10 Popular Video Games You Can't Play Anymore

1. City Of Heroes

This list has made it pretty clear that two things will almost always foreshadow the end of the line for a game: licensed IP and dedicated servers. This goes double for massively multiplayer online games.

Unless you’re World of Warcraft which will probably outlast the inevitable heat death of the Earth. At the end there it will just be the cockroaches and World of Warcraft.

Not only will WoW probably persevere long after all of us are gone, it has gone some way to stamping out almost all of its competitors and fan favourite superhero themed MMO City of Heroes was no exception. The 2004 online RPG by Cryptic Studios and NCSoft let you build a character with one of five different origins, customisable powers, and unique archetypes. A suite of free updates expanded upon the game in various ways between 2004 and 2012, and an expansion called City of Villains in 2005 ushered in villain archetypes, and new PvP zones, among other changes.

Despite its critical and commercial success, not to mention a consumer-friendly practice of not deleting inactive player characters even when the subscription was cancelled, the new development team Paragon Studios was ultimately disbanded in 2012.

The game was no longer supported by the end of that year and players were less than happy, doing everything in their power to keep the game alive. In 2019 it was publicly learned that a private server for City of Heroes had been running since the game was shut down. That server was then shut down but the source code it was built on was distributed so now there’s lots of little baby public servers running and fortunately NCSoft has not sought to stamp them out.