City of Heroes was a popular MMORPG that launched in April 2004 and existed for just over eight years. During that time, it gained a dedicated community of players who continued to play the MMO even after the game ended, via private servers that found themselves in a strange legal gray area. But now the developers are behind City of Heroes have officially given a private server the thumbs up to move forward.
The superhero MMO was released in 2012 City of Heroes was officially closed. Many people were upset and sad about this. But not everyone stopped playing. In 2019 it became public that in the years since the game’s demise, there had been a secret, unofficial private server running the game. After the game community collapsed, the people running this server eventually released the game’s code online and a few other private servers appeared. But there was always a fear – which is why the first private server was kept secret for so long – that developer NCSoft would one day come along and put an end to it all, since the company owned the original code and IP.
But on January 4th, the developers behind the unofficial fan-run project revealed Homecoming announced that NCSoft has no plans to kill the most popular ones City of Heroes private server. Instead, the company did something surprising and provided developers with an official license to maintain a City of Heroes Server.
In a post published today on the Homecoming Forumsthe people behind the private server thanked fans for their patient wait over the past few years after teasing in 2019 that there are discussions with NCSoft about the project.
“Homecoming has received a license to operate one City of Heroes Server and continue to develop the Game – subject to the terms and limitations of the Agreement – but as between us and NCSoft, NCSoft continues to own the Game City of Heroes intellectual property and its derivatives,” explained the developers behind the project.
The developers have confirmed that accounts and characters are “safe” and will not be deleted. They also announced that new content will continue to be created for Homecoming, access will remain free, and the project will continue to be funded entirely by fan donations.
As part of this new deal, it seems that other private servers may not persist. The team hopes that the players come to their senses Homecoming and they can centralize the community more. The Homecoming The team confirmed that part of the contract requires a single “in-house installation and patching solution,” which is why the team invested time in developing its own launcher.
Although there are still many questions and details to be clarified, the overall reaction is mostly positive. This is a surprising turn of events and a very rare example of fans being allowed to officially keep a game alive. It also shows that there are ways to preserve MMOs and keep them running after their official closure, assuming there is fan interest and support for the dead game.
MMOs have always been a tricky thing for gaming advocates, and this one City of Heroes The deal shows that there are other solutions if companies can work well with fans and modders.
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