Syp of Bio Break has a retro gaming column in which he plays 20 year old games again and makes a journal of his experiences with those games. Personally I rarely play games more than a few years old, but somehow it is good to know that I could, even if I have to solve a few technical difficulties first. That contrasts sharply with an observation Cam did yesterday in the comments, where he stated that: "Multiplayer-only games have no shelf-life. No longevity.".

I'm not saying that his observation is an absolute truth, you can still play Meridian 59 from 1996 or even LPMud. But just like the WoW subscription curve, the number of players of a multi-player game rises for a while, and then declines. Depending on the game mechanics a decline can have more or less serious negative impact on the remaining players: Longer waiting times in queues to get a number of players together, for example. And then there is the danger of the servers being switched off, and the game becoming totally unplayable. MMORPG.com lists 260 dead MMORPGs, and the list gets a lot bigger if you include other types of multiplayer games.

As Cam says: "Everyone's playing Battlefront now, so who's playing Splatoon, Rocket League, Titanfall, Evolve, Brink, or any of the literally HUNDREDS of indie 2D arena-battlers who are all languishing in the 'mostly negative' reviews bin with the predominant complaint being: "Empty servers."". The advantage of MMORPGs is that there is still a lot of game left if you were the only player on the server. Those arena-battlers or other types of multiplayer PvP only games simply become unplayable if there are not enough players online to form even one game.

"Games as a service" has replaced "Games as a product" because developers couldn't find a better idea to combat piracy. As a result even some games which are from gameplay fundamentally single-player experiences now only work after you've logged into a server online. The day the company goes bankrupt or closes down the server because the cost outstrips the revenue, you can't play that game any more. Which means that any game that uses servers has no guarantee that you can still play it 20 years later, and might die much faster than that.

Part of the problem is the over-supply of games these days. There are so many games of any given genre coming out every year now that it is simply mathematically impossible for each of them to hold their players for long. Of course some blockbuster games will last for decades, but not many games can achieve that any more in such a crowded field. As much as I like to pick up games on Steam for cheap a year later, I must agree with Cam that with multiplayer-only games the months or year after release can become the only opportunity to play the game at all before it withers and dies.

Which multiplayer game of 2015 do you think will still be around in 2035?