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Re:Game developer loses multiplayer service code by fragsworth on Sunday September 08, 2019 @12:03PM (#20911324)
Here's my take - it looked like their average concurrent players was around ~30 before this happened, which indicates it was nearly a dead game. It's free-to-play, and I can't say how much they made per player, but a decent amount would be $0.05 per DAU. Converting concurrents to DAU is difficult, but let's say they had 500-1000 DAU. That would be on the order of $25-50/day.

My guess is they could fix the problems, but it would cost an engineer a month? or a couple months? Considering the game was on the decline, it's hard to justify spending any effort to fix the issues.

Now the weird part. It was a F2P game - I don't know how much stuff people were buying in the game, but there's an implied contract that when you purchase a digital good, the digital good will continue to work for some reasonable amount of time. They are breaking that agreement by not restoring their servers and I am not sure what that means legally - there's potential for class action lawsuits, maybe?

Re:Game developer loses multiplayer service code by jsnell on Sunday September 08, 2019 @01:51PM (#20912075)
It was only made free to play after the blog post. Before that it was a $10 game: https://steamdb.info/app/237870/
Re:Game developer loses multiplayer service code by cpp4life on Sunday September 08, 2019 @01:13PM (#20911790)
It seems like the marketplace needs to offer some kind of contract: any purchase in a f2p within 30 days of the app being turned down for any reason should be refunded.