Are MMOs Time-Release Vaporware?

KKnDz0r writes "Australian technology and gaming site 'Atomic' raises an interesting question about the dangers of MMOs that go bust. Are they part of a new breed of games that render themselves completely useless and without value if the parent company goes belly-up? It certainly seems that way in some cases, with Fury and now Hellgate: London both going to software heaven, leaving a player base holding relatively useless client software." While it's certainly not an issue for the large, continuously successful MMOs, we've lately seen a huge influx of companies trying to grab a slice of the MMO pie, some of which will inevitably fail. It would be great to see a dying company at least open up the server software, but how can we give them incentive to do so?

Comments

Re:Ranting about character support on Slashdot

[YttriumOxide]

"Encyclopedia" is a 'non-englishy' spelling (in fact, my auto spell checker is underlining it in red right now)... It's an American spelling, and while I've certainly seen it, I really don't like it. I don't think I've ever seen "façade" spelled as "facade" though.

Do you also write "cafe" instead of "café"? Or how about naïve?

I agree about Unicode being important, but it's not so much because "Umlauts rock", but rather that it's just handy to be able to spell things the way they should be spelled! I have no problem writing "Copenhagen", "Cologne" and "Munich" if I'm writing something specifically in English such as a travel guide, but if I were to talk about the place names "in general" (as I would do here on Slashdot for example), I'd write "Købnhavn", "Köln" and "München".

Not related to your reply, but another time it'd be useful on Slashdot would be for various symbols such as © and ® - discussions requiring these symbols are definitely pretty common around here!

While typing this email, I also wanted to give an example of the word, "Foetus" with the ligatured oe, and the degree sign, but even after typing œ and °, they don't display... it's even worse than I'd thought!