What if Stop Killing Games win? Anthem, SpaceCraft and Warframe devs on the "massive undertaking" of reverse engineering an always-online game

Sci-fantasy shooter Warframe is the sexy cyborg fruit of 13 years of updates and expansions, encompassing scores upon scores of quests, areas, plotlines, systems and characters, together with a huge quantity of player-made art. Much of Warframe's original design still exists within the game, however tweaked and refreshed: the developers have removed a few larger chunks, including the underloved PvP raids, but they've mostly sought to polish up aspects that have lost their lustre, while playing out stories that range from spacey self-referentiality to commentary on indentured work. Currently, the studio are reworking Banshee, a sonic avenger who formed part of the Warframe launch roster way back in 2013.

"I know the Warframe team has been talking about bringing back raids, and doing stuff with that," the game's original design director Scott McGregor told me, at this year's Tennocon expo. "But overall, there's a lot of stuff from Warframe that's been in there for a long, long time. For better or for worse. I think, as a team, instead of mostly turning it off, we either improve it, or we replace it with something better."

Given that commitment to retaining all the love and labour soaked into Warframe's foundations, I find it strange that Digital Extremes do not, according to McGregor, have any particular plans for ensuring that Warframe will survive, should Digital Extremes become unable to officially support it. While Warframe is a PvE-led experience, mostly played solo, there's no offline mode and no local server support. "I can't say that we've really thought that far in advance," McGregor told me, when I asked how Warframe might outlive Digital Extremes. "We just keep working on the game." In the event that the devs are forced to pull the plug, he quipped, Digital Extremes will "do the Canadian thing, and it will be the right thing."

It seems increasingly vital that the creators of online-required games like Warframe make plans for their afterlives. The 'live service' space that attracted so much investment in the 2010s now appears fatally saturated, with a few evergreen juggernauts straining for growth, while the likes of Concord and Highguard crumble to atoms within weeks or months of release. Some of these live service decommissionings have sparked a lasting outcry. When Ubisoft shuttered always-online racer The Crew, it inspired the formation of Stop Killing Games, a "consumer rights" crusade to stop publishers arbitrarily switching off access, and make the addition of offline modes, local server support, and similar 'end of life' functionality a legal requirement. SKG's broad argument isn't that publishers should have to fund online games in perpetuity, but that there should be an obligation to hand the game over to players somehow when the publisher decides, for whatever reason, to end support.

SKG have proposed or endorsed a variety of legislation across California, the European Commission, and the UK parliament. They've not had huge success winning over the politicians, with industry lobbyists like the Electronic Software Association pushing back, but they've certainly kept the subject of preservation in the headlines. Recently, Sony fuelled the fire by announcing plans to stop selling PlayStation games on discs, putting more power in the hands of digital publishers who may cut off your access to their catalogues at whim. Amid these larger changes, there have been a few more positive stories about individual cases of videogame preservation. Earlier this year, Might & Delight added an offline mode to their wonderful RPG strollalong Book of Travels. Thick as Thieves developers Otherside are currently working (amid layoffs) on peer-to-peer multiplayer for their Looking Glass-inspired burglary sim, so that player gangs can keep on robbing mansions after the servers evaporate.

Myself, I support SKG's overall goal of ensuring that storied online games don't vanish forever. I find it a little terrifying that a universe as florid and fizzy as Warframe doesn't have any legacy provisions in place, though I guess it's possible that McGregor – who is now design director for the up-and-coming Soulframe - is simply keeping the plans under his hat, to avoid fomenting the idea that Warframe is on its way out.

Still, I have reservations. I think SKG's organisers are selective in their case for videogame preservation. They've had relatively little to say about the biggest extinction event of the past couple years, the sudden deindexing of thousands of adult games on Steam and Itch at the behest of payment networks. You could justify this as the group having a focus and picking their battles. You could also comment that a self-described "gamer coalition" is more comfortable going to bat for a shiny triple-A racer than a queer visual novel with some "problematic" elements (an inhibition I admittedly struggle with myself, as a cisgender news writer).

I also think SKG's organisers need to put aside their flattening emotive rhetoric - which often makes signing a petition against an online RPG's retirement sound like storming the Bastille - and do a better job of expressing the practicalities of adding 'end of life' functionality. The difficulty of this varies hugely by the project, to the point that comparisons start to feel meaningless, but much depends on whether developers plan for it from the beginning.

Among this year's individual cases of games introducing offline modes is SpaceCraft, Shiro's starfaring mining and trading empire sim. "When we started developing SpaceCraft, quite early on we thought about players still being able to play offline in the far future in case servers are no longer available, so we created the game with that in mind," the company's CEO Nicolas Cannasse told me over email. "It was important for us as we wanted SpaceCraft to be both playable with many players collaborating together or by solo players that wanted only to trade with others but have their own progress."

Shiro did, admittedly, have to introduce the mode ahead of schedule, after a number of solo asteroid magnates complained about being forced to go online during SpaceCraft's early access launch. "It required significant effort, for example adding saves management and autosaves," Cannasse went on, "but our infrastructure was flexible enough to allow for that." The developers themselves have benefited from the offline mode, he said; they are able "to run any version of the game locally on their own machines, simplifying testing, debugging and day-day development."

Inevitably, adding such features to games that were never planned to exist outside official servers may be an absolute nightmare. In a video last year, former Dragon Age series producer Mark Darrah sketched out a grand plan for reviving Anthem, BioWare's defunct always-online RPG, as a singleplayer experience running on local servers. In the same video, he also revealed that Anthem did support local servers at one point before launch. After writing up Darrah's video, I contacted him over email to ask for more general thoughts about how games with mandatory online can be rescued from the scrapyard. The picture he painted was considerably less rosy.

While letting players run games on their own servers might seem straightforward – surely, it's just a question of popping the server code and documentation on Github? – Darrah observed that properly reverse engineering games like this can be "a massive undertaking", with costs potentially running into the millions. The dedicated servers offered by publishers are generally optimised towards the maximum possible headcount, and the server code may not scale well in the hands of players and modders, though this is less of a problem for a co-op squad game like Anthem than an actual MMO, such as Eve Online. Running the server on your own PC in order to launch a hitherto always-online single player game might also screw things up, Darrah added, because again, the code might not be optimised for this: "the GPU may be exploited for odd things, for example."

Another problem is security. Darrah pointed out that any publisher retrospectively adding local server features would need to carry out an audit to ensure players aren't at risk of data breaches. "For a game like Anthem that shares code with other games, you would also want to ensure you aren't introducing a security issue for your other games," he continued. Anthem uses the same Frostbite tech as EA's blockbuster cardgame FC Ultimate Team, for example. As such, Darrah explained, adding local server support for Anthem might inadvertently give a hacker access to FC UT's backend.

"If you are a hobby group, a lot of those things can be ignored," he said, "but if you are a corporation doing something required by a law, you cannot." In his videos, Darrah has offered broad support for Stop Killing Games, but he feels that requiring current online games to implement local servers and similar measures would be more than many developers or publishers could stomach.

In general, Darrah thinks that "if servers aren’t allowed to ever disappear [or] have to have an offline mode some games will never happen." Should a government pass laws requiring developers to add such features in hindsight, he suspects that many publishers will do what corporations often threaten to do in the face of regulation - take their business elsewhere. "I assume that any laws will be go forward only," Darrah told me. "If they aren't, then expect a bunch of live services to disappear from those jurisdictions, before the laws come into effect." For reference, see how certain live service games have deserted Belgium after the government passed a ban on lootboxes.

Darrah's account hardly covers all the hurdles associated with preserving a game that was originally designed around mandatory online. There is the ever-depressing subject of intellectual property law: many such games feature proprietary tech that can't be straightforwardly 'given away' for players to run on local servers. Loot-driven online shooters are held together by real-time economies that would need to be completely redesigned or replaced, if the game were to live on in the hands of a smaller community. None of these challenges seem insurmountable, to me. Companies like EA and Ubisoft already work with or around regulations of all kinds, such as laws against mandatory overwork or crunch. Still, the practical burdens need to be properly conveyed in the course of making the case for preservation.

I see Stop Killing Games as one plank in a larger campaign against the centralisation of access to art in the hands of a few. It's an objection to the characterisation of culture as a service that can be withheld. That sounds like another cheesy rallying cry, so let me temper it with the observation that some videogames do only exist meaningfully as services - or to phrase it in folksier, less corporate terms, as a conversation between developers and players, conversations that sometimes involve removing things, because after all, that's how you give the whole a shape. Warframe has no reality, for me, when redefined as a "good" that should be bottled for posterity. It ceases to be when you do away with the evolving rapport between developers and players, that mutual history that (as I was told elsewhere at Tennocon) causes some players to lose their shit when an update alters the audio for weapons they've been using for over a decade.

If, as Darrah argues, games like Warframe might "never happen" given more stringent legal requirements for digital preservation, one counter is that we might see other kinds of game, instead. "Live service" and "always-online" aren't just technical stipulations, after all; they are a design foundation for particular ideas, emotions and stories. Helldivers 2 turns "live service" into a parody of today's forever wars and fascism's symbiotic need for an enemy without - the bloodshed drags on, from season to season, the defenders of humanity keep prevailing over the bots and the bugs, and somehow, the only real winners are the bastards selling warbonds. Being obliged to plan the eventual introduction of an offline mode or local servers might goad Arrowhead to structure the game's online meta-narrative differently. You'd get a different kind of story. Maybe a story about fascism's defeat? But not necessarily a better story – just different.

There are other, smaller experiments with preservation-led design we could turn to for inspiration. Billy Basso's platformer Animal Well self-defines as a "time capsule": it was deliberately made to be compatible with hardware for many years to come. Basso's ethic of preservation extends to the choice of in-game props that have a certain "timelessness", such as big red dialphones – objects that will still resonate with players a couple generations from now. I'm interested to see a live service developer similarly mythologise the process of handing off their creation to the players, once the money has dried up. Given the fun they've had with Warframe's swirling metafictions, I imagine that Digital Extremes especially would have plenty of ideas.

Parts of this article were based on a trip to Tennocon, for which the organisers paid travel and accommodation.