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Live-service devs should "make a private hosted version of your game" when projects are shut down

Velan Studios' director of marketing, Josh Harrison, has one recommendation for studios looking to close down or "sunse…

"There are small but mighty communities that are still going, built around this private server months after shutdown by playing games daily, hosting their own tournaments where they're raising their own prize pools, and more," Harrison added. Whilst Harrison acknowledged that not all studios have the capacity to release a standalone client, let alone "sanitise" it to strip licensed software and so on, making the change was a "relatively light lift" for the team. "In our case, we were only able to do it for PC players for a few different reasons but it still did the job that we wanted it to, and due to some extremely light analytics hooks in it, we still see people playing it every day even nine months later."

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