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Comment by snarfy | Hacker News Reader

I'm still bitter that they unilaterally killed the entire Unreal Tournament franchise, pulled all games from all stores and turned off the master servers with no explanation.

I could understand maybe turning off the master servers to cut costs, but lets be honest, they could have hosted the entire franchise master servers on a raspberry pi. There was no need to pull the games from stores. They all but guaranteed there will never be any new players and the existing players all resort to piracy now when needing a new install.

At least give an explanation.

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Unreal Tournament patches are still in development with official approval/support of Epic:

https://github.com/OldUnreal/UnrealTournamentPatches/

These patches include updates to the master server addresses which enable the game to continue working online.

Third-party master servers have also been available for at least a decade.

It's nice but doesn't explain UT2004, UT3, and UT4.

There are patches going around for UT2004, but it all has to be done under the table with fear of retaliation from Epic.

At some point your new ventures compete with your old successes.

What would you and others have payed for a Unreal Tournament monthly subscription? Not much I assume.

If you are a land lord you want the home-owner slice to shrink and the renter slice to grow. Gross, right?

I was interested in their Verse programming language, but it's future looks grimmer now.

Perhaps then just make it available for someone else to set up and run their own servers. Maybe they did. It's what I would do.

Why is it’s future looking grimmer?

Probably because of https://www.epicgames.com/site/de/news/layoffs-at-epic

Seems like a weak argument to me. Is that it?

I didn't see any specifics that obviously bear on Verse development.

Yeah, quite the opposite, I see this in the official announcement: "We aren't cutting any core businesses, and are continuing to invest in games with Fortnite first-party development, the Fortnite creator ecosystem and economy, Rocket League and Fall Guys; and services for developers including Unreal Engine for games and enterprise, Epic Games Store, Epic Games Publishing, Epic Online Services, Kids Web Services, MetaHuman, Twin Motion, Quixel Mega Scans, Capturing Reality, ArtStation, Sketchfab and Fab."

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