‘City Of Heroes’ Fan Server Will Continue With An Official License From The Developer

Nearly four years ago, we discussed the online superhero game City of Heroes, which had been shut down officially by NCSoft, but which had survived in the shadows due to some fan-run servers. That story from 2019 was fairly interesting for a couple of reasons. First, it stood in contrast to some similar instances where fans have run online servers for MMOs that had either also been shutdown, or for original versions of those games that were no longer officially available, only to have to shut down those servers after legal threats or action from developers and publishers. Second, while there had been some concern about such threats from NCSoft among some that ran fan-servers, those were eventually put somewhat to rest by the first group to setup a fan-server stating that they had talked to NCSoft, might have more announcements in the future, but that play could continue without worry of legal threats from the company.

In that post, we mentioned that NCSoft, which has had a history of going legal on things like this in the past, had an opportunity to change the narrative and be awesome by working even more closely with this fan-run community. And, while it took nearly four years to get there, it seems NCSoft will be pursuing that route, having agreed to officially license at least one of the largest of those fan-run server sites.

In a post published today on theHomecomingforums, the folks behind the private server thanked fans for waiting patiently over the last few yearsafter teasing in 2019that it was in talks with NCSoft about the project.

Homecominghas been granted a license to operate aCity of Heroesserver and further develop the game - subject to conditions and limitations under the contract - but, as between us and NCSoft, NCSoft still owns theCity of Heroesintellectual property and its derivatives," the devs behind the project explained.

If you read through the announcement on the forum, there's a lot of good and only a few areas of concern. The current state of the game, the players and their characters, all remain. Nothing needs to get deleted or changed. In addition, the fan developers can still continue to develop new content for the game. Streaming and social media are also all fine to continue, so long as nobody puts that content behind a paywall.

The only thing that kind of sucks is that it looks like NCSoft is only willing to do this once.

As part of this new deal, it seems other private servers might not stick around. The team hopes players will come toHomecomingand they can centralize the community more. TheHomecomingteam confirmed that part of the deal requires a single in-house installation and patching solution" and this was why the team spent time developing its own launcher.

Still, compared with the general blanket refusal to allow any fan-game scenarios to exist exhibited by most other developers and publishers, this is a very large step in the right direction.

So cheers, NCSoft. It's nice to see a gaming company actually work with fans instead of against them.