Sony kills Amplitude support
I’ve long wondered what happens when a game’s online support is terminated. Well, it’s happening this weekend with Amplitude. Sony is pulling the plug on the server for the online portion of the game Amplitude, which is a rhythmic music videogame for the PlayStation 2, not unlike Guitar Hero, except with a standard controller rather than a goofy peripheral. I actually played Amplitude a bit, and it was the only game I’ve ever played online with my PS2 (yeah, that network adapter was a great value).
This does raise some questions though. How long are companies obligated to continue to support online play? They are putting these capabilities on the back of the box, after all; is it fair to remove online support whenever it ceases being profitable? What if they nixed online support for a game that was just one year old? Could that be considered deceptive advertising? I wonder how much it really was costing them to keep one server running. From a public relations perspective, maybe it’d be worth it to keep the server running, even if it is costing them some electricity. After all, all of the Amplitude players are PS2 owners, and this incident is going to stick in their mind when they consider buying future videogames or systems from Sony. Perhaps Sony’s best move would have been to make the server software available and let a fan take over the running of the server. That way they still don’t pay any more maintenance costs, but they haven’t pissed off so many customers.
What most intrigues me about this issue, however, is how it could affect the realm of MMORPGs. What happens when an MMORPG goes under? Amplitude did not have a persistent world, in contrast with pretty much every MMORPG out there. What happens when EverQuest is finally taken down? What happens when people lose access to characters that they’ve literally spent years playing? (Yes, it’s true, some people have actually logged over 365 days of game time on a single character.) Do game companies have some sort of obligation to continue online support so long as there is a fanbase? I suspect not, but I also don’t think it’s good for business to pull the plugs on an online game.
Let me bring up another example. Total Annihilation, the best real time strategy game until Supreme Commander, had an awesome online battle system called Boneyards. Players would log in and fight individual battles on a world map, and as one team won more and more battles they’d take more and more territory, eventually winning when they took over the entire planet. It was a very neat system, and I haven’t really seen it done since. But unfortunately, the parent company of Cavedog, the people that made Total Annihilation and the ones who were hosting the servers, went bankrupt, thus taking down Boneyards with it. The online experience of Total Annihilation is now horribly gimped, and there’s not a thing anyone can do about it because the Boneyards source code was never released.
