Epic Games is following Ubisofts route: Turns off servers for old(er) games

Epic Games is following the route of any other AAA publisher with multiplayer games

FTFY.

This doesn't make it "right", and yes it sucks that such server software is not made available to its community, and yes its as if they're only considering resurrecting online features via EOS for only whatever they think might be profitable in the future, but...

I kind of understand that it costs money and in some cases can be complicated even for the community to take on especially when there's backend (e.g. database platform like Oracle) or middleware software providers that licenses are required for. The community would have to take on such licensing costs with those vendors directly (not the game publisher).

When there is no middleware or 3rd party licensing, then sure let's call Epic totally selfish for not forking over servers to the community, just like the norm with nearly all other AAA publishers.

I'm not a fan of Epic's store, nor their Epic Online Services, nor how they've handled Rocket League & Fall Guys since acquiring their devs (requiring EOS, increasing cost of DLCs after move to F2P, etc), but this is not them trying to become a monopoly any more than Steam could be a monopoly (which they aren't).

Dance Central and Rock Band stuff it might be due to expired licenses. Unreal, makes no sense to be removed, as 2 are single Player, the rest have solid bots to play with.

Yeah I won't give them crap for this one because it avoided the pitfall that was at risk with the Ubisoft closures.

The following titles will have all online services disabled on January 24, after which players can continue playing single or local multiplayer modes offline etc etc.

Most games are only getting their online components shut off, single player and local multiplayer features will remain.

I do still see some exceptions to that listed at the bottom but I'm of mixed opinion.

• Rock Band Blitz was apparently already delisted in 2017. Now I give this one half marks since from what I can see, this one was a single player experience. But they at least made a way for those who purchased the game to carry their songs into Rock Band 4 so they didn't entirely die just yet (still another purchase though).
• Battle Breakers was f2p so that falls under standard f2p game death. Always sad but nothing unusual.
• Singspace I can't quite tell. It may have had a single player component but does feel like it was multiplayer social by intent.
• Unreal Tournament (Alpha) - well this is an alpha so nobody paid for anything as far as I'm aware. There may even be a way to still play single player, I just don't want to do enough research for that.

In my opinion of those, Rock Band Blitz feels like the closest one to being like the "almost Ubisoft" issue. But I didn't even know this spinoff existed, so I imagine outrage over it will be much less compared to what sorta happened to Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, etc.

Why put up a vote when you just farm hate-votes with no point to it?

I really don't think costs play a role here. You could run all the different Unreal Multiplayer Servers all at once on a potato and still have processing power left over to host an open Teamspeak server for all of them.

I wonder if they will pull them from GOG too. To me this feels like EA's stunt with Origin 11 years ago, because unlike Ubisoft, EA tried to sell everything like Steam.

who cares and who still plays those games ? most of those games were released when most of you guys werent even born there are big games like GTA 5 that got their servers shutdown for ps3 / xbox 360 and no one cared as much as they care for egs ppl now days just try to find anything to hate on egs

It's like they WANT you to put an eyepatch on.

It's really absurd how people try to taint only some selected companies, in this case Epic and Ubisoft. As if these two would be the only publishers to shut down servers for old games.
And here it's even some games being 20 years or older. As far I can tell pretty much none of the Unreal games had more than 200 active players since 2014.Heck, some haven't reached 10 players in many years.

Beautiful poll OP,don't listen to Epic bootlickers

Always amusing to see the cost argument brought up in such discussions. For the yearly pay of one higher up corpo you could maintain the servers for a hundred years easily.
If these corporations took any pride in what they're doing they wouldn't let go their legacy games to oblivion.

Where's bambi??

I don't mean to make you more angry, but pretty much everyone shuts down servers, including indies. It's an absolute nightmare and essentially, in my opinion, destroying culture even.

Hopefully legislation finally helps get companies to support local multiplayer tools for all games that need it since I know there's been some drafts for the EU already being made.

What a mess :(

For really old games? I can understand it.
I mean it shouldn't be the way things are, and companies should put in place a means of their remaining community taking on those things at-will, but this is how it's always been done. Not just epic.

That said, some games get their support pulled only a month after launch if they were deemed a flop, and that's where the real bullshit is. Though I've been lucky in that it's only happened to me once, and that was with the original All Points Bulletin (I think that died after 3 months?)

Zeruel132 comment is on point, every game needs to have a "listen" or "dedicated" server option as a consumer right. There's still a lot of old school games being played but lets keep in mind their communities are really small. One example: Red Orchestra Ostfront only has russian and polish dedicated servers and they join during weekends. Killing Floor 1 still has people. Battlefield 1942 on PC is run with a modified patch and so on.
Lets keep in mind many gamers move from one online game to another in X years, that's just the trend, so if the player base count is not enough you can bet they're gonna shut down the official servers. "Squake" was a really fun game that was given here by one of the devs, but the online multiplayer was run just by them so officialy It's abandonware at the moment. For some companies It's just their business model, they really don't care If the game gets buried, It's just another game in their list for resume.

We need right to own. Companies that sell games with online service should not be allowed to make the games no longer playable as sold, if they shut down servers they should distribute software freely to anyone who owns the game to allow them to run their own servers.

It's so cute how they think this won't end up biting them in the ass. As if a majority of their user base is there for anything more than free games, and free to play exclusives. I'm gonna bet that Steam is where Epic gets most of their money, outside of microtransactions, which are a whole 'nother layer of crap.

And fuck them times a thousand for disabling DLCs. I get shutting down online components for mad old games or games which are basically 100% inactive, but removing access to DLC one has paid for is bullshit. Fuck (and I cannot stress this enough) Epic games.

Edit: I'm not trying to Stan for Valve and Steam, just to knock Epic. I've bought games off of EGS and love a lot about it. It's just that I refuse to tolerate their BS, especially when it comes to removing access to something we've already purchased.

Ah classic corpo white knights defending their stupid corpo decision version: Epic (but enough jokes about fanboys, and yes you can BL me for that)
Tim really treat PC like console (aka closed system).

• I know is OLD games but why? Everyone is free to play game they want to play
• No space on serwer? It is Master server (keep info for server browser) it is no dedicated game serwer and need low resource (shop web page need that mutch).
• No money? But have money for exclusive deals (I read funny article were EGS take more money than make). Master server probably running on same servers were fortnite is running (Amazon) and take like 0,5%
• What reason for delist games? Community created "Community Master Server" (for UT99). When copo fall, mods, and community gods restore what is lost.
• Why don`t publish original source code for master server for community? It old code for pete sake!
• Even EA make less BS: yes closed MP for e.g. crasis 2 but don t take game from store (and can be modded back), and you can sill buy/play BF4 or 1942. Valve do some bad thing for consumers BUT you can buy all old games (on their own store! Epic can`t even do that) AND have working server browser. MS remaster their games WITH MP and dedicated server (Halo MCC)

And we have UE4 ending WITHOUT PROPER (not alpha) Unreal Tournament game (UE1 have 1 (and one normal unreal), UE2 have 2 (and 3 other unreal games) UE3 have UT3)
Smal OFF TOP:
EGS is still a gaming joke as beta store for early testers
Valve: have com-tab, guides for every game on store, not mention: remote play, steam deck (BTW: you can play unreal games on deck)uncensored games, their old games
GOG: no DRM policy (and you can downland instaler), goodies, opt-out luncher and luncher for other games (galaxy) uncensored games, their old games
What have EGS? Fortnite and year exclusivity deals
Even Ubisoft and EA dropped their store exclusivity (bethesda luncher go down, B-net who know after acquisition)

Epic pulls all Unreal games from GOG. Gog tried to negotiate with Epic to bring them back somehow at a later date, but Epic didn't budge.

In other news, Epic Will Pay Half A Billion Dollars For ‘Fortnite’ Settlement Over ‘Tricked’ Purchases And Privacy. Another article.

Source: Children's Online Privacy Protection Rule ("COPPA")

I guess nobody here knows how expensive and costly it is to run a dual pentium II server with 256 megs of ram on a 10/100 connection to provide those games some multiplayer. I bet it draws as much power as a few 100W incandescent light bulbs! Having the servers on would eventually cause Epic to go bankrupt in a few million years! Whew, I am so glad they decided to prevent that so early. Go Epic!

They are far from being like EA, this decision is pretty much understandable, games affected are really old, and server maintenance for them can cost a lot and can be time consuming for them to maintain them regularly.

It sucks obviously for people who are still playing those games, BUT games will be playable offline just fine, AND you can still play them kind of "online" with other people using software like Hamachi for example and creating unofficial servers to play on, so in most cases gamers can be unaffected with this change, you just need to use other software to play with other people.
And if said games have a huge player base, I am 100% sure that the community will make Multi-Player projects to keep them alive.

And they did say that some of them will be back online using Epic Online Services (which can actually be beneficial to the people playing those games, because of improved servers and match-making/communication services.)

So long story short, this is an issue, which can actually be bypassed/fixed by both fans and Epic.

TBH you can be extremely lucky that its not EA or Ubisoft, because when they kill support for the games, they kill them completely, and most of the times not even modders can fix them, and some of them even lose the ability to be playable offline (Single-Player).

Issues like these are why I avoid paying big bucks for a game of which the functionality relies on one-entity owned server (farm) and for MMOs in general. Some years ago, e.g. when GameSpy shut down, it was at least still possible to get some matches going with other players. But many a company then moved to a closed server system. And for me that is a bit of a problem when I get around to play a game sometimes only years after the actual release, and basically wasted money if there is no option whatsoever to host a private server. So I just avoid that when it is clear already at start that it is a closed system for MP, and no frustration when it eventually gets shut down.

i think it's not that they are shutting down servers for older games. they are shutting down servers that still uses the older version of the online service, which happen to affect the older games. here's the first sentence:

Starting today, we will begin turning off out-of-date online services and servers for many older games in the Epic family as we move to solely support Epic Online Services with its unified friends system, voice chat features, parental controls, and parental verification features.

they only disable games that don't use epic online services. the ones affected just need to move to epic online services and it'll work again. i'm not sure if the decision comes to epic or the developer to make the move, though.