Demon’s Souls online servers staying up until spring 2011

This scares the hell out of me.

Atlus has the ability to, and will, render a large USP of the game moot with a flick of a switch.

This is a horrible forcast of things to come. We pay £40 for a title that we don’t own… at any point publishers can deny us access to our purchases.

It’s the reason why I hope full game download markets don’t become prevalent.

Hear, hear! Still haven’t completed this enthralling monster of a game yet. This announcement won’t make me rush any longer to finish it off though. The only half decent thing to come from this is that there will be no more random invasions where you want to be online still (despite the fact that you won’t be able to go into other peoples games as a Phantom, which is pretty shit to say the least).

Sounds like I will end up trading my edition in for the inevitable sequel if the contents of this announcement are followed through with though.

I don’t understand the reason behind this. Did it have really poor sales or something?

That’s really not very long for those folks who bought PAL version… or is this just the U.S. version this applies to?

this is pretty old news,i read about this a few days ago,i hope its not pal region,i only got it this week and love the challenge,its hard as hell but hard to stop playing.Sadistic game.

fuck man that was my favorite ps3 game.why so early? poor sales? sequel perhaps? WHY?

@6

Servers cost money to maintain.

woah thats quite soon aint it?!

*looks at backlog of games*

*notices demon’s souls at the bottom*

oh for fu… =(

@8 i’m in a similar situation. looks like this is getting completed very soon..

I’m guessing as Namco and not Atlus published the game in pal regions, that this deadline only applies to US copies.

Depressing news though, without the online side the game loses much of it’s appeal.

Ive platinum’d the EU version so im kool.
I think this is a good ploy to get the sales up til then i reckon. And besides you can play the game without the online portion fine because its not the usual shitty plastard on multiplayer were all bored of but a great way to work together .

ugh fucking pussy-ass casual gamers has to ruin sales for great games…..but they’ll definitely buy dildos with balls on it and flail their arms like idiots.

That’s fucking weak.

Isn’t it ‘at least next March’? Atlus is just guaranteeing that servers will remain open until March 2011 at the very earliest.

I’m afraid VG is turning to tabloid with exaggerating topics like this.
It was written in Demon’s Souls online agreement in the first place (US version) that Atlus would support the online service for at least until last March…servers still were active after March.

Now Atlus announces that servers will be active for at LEAST a year.There’s a possibility that Atlus may stop supporting the online service of Demon’s Souls after March 2011 but that’s not final as the whole topic implies.

If there’s a moderate ammount of users still using the service they won’t stop supporting it…(that’s why they give another year at least to see if the service is still being used) unless they have plans for a sequel which is another story.

“I’m afraid VG is turning to tabloid with exaggerating topics like this.”

Where have you been? This has always been the case.

VG report news.

If you don’t like how it’s written, go elsewhere.

The majority of the community enjoy all the contributors articles, and if you wish to berate the staff you might as well leave.

Was that directed at me or zoop? I can’t quite tell. O.o

so ppl who bought the game will not be able to play it anymore after the date?

They’ll still be able to play it if the server go down. The game doesn’t *require* it. It just adds a lot to the experience.

It would be sad to the see them go down though. Those features really make the game stand out from the crowd.

Exactly what will change for the game if this happens? I wasn’t even aware that the game was meant for online play.

If you haven’t used the online functionality, you’re missing out on some of the best stuff in the game.

http://demonssouls.wikidot.com/online

You won’t see other players deaths, read hints from them, or enter other people’s worlds to help influence your game’s Tendency.

Those features sure sound nice, a shame for gamers if that stops. I don’t have the game, i seriously considered getting it. But then i realized i still had so many games yet to finish.

Sometimes it amazes me how many of the PS3 user base expect to get things for free.

This is the very reason (or one of them) that online game subs will eventualy happen.

Playing online costs money. Servers, maintenance, support. Even if a game sells well, it is still expensive. The cash needs to come from somewhere. Either higher game prices, in game advertising, sub fees, something.

P2P help because it gets rid of servers. But fees still are invloved if it runs over something like LIVE(not too sure about PSN – but I would guess so).

Anyways old adage here folks – your never going to get something for nothing.

Besides the much needed help against some of the bosses, and some one to give you a freaking pure bladestone the online isnt really needed much…all thats hints, and watch players death you’ll figure out

I only owned this game for a short time, cos my balls were too small to get into it fully, but I found the hints left by other players to be a bit of a distraction. I found myself wasting a lot of time reading perfunctory messages that actually hindered my progress. Maybe that’s just me.

Oh fuck that is a sad state of affairs. Imagine retro gaming of the future:

“I got a copy of MW2 which was THE action game of the naughties. But since the servers are down I’m stuck with the short single player stuff they tacked on”

P2P is the only way to go. Or maybe Google could step up and host this in exchange for the user data.

That does seem rather soon. Surely it’ll have to go on longer than that? Unless nobody’s actually playing by then, I suppose.

Christ, is no-one actually reading the fucking story?

@30
No, just the headline apparently.

I think the problem is that when companies say “at least until date X” they pretty much always mean “we will be turning this off on date X”.

Except that with this announcement Atlus are extending their guaranteed period of service by almost a year. The original TOS stated support was only a given until April 2010.

25:
i have the definite answer to all ever occuring server coast bullshit:
dedicated server installations.
If ppl could set up their own servers there is no need for those morons to destroy great games.

But it seems they are not capable for this. If they dont even can come up with such rocket-scientific things like a server-browser (must be the hardest thing on earth).

TBH the online experince on any gaming plattform gets worse and worse year after year.
Games get more generic,
softrware gets more moronic,
ppl get more stupid.

Ive played online since the late 90s (first Quake, then countersrike) and the situation has never been as bad as today.
At the moment im playing bad company 2. its realy sad to see games with so much potential and in general this particular part of gaming (online multiplayer) which has been such great fun at times going down the drain because of a incredibly poor and disapointing online experience.
Sad story is sad.

@34
Dedicated server installs wouldn’t really help solve the situation with Demon’s Souls though – thus your definitive answer isn’t .

The problem with Demon’s Souls is that the online aspects don’t sit in a nice neat pigeon hole. Effectively the information and interaction is more like an MMO – but there is no subs model to help fund it. The online aspects naturally diminish in use and helpfulness as the number of online players diminish too. So a user set-up server with 20 people playing is fairly pointless. It just doesn’t work well like that.

It needs a significant number of people playing for the online aspects to be of use. Hence going back to the original article. If they turn off the servers because there are too few people playing then it really makes little difference to your game experience. If there are still significant people playing then they should keep the servers going.

Demon’s Souls is still definitely active in-game.

And like Aimless said, they’re extending their original intended time of support. The title of this article completely missed the whole point.