That’s true; I tend to think of a private server hosting a single game session of 1-4 players, but I haven’t interacted with private reimplementing of large community interactions. Generally, the commercial implementation would involve many connected servers, so it’s perhaps a bit more complicated than giving a separate address in a launcher option, but becomes less of an excuse overall.
That said, while the game is alive and well, the only motivating reason for that option’s existence is to support piracy of their game. Depending on how much they care, it’s something they’d have to keep under wraps in a development folder until the day the game dies out.
You may as well say the same thing about DRM-free games then, since this is effectively just a gimmick to disguise DRM. You don’t provide the server to endorse piracy. You do it because anything less is giving your customer an inferior product. Even if the preservation aspect of this didn’t upset me, I’d still have a hard time buying a game like Helldivers 2 because it comes across as phenomenally poor value compared to buying a game that’s built to last.
That’s true; I tend to think of a private server hosting a single game session of 1-4 players, but I haven’t interacted with private reimplementing of large community interactions. Generally, the commercial implementation would involve many connected servers, so it’s perhaps a bit more complicated than giving a separate address in a launcher option, but becomes less of an excuse overall.
That said, while the game is alive and well, the only motivating reason for that option’s existence is to support piracy of their game. Depending on how much they care, it’s something they’d have to keep under wraps in a development folder until the day the game dies out.
You may as well say the same thing about DRM-free games then, since this is effectively just a gimmick to disguise DRM. You don’t provide the server to endorse piracy. You do it because anything less is giving your customer an inferior product. Even if the preservation aspect of this didn’t upset me, I’d still have a hard time buying a game like Helldivers 2 because it comes across as phenomenally poor value compared to buying a game that’s built to last.