Direct Question to Klei

[Gotheran]

Does Don't Starve Together have an end of life plan?

With the rising change in the gaming climate of always online life support does Klei have any intention of supporting DST to continue on after they can no longer afford to maintain servers for both gameplay and cosmetics? Or if Klei should be picked up and possibly shut down by a larger entity or have to close in some way?

[Castiliano]

A future where we play through Hamachi or something with friends 

[Wander89]

I hope it never ends!

[Gotheran]

On 2/10/2024 at 2:41 PM, Wander89 said:

I hope it never ends!

It's both naive and incredibly ambitious to assume it will, even if Klei doesn't ever plan to close DST at some point they will, Klei may just cease to exist one day, or a bigger company will buy them up and shut down DST development and server hosting.

The act of hosting and sharing servers is not rocket science but the reason for server hosting/browsing networks is to ease the process of hosting larger scale servers as well as a tiny bit of extra security as direct IP sharing can be dangerous if you're not sharing it with trusted individuals over a secure line of communication, stuff like Hamachi or other server network software just automate the process of hosting and finding but also opens your servers up to random joiners who might grief the game, DST is a small enough game peer to peer play is not a foolish way to handle it.

[Dr.Webber]

I hope we get a ds3

[Cheggf]

On 2/10/2024 at 2:19 PM, Gotheran said:

With the rising change in the gaming climate of always online life support

what

On 2/13/2024 at 6:36 PM, Gotheran said:

It's both naive and incredibly ambitious to assume it will, even if Klei doesn't ever plan to close DST at some point they will, Klei may just cease to exist one day, or a bigger company will buy them up and shut down DST development and server hosting.

So how would they possibly have an "end of life plan" for the event that they are abruptly bought out and forced to shut down the servers? Why would a company ever even buy them out and say "Alright guys, you need to shut down the #1 most profitable thing you have going by far. We're getting rid of that, ASAP. You need to immediately terminate everything, and make people no longer trust you because you deleted the items of millions of players, so that we can now use this untrusted company with no active IPs for unknown mysterious reasons. Oh, yeah, by the way, of course we're going to give you all the time in the world to enact your end of life plan for the game. Feel free, take as long as you need."?

[Uedo]

3 hours ago, Cheggf said:

what

So how would they possibly have an "end of life plan" for the event that they are abruptly bought out and forced to shut down the servers? Why would a company ever even buy them out and say "Alright guys, you need to shut down the #1 most profitable thing you have going by far. We're getting rid of that, ASAP. You need to immediately terminate everything, and make people no longer trust you because you deleted the items of millions of players, so that we can now use this untrusted company with no active IPs for unknown mysterious reasons. Oh, yeah, by the way, of course we're going to give you all the time in the world to enact your end of life plan for the game. Feel free, take as long as you need."?

From the perspective of a buyer it makes sense to purchase an IP and claim the copyright if it's successful and you get a good deal. It may be more lucrative in the long run to halt the game, keep the franchise on the bench for a few years, stir up appeal for the IP again and then release something that's cheap, simple and is easy to consume. If the IP takes off again you can start looking at how to milk it and maintain engagement, bleed it for all it's worth, then bench it again and rely on merch. If it never takes off, chalk it up to a risky investment and release peripheral content that utilises the IP whilst you look for your next cash-cow

[Cruvimaster]

On 2/10/2024 at 5:19 PM, Gotheran said:

Does Don't Starve Together have an end of life plan?

With the rising change in the gaming climate of always online life support does Klei have any intention of supporting DST to continue on after they can no longer afford to maintain servers for both gameplay and cosmetics? Or if Klei should be picked up and possibly shut down by a larger entity or have to close in some way?

It's Klei's most important game.

I only see the end of the game if Klei disappears from the market or if it manages to do something that replaces the game solidly.

 

Edited February 20 by Cruvimaster

[BalkanCockroach]

6 minutes ago, Cruvimaster said:

It's Klei's most important game

Except Eets classic.

Edited February 20 by BalkanCockroach

[Cruvimaster]

DST

ONI

DS

We have all realized the importance of DST.

Edited February 20 by Cruvimaster

[nome]

It's all designed to be very cheap to run and to be able to degrade gracefully if necessary. DST dedicated servers are the most expensive but the community can already run their own instead of using the Klei Official ones. The skins servers are quite reasonable to operate and if we ever decided they weren't worth the effort we could just release an update that moved it all client side. The login servers validate your identity - without them you'd have to play in offline mode but they're also VERY cheap to keep going and used for all our games, not just DST.

[Gotheran]

On 2/20/2024 at 7:24 PM, nome said:

It's all designed to be very cheap to run and to be able to degrade gracefully if necessary. DST dedicated servers are the most expensive but the community can already run their own instead of using the Klei Official ones. The skins servers are quite reasonable to operate and if we ever decided they weren't worth the effort we could just release an update that moved it all client side. The login servers validate your identity - without them you'd have to play in offline mode but they're also VERY cheap to keep going and used for all our games, not just DST.

To be honest I never understood why the system wasn't client side by default, only for how it's become an industry standard to handle it in such a way.

[Maxposting]

1 hour ago, Gotheran said:

To be honest I never understood why the system wasn't client side by default, only for how it's become an industry standard to handle it in such a way.

It probably has to do with the fact that you can cheat stuff in client-side, whereas having it distant gives an extra "protection" and basically guarantees validity of the skins.
I'm guessing rn though.

[nome]

4 hours ago, Gotheran said:

To be honest I never understood why the system wasn't client side by default, only for how it's become an industry standard to handle it in such a way.

We started off on the steam marketplace, so server-side was a hard requirement. Client-side is a lot more work, especially as it's all effectively server-side anyway (the APIs the platforms provide are rightfully server-side, so we'd just be taking server-side data and copying it to the client) and it would be a support nightmare when client bugs corrupted people's inventories or they reformatted their computers and lost all their purchases/drops(!)

I haven't seen any industry standardization around client-side, quite the opposite.

[Ridley]

4 hours ago, Gotheran said:

To be honest I never understood why the system wasn't client side by default, only for how it's become an industry standard to handle it in such a way.

I'm interested in knowing what client side games you are thinking of. I can't think of any.

[Gotheran]

7 hours ago, Ridley said:

I'm interested in knowing what client side games you are thinking of. I can't think of any.

Numerous games mainly from the early 2000s have unlockable cosmetics and are client side handled, yes it means that resetting your save loses your cosmetics but often they weren't a glacially slow waiting game to obtain, the biggest examples I can think of off hand are all ps2 or gamecube console games before consoles were routinely also on digital life support. More recently Enter The Gungeon has cosmetic skins, even if it is just one per character and again is lost if your save gets wiped, oh and Insomniac's Spider-man series.

11 hours ago, Maxposting said:

It probably has to do with the fact that you can cheat stuff in client-side, whereas having it distant gives an extra "protection" and basically guarantees validity of the skins.
I'm guessing rn though.

This is really just a poor mind set, the only reason they have "validity" is entirely artificially assigned from the painfully slow rate at which they're given out and the arbitrary colour of text they spawned with. In the absolutely best case scenario the only defence of these sorts of systems is permitting the company to give titles ongoing support but its a double edged sword as games of this nature tend to warp overtime alienating parts of their audience as changes become more confusing or controversial and the game just doesn't resemble what it started as.

8 hours ago, nome said:

We started off on the steam marketplace, so server-side was a hard requirement. Client-side is a lot more work, especially as it's all effectively server-side anyway (the APIs the platforms provide are rightfully server-side, so we'd just be taking server-side data and copying it to the client) and it would be a support nightmare when client bugs corrupted people's inventories or they reformatted their computers and lost all their purchases/drops(!)

I haven't seen any industry standardization around client-side, quite the opposite.

To be far standards have greatly changed, and by the time Klei entered the field things were already drifting this way. And as I said above save loss was a risk with older games that had cosmetic rewards but those were rarely as tedious to unlock as MTX systems and usually left you with a more complete feeling that you earned it instead of having waited or been pushed into buying them instead.

[Maxposting]

6 hours ago, Gotheran said:

the only reason they have "validity" is entirely artificially assigned from the painfully slow rate at which they're given out and the arbitrary colour of text they spawned with

so true 

[Cheggf]

7 hours ago, Gotheran said:

Numerous games mainly from the early 2000s have unlockable cosmetics and are client side handled, yes it means that resetting your save loses your cosmetics but often they weren't a glacially slow waiting game to obtain, the biggest examples I can think of off hand are all ps2 or gamecube console games before consoles were routinely also on digital life support. More recently Enter The Gungeon has cosmetic skins, even if it is just one per character and again is lost if your save gets wiped, oh and Insomniac's Spider-man series.

Don't Starve Together does not have unlockable skins, it has purchased skins. There's no option to stick your credit card in the Gamecube. I can't think of a single game that has purchased skins that aren't server validated.