Comments on: “Making it technically work and making it actually enjoyable as a game are different things.” Japanese devs weigh in on why retrofitting live-service games with offline support is harder than gamers think

By: Dev

Dev — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 13:58:48 +0000

In reply to Repent.

Don’t blame the developers, blame the PUBLISHER. Developers don’t make that choice.

These types of things are forced in by investors and the publisher itself in AAA studios.

But yes, the simple solution is just don’t force in singleplayer experiences.

And no – it’s not super complicated. I work as an indie, and in the past – I created a type of Interfaced FileSystem which worked both online and offline ( it behaved like a REST API, and simply emulated requests offline when writing and reading locally – requiring “default” values during read), and it worked.

Anyone who claims that “making a single player game offline only is not possible” is not only lying – but also pretend games 20-30 years ago didn’t exist.

By: Repent

Repent — Sun, 19 Apr 2026 19:20:38 +0000

Lmfao at the seething devs making up inane drivel to cope about the fact that their skinnerbox gachaslop garbage falls apart once the game gets rid of the dopamine dripfeed of timegates and lootboxes. Don’t make a cancerous business model and don’t treat games as disposable transient slop if you don’t want people to fix your greed.

By: SlyAceZeta

SlyAceZeta — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 20:35:31 +0000

“it’s often not a viable choice for developers in terms of the additional work and cost involved”

So don’t make the online-only game in the first place. Simple as that. Every game like this should have to account for the eventual server shutdown as part of its planning, development, and budgeting. Sure, sure, easy for me to say, but all of these games completely disappearing and all of our save data being taken away or deleted is a huge problem that multiple groups are aiming to tackle now. Stop Killing Games didn’t spring up from a fringe belief.

By: Lorenzo

Lorenzo — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 18:03:37 +0000

I do not think it matters either way so as long as it’s optional if people are allowed to host the server of a live service itself and it becomes a thing to allow that to happen when the service is shut down.

Also saying things are difficult without having such options built from the start is basically making excuses. It’s the whole reason why Stop Killing Games is helping enacting laws in the first place in the EU and US.