I was playing poe2 the other day and the servers went down for a bit. They came back up a couple minutes after.
This got me thinking about a few years ago when I played MMO games, like Wildstar which is now defunct and unplayable forever*.
So… I have Grim Dawn on Steam. If the Crate company disappears for one reason or another (not before FoA tho thx), can Grim Dawn still be played?
From a technical standpoint I believe so. But there are layers to this question. What happens to your intellectual property? Could it still be bought? Or only played by people who have the game? Could some other company buy the IP and somehow disable the game from Steam?
*Uh, so after writing this I looked it up and some folks are trying to keep it alive. Nice!
game wont be removed from your steam library, even if the IP got bought
Steam also now don’t allow sabotaging of games sold, so if someone bought the IP and made it unplayable they’d roll the version back, and likely block said new owner from the reposit until they make a new branch,
(this happened atleast once when a malicious dev did this to their game before)
*that doesn’t mean the new owners can’t make changes you might not like tho
-i’m assuming it’s similar for GoG
Whether or not Crate sells the IP would be up to them,/bankruptcy proceedings
But what may happen is the game simply gets removed from purchase if the IP doesn’t find a new home and a studio goes completely bankrupt, like happened with Rochard,
owners ofc still able to download and play from their library
aside from that/based of what’s happened before with other games i don’t know the finer technical details
“platform wise”
not like they can do anything to any manual GoG installers you already had
Worst comes to worst those of us who bought a physical copy as part of the Kickstarter years ago would still be able to play v1.0 assuming we have a CD player in/attached to our PC.
