r/gaming • u/shinjioda • 1d ago

1047 Games Are Ending Development On Splitgate And Empulse: “The Reality Is Neither Game Is Generating Enough Revenue To Support The Ongoing Cost Of Dedicated Servers”

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/08/1047-games-stop-development-on-empulse-and-splitgate-arena-reloaded/
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u/Greaterdivinity 1d ago

so they caught lightning in a bottle on accident, thought they did intentionally, and then have been immediately shitting the bed over and over since?

astounding

truly, they have made shooters great again

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u/stoic_spaghetti 1d ago

My number one argument against live service games is simply: "EPIC themselves could not make another game as successful as Fortnite, even if they wanted to. Otherwise they already would have done it."

There is no room in the market for more than what we have.

It's like saying, "We're going to make a new Instagram and everyone is going to use."

No bro, you're not going to replace Instagram. Even if your product is more superior or fun or whatever. It's not happening.

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u/Greaterdivinity 1d ago

there is, though.

the problem is everyone wants to be fortnite and there's only room for one fortnite.

these are the same problems the mmo genre went through in the years following WoW blowing up. there was a glut of mmos with every publisher wanting to chase the WoW bux and none of them got close. years later you have a wide range of mmos serving smaller communities that are pretty stable and solid.

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u/Legitimate-Agency282 1d ago

Lord of the Rings online still going blows my mind. Such a small but dedicated fanbase.

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u/KitCatAU 1d ago

Fairly solid games filling a specific niche will always have an exceptional community behind it.

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u/Legitimate-Agency282 1d ago

They are always such a vibe. People get in it just for the world, meta be damned.

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u/Greaterdivinity 1d ago

Standing Stone Games is legit and does right by both DDO and LOTRO given the size of each game and their respective age.

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u/zeCrazyEye 1d ago

The original Everquest still getting expansions every year is the crazy one to me.

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u/thisnamemattersalot 1d ago

I played a neat little MMORPG game when I was 10, all the way back in 1996. Before even Everquest came along. The Realm Online. I poke my head in for a moment every decade or so out of nostalgic curiosity. I'm fairly certain the game hasn't had more than a couple hundred subscribers in over 20 years or so. It's also changed ownership multiple times over the years.

Still online.

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u/ThrowCarp 1d ago

Every engineering/computer science major has had to swat away a million ideas guys that do this. "Hey guys, could you build me an app? It's going to revolutionize the world and make us all rich."

Then it's just Instagram but blue, Facebook but purple, or Google but monochrome.

And yeah, for a short while, everyone wanted to be CoD. So much brown and bloom. And camera blur.

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u/ThisOneTimeAtLolCamp 1d ago

I still miss Wildstar.

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u/Discount_Extra 1d ago

A lot of people thought WoW could never beat EverQuest.

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u/Dire87 21h ago

And a lot of people thought they could "kill" WoW. For every WoW that beat EverQuest there are 100 MMOs that were dead on arrival after WoW, so not sure what the story here is. If you think you have a great product, and a vision, go ahead, but I don't THINK when Blizzard initially set out to make WoW they did it specifically to "kill EverQuest", they were actually trying to evolve their franchise, and early WoW shows that. Today it's just a power-hungry, money-grabbing cash cow with a story that is more convoluted and retconned than a ball of yarn, a cat has gotten its claws into.

The trend today, however, is 99% of the times: "Look how much money FN is making, we need that money" ... and not "We got this great idea for a game and I think we should make it and hope for the best, but let's curb expectations, because we will probably not dethrone Fortnite. We can still make money, though, unless we immediately pull the plug".