One year later, City of Heroes' officially recognized fan server has me praying it's the future of dead MMOs

A little over a year ago, City of Heroes got the sort of second chance most defunct MMOs never do: a fan-made private server with written permission from the publisher to continue operating.

While NCSoft hasn't guaranteed that the fan server can last forever, it's a mite more generous than the cease and desist letters typically handed out to these sorts of things. World of Warcraft's Classic version only came to be after a notoriously huge private server with the same idea got the boot, and Disney has been playing whack-a-mole with Club Penguin clones ever since the real thing shut down.

City of Heroes hasn't rocketed its way to mainstream success, but it certainly has a brighter future than any of its other belly-up contemporaries. Plenty of those games have gotten revived by fans, like ToonTown and Warhammer Online, but the possibility of a dreaded cease and desist letter looms over those unauthorized servers.

While they may not represent a meaningful financial threat to the companies that own the dead games' rights and don't collect any cash themselves, the bigger these games get, the more likely it is the owners will swoop in and claim it as their intellectual property. The communities are resilient, but the projects themselves are woefully fragile.

As a big fan of the wayward Wildstar and other dead games, I'm left to wonder at the possibilities Homecoming implies by its very existence. It's not unprecedented: Everquest's Project 99 is a fan project that was ultimately sanctioned by Daybreak in much the same way. And you know what they say: once is happenstance, twice is a coincidence, and thrice is going to bring Wildstar back.

Okay, maybe not. But there are enough outstanding private servers to show that a lot of these games have capable, sizable communities long after their deaths. Star Wars Galaxies is another one with a team of rogue fans keeping it alive, and it's still making sizable feature-rich updates a decade after the game was sunset.

In the case of Galaxies, ToonTown, Warhammer Online, and plenty of others, volunteers have spent more years keeping the game playable than its original development team did while it was commercially available. And in the case of City of Heroes Homecoming, updates are still being cooked up for the 500,000 characters created last year alone.

NCSoft was straightforward enough in its statements last year, pointing out that negotiating this sort of license is rarely worth the time or resources for the company which owns the rights. That's fair, but we're at a crucial time in this medium's history when online games' ephemerality is more obvious than ever, hugely active games are squashed by the overhead anvil of an impending sequel, and an estimated 87% of games ever made are completely unplayable by standard means.

Maybe it's unrealistic to assume that a triple-A publisher would ever altruistically keep a game alive at a cost to itself, but with volunteer developers as passionate and active as the ones keeping all these MMOs around, I'd like to think there's a world where we don't have to settle for maintenance mode.