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The “Stop Killing Games” movement is something that is really important to us here at the Loftia team. As players ourselves, we’ve felt the sting of a beloved online world and place to share with friends vanishing forever. As creators, the thought of Loftia, a world we are pouring so much of our lives and energy into, being lost to time is unthinkable. The challenges of game preservation are real, especially for an indie MMO like Loftia, but we believe tackling them head-on is truly important.
As a completely independent studio, with no publisher or giant parent company mandating what we must do, we thankfully have lots of flexibility here, to both discuss things openly, and help lay a path for preserving Loftia, so that we can do our part to Stop Killing Games. Be warned – this gets a bit technical, since this is a complex topic, but we tried to keep it accessible!
As we all know, games we love have been getting shut down for a long time. Some of our team members have experienced this, and fought to Stop Killing Games even before we had a slogan and a petition. Our Executive Producer, Chris Clay, worked on the MMORPG Asheron’s Call where the team released the server software to the community after 15 years of operations, and https://emulator.ac/ still exists today, over 25 years after the game was originally released. They also worked on Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online that are still in live operations and receiving updates today. Both of these games are still thriving, almost 20 years since their initial launch! And on top of helping bring Magic: The Gathering Arena into existence as its Game Director, Clay still fought to keep its predecessor, Magic Online, running – against immense internal pressure to shut it down due to the success of Arena.
Our Lead Game Designer, Felipe Dal Molin, worked on Ballistic, a Facebook-based first-person shooter playable on the browser. When the Facebook games boom from the early 2010s ended and the publisher had the game shut down, the developers decided to build a standalone Steam version, Ballistic Overkill, which came with the server binaries available for anyone who would like to keep their own servers running. Community servers are still running today, even after the game was delisted from Steam!
For Clay, Felipe, and many other developers on our team, having had other games killed in the past, it means so much to us that all of the blood, sweat and tears that we’ve poured into Loftia (and other games) will result in a title that will stand the test of time for decades to come.
When you build an ambitious project with a small team, you need to search for areas to offload aggressively. Ten years ago, it simply wouldn’t have been possible for Loftia to exist – not without a far larger team and budget. The reason we can is that we are standing on the shoulders of giants, and leveraging some of the amazing platforms and tools massive companies have built that do much of the work for us.
Here’s a look under the hood as some of the services that make Loftia possible, and why it is tricky to replace them if we aren’t around to pay the bills:
Building a robust, performant and affordable backend layer was something that required a massive team of super talented people when Blizzard was building World of Warcraft, over twenty years ago. Now, we can handle the infrastructure side of it infinitely easier, building on top of world class commercial solutions.
In short, a MMO is not a single client and server like games were in the past; it is a complex web of interconnected services. But what happens if, years from now, we run out of resources and have to stop supporting Loftia? How do we untangle that web for preservation?
We have two main aspects of our plan here; making the game resilient, and making it rebuildable.
First, we make sure that the game won’t completely break if a ‘leaf’ part of the backend services goes down. A ‘leaf service’ would be any service that isn’t absolutely essential to the game functioning – things like achievements and chat, amongst others. If chat isn’t working, just hide the chat box. If the achievement is down, the rest of Loftia is still available. Even outside the context of preservation, this is just good practice, since we are more resilient during normal operations to service outages of the third parties we depend on.
The bigger challenge is the core infrastructure, things like our database layer. If, in the far future, our studio shuts down, we are planning to release a ‘Loftia Ark’ package, that gives the community the pieces they could use to host their own version of the game. This is possible because of another key development best practice we follow: Infrastructure As Code.
We almost never use services that require you to use a web GUI and manual configuration to set up your infrastructure. Instead, our backend architecture; database tables, serverless logic functions, everything, is defined in code scripts. This lets us create a new copy of our backend with the press of a button, which is great for our own development, but also critical for our preservation plan!
In the case that, many years down the road, the worst happens, here is what we plan to provide in a ‘Loftia Ark’:
A plan like this requires extra work. It means ensuring we have a ‘post-shutdown’ life in mind for systems, careful documentation, and maybe even having to spend the last weeks of our studio working on preservation.
But for us, the cost is more than worth it. We are building Loftia to be a place of comfort, creativity and connection, and the idea that all of that could be erased breaks our hearts! We stand with the players driving the Stop Killing Games initiative, and we hope our plan can serve as a beacon for other independent studios who share this vision.
Together, we can build worlds that are made to last!
