“Although Sweet Bandits had to close their doors, we don’t believe Deceive Inc. should quietly disappear because the services behind it aren’t sustainable forever,” the unsigned post reads. "We’re actively rebuilding Deceive Inc.’s backend to be sustainable indefinitely and support community-hosted dedicated servers.
Good guy devs and count me in for self-hosting a dedicated server.
So if seems like the peak of Good Guy Game Devs (but who still need to make money) would sell the game to normal gamers, but also offer the ability to buy a server build license.
From there, if they company goes under, they prepare to open source the game and server code in case the open source community wants to maintain both.
Is there anything else I’m missing in that assessment?
As well as technical issues about how and what code you could hand over, there are likely to be issues around the IP of both the front and backend code, but also of whatever franchise the game is part of. If it’s a good, or at least milkable, franchise concept, they’ll likely need to sell it to recoup sone of their costs. Then, any code they bought in, either as a pre-existing package, or as a subcontracted unit, would be unlikely to have the sort of licence that lets them redistibute it, which means the code will likely be missing key components even if they do distribute it.
Building a basic server that does enough for a small group of players to enjoy is likely to be the simplest approach as they can control what IP goes into the server code, and by not changing the client, they avoid difficulties in that area.
They’d need to be forward thinking in which technologies they use such that they can be handed over to customers. Open source is always nice but isn’t strictly necessary, and it’s far less likely to happen whenever middleware is involved.