Nowadays multiplayer support for video games is assumed to always
be there, every newly released game should have a multiplayer component of some
sort whether it's a full multiplayer experience or just some semi-multiplayer
component. Games like World of Warcraft, Call of Duty and Battlefield are just
some of the many games that benefit from having multiplayer support. What most
people might not understand is that providing a server is not easy or cheap, so
what do the gaming companies do if they cannot afford to keep the server
running? They shut the servers down,
disabling the multiplayer support of the game.
Now
things like this always get me thinking about games we buy today. That at some
point in the future, a large portion of the game you paid money for will become
forever inaccessible. To be replayed only in your memories. Sometime in the
future, years from now when I go to play my Battlefield 3 game, I will ONLY
have the single player experience to enjoy. Games such as Left 4 Dead 1 & 2
will turn into short episodic single player games. The highest difficulty setting
on these games will be virtually impossible to beat since you only have your
terrible computer-driven companions at your side.
Years
from now games such as the newly released Mass Effect 3, multiplayer servers
will shut down causing a large portion of the game to go to waste, since you
need to access the multiplayer portion of the game to continue on your single
player campaign.
It is
sad to know that games we play today have content which has a limited lifespan.
Large portions of our games will stop existing, never to be relived again. And
with today’s gaming industry more and more games are having multiplayer content
interlaced with the single player experience.
Cheers!
/Stefan
