Games with unexpectedly long lived multiplayer communities

Everyone knows that, at least on console, other than the huge hits most multiplayer communities dry up pretty quick and become ghost towns. Some multiplayer games are abandoned just a few months after launch. Last night I booted up the old 360 and logged on to Gotham City Imposters, a somewhat obscure title from early 2012, only to find a ton of people still playing. It was shockingly easy to get a game and even more interestingly some people were low level, implying that people might still be buying the game. It was pretty surprising and heartening to see the game was still chugging along.

Have you guys found other relatively obscure games whose multiplayer communities have survived well past their expected expiration date? Any rhyme or reason as to why it happens to some games but not others? God Mode, for example, was a total ghost town just a few month after launch.

Mount and blade: Warband was still going strong last i checked a couple months ago.

Battlefield 2 still has a ton of people playing it. Likewise for BF1942.

Servers go down in a month though because EA are cheap bastards and won't port a patch in different server stuff for games they continue to sell as multiplayer games. Luckily the community has found ways of fixing this.

Ultima Online was still up last I checked. I'm sure the community is much, much smaller now adays, but the fact that the game is still up and running in any kind of official capacity is kind of mind blowing.

Alien Vs Predator 2, unexpectedly became my favorite multiplayer experience, yet to be surpassed. Still has 2 or 3 full servers running daily, have to install a master server patch as Sierra took down the servers years ago.

I think the most surprising part about this is that the PS2 version of Battlefield 2 still has a ton of people playing it, despite it relying in part on a Gamespy service that has been down for years (not the server browsers, that still work and will probably be shut down along with their other servers in a month, but a message of the day kind of thing that apparently the game won't progress past) - in order for the game to not spit out an error message when you try to connect you need to change the PS2's DNS and stuff, which apparently enough people have done to have a good 40 or so people on at any time.

Man, AvP2 was FANTASTIC. I remember playing that years ago. If it's still going strong, I might actually go back to it.

This game still has a really large community. Hell, I even play it still occasionally.

People talk shit, but me and my friends still play God of War: Ascension online. There is still people playing, though it is almost impossible to find a capture the flag match and it starts to get way slower late at night.

Way after the Giant Bomb crew left there was this running joke on the Hotspot that they had a Dark Sector guild. At least I think it was a joke.

I know any mention of Souls games pisses off the site, but Demon's Souls came out in 2009 and there are still plenty of people playing it. Maybe it gets off easy because you're never certain just how many (or how little) people are playing.

I'm always surprised at finding Left 4 Dead 2 players with custom campaigns installed. My friend and I love playing the large amount of custom campaigns and we always seem to find people joining our game, even with it being difficult to install maps, compared to other games where the maps auto download from the server.

Not sure about unexpected but Runescape will probably last forever.

I played Call of Duty 3 online for aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaages after it came out

Star Wars: Jedi Knight 2 Outcast seems to still be pretty active, I checked up on it about a year ago and there were still a handful of active servers going.

Despite there being two sequels for the community to move onto, it's still quite easy to find a match in Killzone 2. There's usually at least 2 or 3 full matches whenever I have a look.

Even though it's not that old: Mass Effect 3. There are tons of people playing it still when the funny part is that everyone said they didn't want it. Turns out they do. I do too. It's awesome.

Tribes 2 still has a solid community going. It's been six years or so since Sierra shut down their official servers (the game itself came out in 2001), but fan efforts are keeping multiplayer going. And it’s free now, too!

Though, Tribes 2 is awesome, so maybe it's not all that unexpected.

Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle-Cars is still going strong on PSN with a decent size community. The devs are releasing a patch to replace Gamespy's matchmaking and servers in the next few days infact.

Runescape and Ultima Online are still the most mind blowing to me- next to Everquest (the first one).

And they all still get some amount of development still as far as I recall.

There was another MMO that came out around Everquest, but I cant remember the name of it. I think that's still active too.

@vampir: Tribes original is still going too right? I saw it a couple years ago, some one had setup a new master server list

Command and Conquer Renegade. 12 years old, poorly reviewed and still anywhere from 50-100 people online at any time, which is more than enough for 1-2 full servers. Also, the modding community for that game is insane and on par with things like Quake and Unreal.

Also, it's totally awesome.

@cornbredx: Asheron's Call, perhaps?

Anyway, I'm genuinely surprised at how popular Counter-Strike has stayed for over a decade. Like, it's a good game, but Jesus, never would've guessed it would still have so many players in 2014.

Warcraft 2, there is a multiplayer online edition that you can download for free, though I cant remember the name. That original game is 20 years old now.

Warhawk was still going strong 4 years after release. There was still 75 or so servers going at any given time. I haven't checked in on it in a couple years though so I don't know if it's still going.

I remember when Killzone Liberation released their multiplayer (8 months after the game came out) it had about 10 matches going at any given time. I checked in about a year later and it had about 7 matches going at any given time, but now there was hackers with full auto sniper rifles and infinite grenades and infinite range on the shotgun and stuff like that. I checked about a year later again and it was still around 7 matches at any given time, but with fewer hackers.

Burnout Paradise is still incredibly active, at least on PS3.

Warhawk

This is kind of a redundant subject when referring to PC games, I mean Doom still has a respectable number of people playing in various source ports, so listing stuff released well after that really isn't all that surprising in the least. The majority of MP games are dusted off and unofficially and continually modded/supported by the community and the fact that this is almost a given (as long as a minimal amount of player demand exists for it) is one of the biggest strengths PC has over console gaming; unrivaled longevity.

Since the OP listed a console game, maybe it'd be more interesting and revelatory to stick to that criteria, since they're already quite notorious for having online communities that are inevitably cut short or even being dead on arrival..

I used to play Jazz Jackrabbit 2 probably about 12-14 years ago and even then you had to use a server patch to connect to the multiplayer server list because the official Epic one had been taken offline. A few months ago I was reminiscing about the JJ2 days with a friend and decided to see if the big hub site (Jazz2Online.com) was still up. To my surprise it was still up, actively being updated, and even showed a list of JJ2 servers with some 20 or so people playing on them.

Anarchy Online is still going strong with the F2P model. I have been waiting for years for a sequel, but I don't see that happening any time soon.

The DC version of PSO is still being played on private servers by a fairly significant amount of people.

Halo Wars. Still averages a few thousand people online at any given time. Not bad for a game released in 2009

I think what is even more mindblowing about Runescape is that, from what I can tell, it is now two different games and yet still has lasted (or I guess two different versions with no influence on each other. Each having a separate character and everything). I looked into it recently out of morbid curiosity because I played it a bunch with my friends like 10 years ago in elementary school and was shocked to see it still around. They have the current version and all the servers for that, and then a whole bunch of servers with the old version that is missing stuff from the new version, and both versions get new content added (so the old version has stuff the new one doesn't and vice versa). Even more insane, the old game has roughly the same or more people playing than the new version and the only way to play it is to pay a monthly fee. There is no free tier for the old version, and the free tier for the new version is not very big. The vast majority of people playing appear to be paid subscribers. It's insane how long that game has lasted. I thought it would have died out after World of Warcraft came about but apparently not.

@cornbredx: My guess is as @bisonhero said above you may be thinking about Asheron's Call which is actually still active. Now the funny thing, the sequel Asheron's Call 2 was closed down for several years before Turbine bringing the game back as a "beta" and being free to play for those with original Asheron's Call accounts.

The sad news though is that the monthly updates that Turbine was doing for Asheron's Call for over 13 years has recently stopped and the game is going free to play for those that have current subs.

@rockman10: Just checked an it totally is! It's reassuring to know that that kind of dedication is out there.

@vampir: I spent probably a thousand hours on that game as a kid.. it deserves the respect!

NERF Arena Blast. I have no idea why the fuck there would be people playing that and not Unreal but there still seems to be a handful of people with incredibly fond memories of it from their childhood and are still playing it today. Apparently there was a community-made patch a few years ago that added more maps and weapons and stuff.

You could still find a game easily enough in Uncharted 3 when I last played it, and now that it's all free with ps + I'd say there's a few more now.

The XBox 360 Shadowrun FPS had an incredibly dedicated community still playing it for years and years after it came out. It still might, for all I know.

Super Smash Bros. Brawl had lots of active players right up until the end. But I don't know how active it was before the Nintendo WFC shutdown was announced.

@anywhereilay: Uncharted 2 is still active as well, as long as you're okay with only playing Deathmatch. Co-op also works sometimes too, since it only requires a party of 2-3 players.

Holy crap you're right. I also used to play this game a lot in my teen years and even remember going to this site back when I got my first internet. I was about to say Call of Duty but hell JJ2 is from 1998 and still played. I might just replay it again for the memories.

@random45:

This site is a server list, it's a bit less populated then a few years where there were EASILY 5 full servers at any given time, seems to have dwindled down to 1 full serv a day MAYBE, pretty unfortunate.

SERVER LIST

Counter-Strike came out in November 2000 and it had 30000 peak users today. That's a lot.

I think Meridian 59 is still going, which is nuts to me... it's free to play, and open source, but it's still there. The game is an MMO from 1996

Have been playing the Command and Conquer Renegade X remake non stop for the last few weeks. People loved the game so much that they rebuilt the fucking thing in another engine just so they could keep playing it after EA shut down the games servers. The PC community doing stuff like that is why I love them so much.

FUCK YA! I'm one of them. Even got a friend who never played the original into it and it blew his mind.

Socom 2 always had a few thousand people on well into the PS3 era before servers were shut down.

I don't know if anybody is suprised by this or not, but CS 1.6 is still strong as ever. God damn that game is fun.

@giantstalker said:

Subspace launched commercially in 1997 and is still running. The community is tiny though.

Its maybe not that long running, but whenever I play Syndicate on the 360 I can pretty much always jump straight into a game. Only on normal though, only once ever have I found a game on expert.

@sp0rkeh: That's crazy, I played a bunch of that as a kid, seems completely insane that people still do online stuff with it. I still fire it up once a year or so since it's basically my favourite game, but I only run through the single player, I'll have to check out the online next time.

I know this is an old topic, but I haven't seen one game mentioned that sorta fits with the OP.

Monday Night Combat released in 2009, and is still going decently strong today. The majority are older players, but you can still find new players as well. It's similar to shadowrun where you can usually find 1-2 public lobbies at any given time on any given day, but this game truly shines when it's played in a competitive manner. If you like Shadowrun or GCI you make like Monday Night Combat.

Check it out, and if you're interested message me! I'd love to help new players experience this wonderful competitive title. It takes way more of an individual and team skill when compared to CoD or Halo. Competitive MNC Matches