This game leaves behind a legacy of extremely funny poor decisions and mistakes, culminating in becoming one of the few games that got to be shut down twice.

I bought the first Nickelodeon game a couple months after it released, and the online was already dead, I literally couldn't find a match. Just went ahead and got a refund on it.

It's going offline. You can still play it.
If you never owned it then it doesn't matter.

Pretty sure hosting costa arent it, the only thing possible woyld be licensing issues for the IP's otherwsie they could leave it on steam forever and STILL make money off of sales. There are games that do this by making the players host their own servers each match.

The reason that games are even hosted on "official" servers like these is to ensure the company can take the game down once the devs run out of time o the contract they made for all the IP's they use in said game. Otherwise its possible AND has been done before to let the players machines spin up a server each match.

The only issue was having to have a "matchmaking" server but even then, steam has the tools to replace that entirely.

If you aren't already aware of it (and in the EU) please sign the stopkillinggames.com petition so companies can't just drop "support" (that these days means kill) games when they feel like it.

The worst part, the demo was actually pretty good.

They literally could have released this game with mod support, and sold it for $20 and it would have been a fun party game.

Instead, they kept going on with BS games as a service.

Same here. There’s been a few games I’ve seen on here recently that look interesting, even some “indie” titles, but as soon as I get to the Steam page and it lists online only, I’ve lost all interest.

Miss me with that bullshit.

The business model isn't terrible, it makes money, but it is terrible for the consumer

I am aggressively opposed to anything that is profitable at the expense of the consumer. That is a terrible business model.

It's not my game. I only wanted to talk about what they did wrong. Kinda just doing armpit farts at the funeral, yanno?

Were any characters in the game not owned by Warner Bros?

Potentially, I don't exactly know all the rights owners.

But just looking at the roster, I'd assume Arya Stark might be the most complicated. While HBO falls under WB, unsure if ol' George signed away all rights to the character. And there's always future deals too, since rights holders can change hands.

Lol i like that phrasing. Yeah i hear ya

You don't pay anything to steam other than the initial 100 bucks or so, and the cut they take

What are you suggesting? That on once a game goes online it'll require the company by law to keep it running forever?
How many companies would still release games that requires backend if they knew it's a never ending endeavour even if they'll lose money from it?

Running the infrastructure to host the game's baceknd requires money, and releasing the server code as binary or open source is not something that'll happen.

So what is the end goal?

Required games and games studios to build the game to be played offline or have the ability to self host the server.

The companies could shut down their servers, if they at the same time would release the software needed to run the servers.
This would allow the creation of community servers, without any costs or responsibilities for the companies

There was a time when multiplayer games all came with dedicated server binaries.

It will never work

Valve hosts it for "free" (30 to 15% of every sale), yes.

I'm guessing this game has some phone-home DRM or something, and maybe it's only required the first time it's executed after installation ? They could of course just give the game a patch that removes it but I guess they don't want to anger the line investors and make it go down by working even a second on a "discontinued" game.