World in Conflict official artwork without logo

It would appear that someone at Ubisoft really likes World in Conflict. First they introduced a whole bunch of new players to it by offering it for free twice in a row, and now they have taken an extra step by releasing the source code for the World in Conflict servers as well!

Ever since World in Conflict's official servers shut down back in 2015 the community has went to great efforts to create their very own alternative, eventually resulting in a highly impressive project called Massgate. It currently features just about everything the original servers had, though there are a couple of limitations and hoops you'll need to jump through in order to play it. However, with the official source code for the backend server now fully available, anyone is going to be able to start their very own servers and recreate the online multiplayer in all of its glory!

This isn't too big of a deal for World in Conflict as it already had community-made servers up and running, but I really have to highlight moves like this as they are an important step towards preserving games for the future. It's completely understandable when companies want to shut down servers because they only have a small number of people playing, but it sure would be nice if they followed Ubisoft's example here and entrusted the game in the community's hands.

Again, for World in Conflict this isn't too big of a deal as it has an excellent singleplayer campaign, but what about something like For Honor? Once the official For Honor servers shut down that's pretty much it as it's entirely a multiplayer focused game, which means the only way anyone is ever going to play it again is if the community reverse-engineers the servers themselves. As you might imagine, that's not exactly an easy task or something that's guaranteed to happen, so having the developers lend a helping hand is definitely a welcome sight, and hopefully one we'll see more of as the current batch of online-only games start falling off in popularity.