Video games started out as a very niche hobby. The price to play and the technical know-how required for early gaming was too high for many of us to even consider. Nowadays, everyone with a smartphone can carry an entire library of titles in their pockets.

This ease of access comes with a price, and to help give games more longevity we will actually need to make them less easy to play.

This sounds like a distasteful proposition but we argue that gamers are already in this position. While a publisher is supporting a game it’s very easy to join a lobby, play a game and have your stats be automatically saved across multiple devices. When a publisher pulls support for a game this situation becomes reversed: very often the only way a community can continue to play is thanks to a couple of very tech savvy members who can deploy and maintain server instances. Much of the time the greater community stops playing altogether, creating a situation where the remaining players have virtually no one to play with.

We plan to move this model back in time a little bit by creating a situation in which the each player needs to have a little bit of expertise to manage their own game instance. We expect that this will lead to player bases that are smaller than modern games, but we can eliminate the drop-off moment when that base drops to 0.

Join us on our discord and socials to talk more about this proposal. We would love to hear what you think.

https://discord.gg/2AapVZDB