What happens when games are taken off life support

When a game is no longer operational one can still play if it has offline component. However, online games simply vanish as there are no servers to log on to

In the early days, when games were new and gaming devices were still aspirations, games were possessions that could be passed on. From one player to another and so on, sometimes they were part of trades or makeweights in barter deals as players searched for new games to play.

However, not all games sold and that is where this journey begins; this week we try to uncover what happens to them.

The history in this case is twofold, one when games were products and available on physical media like cartridges, floppy disks, compact disks (CDs) and memory cards and secondly, when games are services and available via remote server locations from a variety of app-stores.

Despite, the minimal cost for showcasing a game on a digital app store, an unsold game still consumes valuable screen retail space and bandwidth thus it will eventually begin to be dropped as new games arrive.

When games were sold physically, publishers would often take drastic measures to get rid of unsold inventory. The most infamous of these was Atari digging landfills in New Mexico to bury innumerable copies of the ET game, often considered to be one of the worst games ever made.

Thankfully, things have changed since then, but digital games need servers and upkeep. If games have multiplayer dimensions they need extra services for matchmaking, software to prevent cheating and additional services to keep the whole process seamless. Thus, when a publisher decides to close the virtual doors of a game it is not just deleting it from an app store but stopping all support services that made it playable as well.

When a game is no longer operational you might still be able to play it if it has an offline component, in the case of online games though, they simply vanish as there are no servers to log on to. It is important to consider that it is not just unsuccessful games that die but also successful ones over time as players move on to newer games or hardware.

Recently, there were protests from gamers when Sony decided to close the digital stores that sold games for older consoles. While the protests would indicate that there are players willing to buy games for those systems, the revenue might not have been enough to pay for the maintenance and upkeep of the stores. These decisions are difficult to make as games sometimes have endless repayable value but ecosystems may not.

Games as experiences often leave us with wonderful bits of nostalgia and recalling specific instances can spur us to search and load an old title. When that moment does happen and a favourite game refuses to load up or just vanishes, remember sometimes games pass on to the afterlife as well.

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