega Man X DiVE Offline‘ also took the time to strip out credit card transactions, replacing it with an internal reward system instead, as well as giving you control over the calendar activations.

Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp
Nintendo
2017 – 2024
Status: Shutdown
Actions: Offline Release with
Account Migration in 2024

However, these modifications made account data incompatible, so Capcom opted to not migrate your account data.

In contrast, the shutdown of Nintendo’s Gacha game, ‘Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp‘, also follows a similar line of modifications, but also created a new temporary service that allowed users to migrate their accounts to the fully offline version. ‘Pocket Camp Complete‘ also promised new content updates, for a couple more years.

However, in both these cases, the modifications can be seen to be barebones, which leads to my final example.

Similar Games: Gacha games with an offline release
(gallery-only versions not included)

Magia X
Brave Nine (a.k.a Brown Dust)
Metal Slug Attack Reloaded

Further Reading: This Japanese website maintains a catalog of Gacha games that have recieved some sort of offline conversion.

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Offline Remake

Dragon Quest X Online is a Japanese-exclusive MMORPG that actually still receives updates after over ten years, and its popularity in the domestic market means that it might not shut down anytime soon. But an MMORPG is driven by constant, annual updates, and an evolving world – and Volume 7 of the ongoing story is far removed from the original Volume 1, ten years prior.

Dragon Quest X Online
Square Enix
2012 – current as of 2025
Status: Active with EOL
Actions: Single-Player Remake in 2022

Thus, on its tenth anniversary, Square Enix announced a very unprecedented, and surprising move to bring back the original Version 1 world state, by rebuilding it as a single-player game.

This is where the lines begin to blur, because this is not a plain release of the original version. With AI companions and a complete replacement of the combat system, this is far more extensive than, say, changing your costs in Mega Man X DiVE Offline and controlling the calendar.

But this is a solution nonetheless, and shows that, with sufficient effort, preserving the important portions of a very transient, and ever evolving MMORPG is possible – and proven, though some purists may disagree.

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Closing Summary

All in all, I hope I’ve managed to enlighten you on some of the history surrounding the obsolescence of video games – some intentional, and some unintentional, due to the aging nature of software technology itself.

I’d also like to give an honourable mention to the PC Gaming Wiki, and GOG – independent efforts at documenting and repairing broken software. They don’t cover or solve all of these situations, but are beacons that assist in software preservation, after the original companies fall apart or neglect their game.

It’s quite possible now for games to die. Some of these solutions are planned, but others are clearly last-minute. Emergency and disaster strategies are already a standard in other industries… but not games – not quite yet.

In any case, I hope you enjoyed the article and found it informative.

Thank you for reading.

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Inspired by the recent Quanta Magazine article, Mathematical Beauty, Truth and Proof in the Age of AI, which Dave Luebke sent me.

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This strip will close the "social networks" serie (with thisand thisstrip), until a new giant/intangible/mind-challenging entity appears. And took days to make (why do I always complicate things, I wonder).As I've already said, the UVoD website is slowly dying, but I stillstick to this ancient technology. On the platforms (linked below), there are only less than 6000 cultists following the flow. Not bad, but we're so far from any influencer or AI generated account. Whatever, let's get buried and forgotten, but with a laugh.

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Once we have robotic monks, we can stop worrying about transcendence and focus on productivity.

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Following on from last week’s post on the “I Never Said That Button”, I find myself worrying quite a lot about the strategic uses of communication. Ironically, I realise that I’ve been making a version of this argument myself in conversations with people over the last six months, but have been resisting writing it down because I am not sure if I’ve got a formulation that I’m prepared to defend publicly.

And I think this is part of a general governance problem which is working alongside and intertwined with that of “state capacity”. Consider my favourite practical example – the Hinckley Rail Freight Interchange project, as discussed in “The Problem Factory”. In my mind, it’s an example of three things. First, how complicated the modern world is – the sheer number of things that have to be taken into consideration when you’re building a railway loading yard in Leicestershire[1]. Second, how difficult it would have been to spot the show-stopping problems in advance. And third, that there was just no way to communicate.

Some Planning Inspectorate reports read curiously like Agatha Christie novels. Chapter by chapter, you get detail of the objections and analysis, and then a concluding section in which the Inspectorate assumes the role of Hercule Poirot and explains which of them were red herrings and which were killers. If you had to pick between “vibration from construction work will damage the foundations of a historic building” or “the acoustic barrier is next to a Gypsy/Traveller campsite”, I don’t think it would be easy ex ante. Even when all the analysis is there, it’s hard to tell. Which is the root of my argument that UK (and Anglosphere) infrastructure procurement is beset by a problem of excessive risk aversion – since it is so difficult to know in advance what might be a show-stopper, the developers tend to gold-plate everything, and to address all possible objections, even quite low quality ones.[2]

One way of dealing with these issues would be to allow the developers to call up the Inspectorate, or meet them for a coffee or whatnot, and just say “come on Sam, which of these are looking like show stoppers? We’ve got a budget to mitigate real problems, we just don’t want to waste it commissioning surveys on crap. How about this one – this looks like it would be really expensive, are you looking at it seriously or is this bad faith interference? Does this one have any real local support, or is it just two or three loudmouths with a website?”.

But that’s impossible. In the first place, you can’t call up the Examining Authority for a nationally significant UK infrastructure project and have this kind of conversation, because the likelihood is that they won’t know. At the crucial stage where the planning work, mitigation options and surveys are being done, the Examining Authority consists of two or three people, none of whom have seen any of the papers before.

That’s the “state capacity problem”. But in many ways the bigger problem is that if you suggested doing this, everyone would throw an absolute fit of “what the hell are you doing?!?!?”. Back channel conversations between developers and the planning authorities just don’t seem right, and allowing similar conversations with the objectors wouldn’t cure it. There’s just a very strong intuition that if the inspectorate (which has a quasi-judicial role) is going to say that a particular planning issue is unimportant, or unfounded, or in bad faith, the only way they should communicate this message is through a reasoned decision in an official report.

Maybe we need to think more carefully about what we’re worried about, and whether there are better ways of solving the problem than the ones we’ve chosen. I think the key worry about back channel conversations is that they might be a vector for bribery or influence, but I’m not sure that the potential harm from that is of the same order as the harm from constantly delayed infrastructure. There’s also a general issue that communication systems which facilitate telling one person one thing and another person another can also be misused strategically. I’m not sure, more to come.

[1] In this case, there was comparatively little contribution from the endangered species and heritage sites which usually get the blame. The key questions mainly revolved around “Can the local road system cope with that kind of heavy goods traffic?”. Which obviously isn’t a problem that our Victorian forebears had to worry about; they were starting from a much more blank slate, rather than a slate heap.

[2] Like those repeatedly raised by Buckinghamshire Council. I’ve suggested elsewhere that this is its own governance problem – strategic use of the planning system is antisocial behaviour just like graffitiing trains, and ought to be penalised, through the criminal justice system if necessary. My guess is that it would be almost impossible to get a conviction on this basis, but my guess is also that the kind of people who work the system this way are likely to be extremely risk-averse with respect to personal consequences. So you might be able to get risk-aversion working on your side.

In 2024 and 2025, I served for six months as an international volunteer on a first-person view attack drone team in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. My team was deployed in the Donbas region, in one of the hottest sectors of the front. When I joined the team, I was excited to work with a cutting-edge tool. By the end of my deployment, I was a bit disillusioned. Let me tell you why.First-person view drones are unmanned aerial vehicles with four propellers located at the four corners of the craft, roughly in the shape of a square of seven to

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