Community servers: the games players keep online themselves
A multiplayer game lasts as long as someone runs its servers. If the publisher ships the server software, that someone can be you, a clan, or a hosting company, and the game keeps going for decades. If the publisher keeps the servers to itself, the game ends on the publisher's schedule, unless fans build replacements.
Games that hand you the server
Lists like Game Ranks' and Hostinger's keep naming the same games, and they have one thing in common: official dedicated server tools.
- Counter-Strike 2. Community servers have run since the 1999 Half-Life mod. Surf, deathmatch and custom-map servers moved across to CS2 with the series.
- Team Fortress 2. Player-run servers with custom maps and modes carried the game through years of patchy official matchmaking.
- Garry's Mod. Trouble in Terrorist Town, Prop Hunt and DarkRP all started as server modes and became genres of their own.
- Minecraft. Server software such as Paper and Spigot lets admins build anything on top of the base game, from minigames to whole economies.
- Arma 3. Server-side mods created Antistasi, Altis Life and King of the Hill, which exist nowhere else.
- Rust. The server owner sets the wipe schedule, the gather rates and the group size, and Oxide/uMod plugins cover nearly every other rule.
- Valheim and Terraria. Both are simple enough to host on an old PC, which is why so many friend groups run their own worlds. Game Ranks puts Valheim at number one.
Survival and sandbox games dominate both lists, from Project Zomboid and DayZ to Factorio and Satisfactory. They reward a persistent world, and a persistent world needs a server someone controls.
Games fans had to rebuild
Other games kept the server code in-house. Players wrote their own after those servers went quiet.
- The Crew Unlimited emulates Ubisoft's servers for The Crew, which went dark on 31 March 2024. The game hadn't had an offline mode.
- The Peacock Project replaces IO Interactive's online servers for the HITMAN World of Assassination trilogy. HITMAN's progression and unlocks run through those servers; Peacock runs on your own PC, adds custom content each month and exists, in its developers' words, primarily for preservation. It supports the Steam and Epic versions.
- Halo players run Project Reclaimer's dedicated servers for Halo 3, and OpenCE brings back the original Xbox Halo's system link.
- Older Call of Duty games survive on community clients with their own servers. We cover those in the Call of Duty series.
The MMO that came back with a licence
MMO players often rank communities above the games themselves. MMORPG.GG's list of the best communities picks Final Fantasy XIV, Guild Wars 2 and Lord of the Rings Online, and its commenters push for one more: City of Heroes Homecoming.
NCSoft shut City of Heroes down in 2012. In 2019, fan-run servers brought it back. The largest of them, Homecoming, negotiated with NCSoft for years, and on 4 January 2024 NCSoft granted it an official licence to host the game. Homecoming stays free and runs on donations. It's the clearest case of a community server turning into the official one.
Picking a good server
- Look for rules and active admins. A server's Discord or forum tells you how it's run before you join.
- Get clients from the project's own site. Mirrors can serve modified files. Use the link on the project's site or repository.
- Own the game. The revived games above all run on your copy. Peacock's Discord bans people who ask about pirated versions.
For fan projects that bring multiplayer to games that never had it, see games where fans run the multiplayer.
Sources: Game Ranks, Hostinger, MMORPG.GG, The Peacock Project, Massively Overpowered.