“many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only”

So change your design? The corporate mind cannot comprehend this.

Why could you turn a battle royal game into a local only split screen game for 2-4 people?

I tried to pick the most obvious example of an online only title.

What’s the plan with a 100 player battle royal game?

Edit: the guy I replied to chose to quote someone saying a game is online only, and their suggestion was to change that.

And then ya’ll come in with replies about keeping it online only, and they have 55 upvotes as of this edit.

As long as people can host a server instance, does it matter?

Hypothetically, even if it costs 1000$ per hour in AWS fees to get the required hardware to run that, at least you have the option to, alternatively have a peer to peer option to play smaller version on a LAN with a max of however many players your own network can support, there could be many implementations, which at the end of the day would still allow you to play the game when the official servers (authentication or room hosts) are shuttered and inaccessible

The main point of SKG is that currently, we, as customers, are not even getting the short end of the stick, we are getting no stick, despite having paid for it.

And ultimately, at the end of the day, not our problem to try to figure this out, the point is we’re unhappy with the current situation and want things to change.

That’s not “changing that” it’s keeping it online only.

There are, it may surprise you to learn, different types of game that have online connectivity for different reasons. And the appropriate EOL response may differ across those games.

“Live-service” games where the main gameplay is singleplayer but an online connection is required so they can enforce achievements and upgrades (…and “anti-piracy” bs) may be best served by simply removing the online component so it can all be done locally.

Online competitive games can be switched to a direct connection mode.

MMOs and other games with large numbers of users and a persistent online server can be run on fan-operated servers, so long as (a) the server binary is made available, and (b) the client is modified to allow changing settings to choose a server to connect to (it could be something as simple as a command-line flag with no UI if the devs are being really cheap).

You guys…

I picked an actual “online only” example for a reason. Yet everyone is jumping around talking about other things.

Turning a battle royal into a lan only game sounds like the solution I was expecting in my replies. And then yeah, you can even route that over the internet.

But that’s not changing the design, really. It’s providing the infrastructure needed to run it, even if it’s lan only, and would need more to run it over the internet.