'Live-service is a red flag for us': Why one publisher is embracing an older kind of multiplayer hit: peer-to-peer, server browsers, and organic community

It's a frustrating thing to watch good games disappear. We've seen it happen time and time and time again: studios spend years on a cool multiplayer thing, bank on it being popular enough to become a live-service hit, then toss the entire project into the trash when that doesn't happen.

That could have been the fate of Deceive Inc, a 2023 'PvP Hitman' shooter that has attracted a passionate, but small community. Developer Sweet Bandits supported the game with substantial updates and microtransactions for over a year, but unfortunately shut down in 2024, leaving fans to assume Deceive Inc would one day disappear, too. Then last month, the unexpected happened: an update on its Steam page announced that not only would Deceive Inc not be going offline, but work is underway on community server tools and mod support that will essentially give the game to the community, and keep it playable forever.

The update is not the work of Sweet Bandits, but an initiative of Deceive Inc's publisher, Tripwire Interactive. In an interview with PC Gamer, publishing director Bryan West explained why Tripwire—which also publishes the Chivalry games and makes the Killing Floor series—is going to such lengths to maintain a game that only a few people are playing.

"The core message is that Tripwire wants players to be able to enjoy our games for as long as they want to enjoy them. So we fight and claw to find a way to make that happen," West said.

"We don't want to leave our games in a broken state. It's a mandate from our leadership, and it's part of the reason why I'm happy to be with Tripwire."

Custom server tools and community browsers were once the norm for PC games, but in the age of matchmaking algorithms and expected cross-play functionality, multiplayer games are built around closed networking and dedicated servers. Undoing that process for Deceive Inc is not a small task, as West explains:

"It's several months of work for a very high-level engineer. It's not inconsequential, but in terms of the gains, I would say it's very important for Tripwire as a business that relies on its reputation with gamers. It's important for us to look at the long term and not the short term of how this is impacting our bottom line.

"We feel like being able to continue to sell Deceive, and not shut it down, is going to be a net win over the long haul," West said. "Plus, we get to look gamers in the eye, metaphorically, and say this is important to us. That when we sell you a game, you're able to continue playing it for as long as you want to."

Or to put it simply: "We have a lot of belief in Deceive Inc as a game, and we know that there's a community. We want to be able to continue selling it, to have it out there, to have people enjoy it."

The live service problem

West described Deceive Inc as a learning experience for Tripwire. The publisher signed the game amidst the Covid boom, when folks were staying home playing games and investment was easier to come by.

"We poured our hearts and souls into it right alongside Sweet Bandits," West recounted. "Launch went well, but it obviously didn't blow up the way we had hoped. It presents itself as a more friendly game on the surface, but when you get into it, it's a very hardcore shooter at its core."

The conceit of Deceive Inc is spies versus spies: squads of three don civilian disguises and act like NPCs (similar to the old Assassin's Creed multiplayer modes) while completing tasks. When a match really comes together, it's one of the most unique competitive games I've ever played—channeling Hitman, SpyParty, and hero shooters all at once.

"Our hope was that an 'Among Us' perspective of hiding in plain sight and trying to use stealth would have been more of the meta," West said, "but when it got to the actual audience, it was apparent the shooter aspects took over."

That hardcore meta made the game less broadly accessible and matchmaking increasingly sweaty, but it "resonated with the people that figured out how to play, and three-plus years later, there's still a core community that gets together and runs sessions."

Before the studio's closure, Sweet Bandits and Tripwire made changes to aid new players, like bot matches and rules that discourage open combat, but "by that time it's really hard to recover."

"It's got that window, and unless you get extremely lucky, it's hard to ever recapture [momentum]," said West. "We love the game, and it has done well for us as a whole, but it was not enough to sustain a studio, even a small studio, in the live ops framework. That was a huge lesson for me."

The experience changed Tripwire's perspective on live-service games. What worked for Chivalry 2 won't work for other games, and as a decision maker, West is now more interested in products built to last.

"As a publishing director reviewing stuff regularly, I'd say any small team that's looking to do that live-service model is a red flag for us," he said. "We are looking for and prioritizing games that either have peer-to-peer setups, or something like what we're doing with Deceive Inc right now, where it's more community server-run."

West calls it the "Valheim approach, where you can hook up however you want, and there's not that crazy ongoing cost. There will be big games and certain franchises where [live-service] makes sense, but on the whole, that's where we've pivoted our thinking."

Sounds like music to my ears. The old ways really do feel like the only way for inherently niche multiplayer games. For Deceive Inc—a complex, crunchy social stealth game—West reckons that firing up a custom server with friends will be not only a good option, but the best one.

"Call it its second life. The 'friend game night' type of game seems to be really coming into its own, and I think that is just a perfect way to experience Deceive, with a handful of friends on Discord giving each other grief," he said. "You might play it only once a month or something, but you've got your rotation of games you're playing, and it just fits in there. I think that's perfect."

Deceive Inc is still up on Steam and very much alive. The beta for its custom server tools is coming sometime soon.