One Thing That’s Essential for Dead Games to Rise Again

Publishers have been criticized in the past for removing purchased games from players’ digital libraries. In most cases, these removals were for online games deemed “unplayable” since their servers shut down. But there’s a good reason players are up in arms after losing these games.

Defunct Games Can Live on Through Fan Efforts

After an online game’s servers close, the game is unplayable through normal means. While some games feature single-player campaigns or solo training modes, defunct games with a strict focus on online multiplayer don’t let you go any further than the main menu. It may seem like these games are worthless without official support, but some fans find ways to keep playing.

You can still enjoy the online multiplayer of many defunct games through private servers. These private servers are the only reason many shuttered games are still alive, many of which have thriving playerbases. Some unofficial servers will build upon the original game by restoring cut content and adding fan-made content updates. Online games preserved by unofficial servers include a wide variety of MMOs, multiplayer shooters, mobile games, and social platforms like Sony’s PlayStation Home and Disney’s Club Penguin.

While private servers exist for plenty of popular online games, creating an unofficial server for a defunct game is a complicated process that can take several months or even years to complete. Furthermore, some games can’t be restored through traditional methods. In most cases, defunct servers are restored by fans who access the original game’s server client or server code and modify it to run the game outside its original servers.

Alternatively, some online games are rebuilt from the ground up using data and assets recovered from the official release, though these projects can take years to reach a playable state.

Thanks to these fan servers, defunct online games can stay active at no additional cost to the original developers. However, players need to be able to retain ownership over these games to create these servers. While it makes sense for online-only games to be delisted from stores after their shutdown, publishers shouldn’t revoke defunct games from players’ libraries.

Without the ability to own defunct games, reviving their online experiences will be significantly harder. Unfortunately, with digital-only releases becoming increasingly common for modern multiplayer games, many titles will be practically unsalvageable when their servers go offline.

Online Games Are Worth Preserving

There’s another reason why it’s important to keep these games active. Online games are notoriously difficult to preserve due to their limited lifespan, which is ultimately determined by whether the game is profitable. Massive successes like World of Warcraft, Final Fantasy XIV, and Team Fortress 2 will likely remain online for decades to come, but the future is uncertain for most smaller titles. When these games shut down, there’s no other option to play them other than by using private servers.

Despite this, publishers have started revoking game licenses, ensuring that future preservation efforts would be impossible. For games like The Crew, which kept its servers online for nearly 10 years until its shutdown in early 2024, players had plenty of time to archive assets and server code.

This not only enabled the creation of mods that allow players to enjoy The Crew offline but has also led to an ongoing effort to revive its online multiplayer. But games that met an early demise like Concord likely won’t ever make a return, at least not without their publishers reviving the game in some official capacity.

Both Concord and The Crew at least received physical releases, meaning hackers could potentially recover whatever data is stored on their discs. The same can’t be said for thousands of other online games that were only available digitally before their closure. Revoking these games from consumers doesn’t serve much purpose other than combating any future attempts at preserving these games. However, that may be the point of this practice.

Although private servers are essential for preserving online games, their legality has been a controversial topic. There’s nothing wrong with playing on a fan-made server, but creating one requires modifying and replicating parts of a game’s server code, which could be considered a violation of copyright law. On the other hand, gaming historians have argued that the additional work that goes into restoring online experiences qualifies these preservation efforts as being protected under “fair use” laws.

As reported by Ars Technica, this copyright debate has been at the center of numerous conflicts between the Entertainment Software Association (ESA)—an organization that represents numerous major video game publishers—and gaming preservation groups like the Museum of Art and Digital Expansion (MADE).

In these legal battles, the ESA has expressed concerns about the possibility of these servers becoming publicly available rather than privately archived for strictly academic purposes. It also argued that these unofficial revivals would be competing with currently active online games or any future re-releases of the defunct titles, which may disincentivize players from supporting official releases.

The problem with this argument is that it ignores the reasons most online games are shuttered. Usually, a game’s servers are taken offline due to a low player count or a reliance on aging hardware. When these games are no longer profitable enough to justify the costs of maintenance, developers understandably pull the plug on their servers.

Publishers rarely return to their past failures, so official revivals of these abandoned games are unlikely to happen. Likewise, private servers are mainly created for the niche fanbases that still play these games, meaning they rarely attract new players (though there are exceptions).

Fan Revivals Inspire Franchise Resurrections

Perhaps the most overlooked aspect of unofficial revivals for online games is how it benefits both fans and publishers. Beyond resurrecting and preserving online games for players, these revival projects bring attention to lesser-known titles and indirectly help companies gauge the interest in reviving older games.

In some cases, unofficial revival projects have inspired publishers to bring their games back from the dead. Gigantic was a free-to-play multiplayer shooter that launched in 2017, but went offline after less than a year. Despite its short lifespan, the game continued to attract new players after its closure through private servers. Gigantic‘s renewed popularity eventually led to its official revival in 2024 with a paid version titled Gigantic: Rampage Edition.

Similarly, the 2004 superhero-themed MMO City of Heroes—which initially shut down in 2012—was revived through unofficial servers in 2019, with the most notable being a server titled Homecoming: City of Heroes. Although the original developers never returned to City of Heroes, the game made an unconventional comeback in 2024, when the team behind Homecoming was granted an official license to host City of Heroes from its publisher, NCSoft.

This practice doesn’t just apply to online games. Fan support is just as important for abandoned single-player series and can show developers that there’s a demand for the return of long-dormant franchises. The Silent Hill franchise had been on a steady decline for years until the release of P.T. in 2014. The “playable teaser” hinted at a promising future for the series with a then-upcoming sequel titled Silent Hills. However, internal troubles at Konami led to the game’s cancelation and P.T. being delisted from the PlayStation store. After this controversy, the series went silent for many years.

Despite Konami’s attempts to scrub all traces of P.T. from digital stores, fans kept the game alive through digital archives and unofficial remakes. Petitions to bring back P.T. and the Silent Hill series as a whole persisted over the years. These efforts eventually paid off and led to an influx of new Silent Hill entries, such as Silent Hill: The Short Message, the upcoming Silent Hill F, and the critically-acclaimed remake of Silent Hill 2.

Gaming Revivals Are Good for Everyone

Online games and many single-player franchises will inevitably be abandoned, but there’s no reason to stop players from keeping these games alive. Fan-made revivals exist for small yet loyal fan bases that don’t want to say goodbye to their favorite online games. When these unofficial projects gain attention, both players and publishers benefit from the renewed interest and the opportunity to bring back old experiences through an official release.

For now, the arguments surrounding the legality of game preservation will continue to be a hurdle for private servers. But if publishers start to recognize the benefits of allowing these projects to thrive, they’ll hopefully become more open to the idea of letting fans keep their games alive.