It’s been done.

Tesh :…they could at least legitimize private servers. If the fuss is that maintaining the official servers is too expensive to go forward, let people assume that cost on their own.
…Maybe take an official stand that “we don’t support the game any more, duh” to cover your legal rear, but recognize that while you’ve given up on the game, there are players who haven’t, and they paid money for your product. You don’t have to honor a perpetual warranty, but you don’t have to pour sugar in the gas tank and salt the fields, either.

Hmmm… here’s a thought… how about a ‘franchise type’ business plan?
You develop a game and then ‘franchise’ it out to ‘private’ servers?
Even allow those franchise owners to charge their own rates?
You sell the franchise the same way you sell regular software – only in this case you are selling the server side software (and as a result it would be VERY expensive). But, that said, gamers are not what they used to be (they’ve grown up!)and there are people out there who might be interested in this sort of idea.
As with any franchise, you sell the ‘package’ and all the management docs on how to run it (and associated forums, advertising etc) but you don’t actually run it. Also, the franchise holder does not actually own the game or the IP.

Yeah, I realise there are lots of potential problems here (Tech support for one + putting the game in the hands of the ‘enemy’ ;-] ) but just throwing out an idea.

Note that such doesn’t necessarily mean aiding and abetting the haxxors, I’m just saying that while you’re cutting costs and apron strings on a game that you’d just as soon disavow, cut the legal team that gets their knickers in a wad over private servers (and not so coincidentally cutting *their* costs out of the budget). There’s not even any new coding necessary, since people who want to do it will find ways to do so. Let them.

Maybe take an official stand that “we don’t support the game any more, duh” to cover your legal rear, but recognize that while you’ve given up on the game, there are players who haven’t, and they paid money for your product. You don’t have to honor a perpetual warranty, but you don’t have to pour sugar in the gas tank and salt the fields, either.

What’s left is the headless (non-graphical view) server side representation of the world, which can be CPU and RAM intensive or not, depending on how big and alive the world is.

It can be done.

Todays most MMOs come with super bloated clients, but I don’t see why a game like Guild Wars shouldn’t be able to run on one PC.

I am writing about the technical side here, I don’t play single player games at all and I can understand that no one is interested in providing single player modes as an exit strategy, but it’s possible.

geldonyetich :Personally, I don’t like to look at game development in terms of money invested. How much money did it take to invent Poker? Chess? Are they “lesser” games? Low budget indy games come out continually that surprise us.
Money is almost a moot point — sure, technology takes a bit of scratch to harness. However, the heart and soul of the thing the game, is a product of developer talent in understanding the human condition, not money….?

I would like to agree with you – but the harsh reality is that no-one exists in a vacuum.
I would love it if games were sold based purely on their ‘artistic and design merit’ because we would probably see a lot more innovation.
But why does this thread exist? Because TR got shut down.
Why was that? it was not profitable.
TR was a very interesting game in many ways. I kinda liked it and liked some of the ideas in it very much (both story/plot and game elements) but that was not enough to keep it afloat.
And sadly, unless you can turn a profit you are unlikely to get another go.

As for how much money it took to invent Poker or Chess?
Hardly a fair comparison, the design team on Chess was huge and they largely worked for free, in addition the development time was in the order of hundreds of years (vaporware!).

Money is almost a moot point — sure, technology takes a bit of scratch to harness. However, the heart and soul of the thing the game, is a product of developer talent in understanding the human condition, not money. Everything else is advertising and, well, what intrinsic value have you proved you have if you’ve just paid to be popular?

That’s right: Eat blasphemous truth, Western world.