Would Day Paw Games ever just shut the servers down and tell everyone to stay home? Could it be ran remotely, or just hope the hamster has some high heroic stamina?
If they can work remotely it should stay up but if for some reason people need to physically babysit the servers it could get shut down.
EQ2 is still alive so it would have to get at dozens of times worse. Age of conan is still running. UO. tons of games, believe it or not, have far fewer players than EQ. EQ is doing SURPRISINGLY well for a 21 year old game unless you compare it to WoW (which you shouldn't).
Not talking about the player base, talking about the big brains keeping the servers online and running the company.
It does not take a lot of people to keep the servers up and running, but social distancing and people working from home could slow down development. If anything it could impact the next expansion and updates to the current game
Companies like DBG are positioned better than most industries. I would think that work from home would work for them.
It is being reported the EU is requesting streaming companies stop streaming in HD and Facebook usage is pushing their resources to its limits. I would expect larger issues to take the game offline before anything specific to internal decisions or staffing.
Just ban all the auto-play video ads online, problem solved, considering there's millions of plays per day, anecdotally.
Let us all converse with our chosen deity and press them to intervene such that we do not have to find out how many humans must perish before ad revenue is deliberately cut.
In the meantime, I'll be using the Brave browser. I don't mind ads, it's just the auto-playing ads (especially with sound un-muted) that annoy me to no end. Ad revenue doesn't need to be cut, just a few lines of offending code.
I seriously doubt dark paw games owns servers, so you should be looking at what server farm they use. What would it take for a server farm to shut down, the electricity shutting off. All of everquest can be run remotely minus the server rooms, which as I said would be that other company. So I wouldn't worry about it, unless you think the worlds gonna end from a virus that only kills older people.
The game makes enough money to keep at the very least 45+ people paid and working [according to the Darkpaw photo taken] so I dont think the company is worried about longevity, they clearly are already there and have it. We can revisit this topic at he 31st anniversary I suppose.
It's not unheard of for for large gaming companies to own their own servers, it's actually common. That said, list the top 500 companies that DPG would pay for rack space and I guarantee that companies 495-500 would have more stability that what we have now.