Your Favorite Dead Games

A dead game can be classified by a game that is impossible to play in its original state, either by its servers going down, extremely low player count, abandoned by developers, and/or by being pulled from store shelves. They are primarily online-only, multiplayer live service games, but some people consider singleplayer games that haven't had a sequel in decades also dead games due to developer abandonment or publisher apathy.

Here's a few examples of my personal favorite dead games.

 • Sub Rosa

    - A First-Person round-based PvP game of which you're split into one of four teams. You're given a task to obtain an object from one of the other three teams at random, with it being up to you and your team to figure out if you want to obtain the object with a trade deal, brute force, or some level of subterfuge. The game's big gimmicks is its proximity voice chat and ragdoll-like player characters that are affected by physics and momentum. Using your gun isn't as simple as aiming and shooting, with you having to input multiple key combinations to reload your gun and waiting for your gun to stop wiggling around. The game's death mostly comes from the developer moving onto other games, but the horrifically toxic community that harasses both the solo developer and players can also be a contributing factor of this.

 • APB Reloaded

    - A third-person PvP open-world(ish) game of which you're one of two factions: Criminals or Enforcers. Both factions can see each other in the open world, but can only engage in PvP when an Enforcer catches a Criminal in illegal activity, or if both sides queue up into a PvP mission, of which the mission is randomly selected and typically involves some form of offense from the Criminals and defense from the Enforcers. The game's biggest claim was of its in-depth customization system. It gave you access to a Black Ops 2 Emblem Editor-style system of placing objects around any item you wished to fine-tune and customize your clothing, vehicle, spray paint, and clan emblem. There was also a somewhat primitive music creation section that let you create a small tune that played when you killed another player. While technically not 100% dead, with its current developer being active in updates, the fact that the player count is on an incredibly steady decline, the only players left being the ones that either just started that day or have spent too much money on the game's Pay-To-Win system to dominate those same new players, and the game straight up dying in the past with its original developer Realtime Worlds, the developers of Crackdown, I don't see this game coming to any "live" state anytime soon if ever.

 • OurWorld

   - More of a virtual world than just a game per se but I'm still counting it, whatever. In comparison to something like Gaia Online or Club Penguin's 2D virtual world, OurWorld was a lot more grounded in theming, trying to give off an urban city aesthetic. The main "gameplay loop" was to level your account up by earning Flow, which was mainly earned from playing various third party Flash games you may have heard of before like Diner Dash, Cake Mania, Storm the House 2, and like 50 others. Leveling up gave you access to new emotes and public areas to explore. There was also a housing system, while really only accessible to paying "Resident" subscribers, that let you create your own space to invite people over to. Like with a vast majority of virtual world games, the original demographic aged out and they couldn't replace the now adult users they lost. Ended up closing shop around 2021, with the small amount of younger users that saw the closing still clinging for an official revival on the related sub reddit.

I have a lot more that I've experienced, maybe I'll talk about them later. Have you interacted with any of the games I listed? Is there something you love that I didn't talk about?