“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.
The PR-friendly response for why they centralize servers always sounds good, because it’s PR. They push lots more updates than they did in the old days because it’s part of the business model, whereas we used to get sequels and expansion packs that paid for that work up front. This is another way of framing my perspective on this modern business model as being expensive for them and generally a losing bet that’s not worth pursuing compared to how we used to do things.
I don’t even consider that cynical. It’s the only conclusion I can come to based on how these different companies behave. The artist already told me clearly what the intended experience was, and if I bought the damn thing, I should be able to disregard it. Games are also games, and we should be able to run house rules. Getting in the way of that is just making the product worse, regardless of what the art is.