I'm generally in favor of the idea but I feel like it falls apart on the edges. imagine you're a small studio that made a passion project. you scrape together funds and you're able to keep it afloat for a year or two. you never really get the breakout success you were hoping for and eventually have to pull the plug because you're out of money. so what happens? all the devs have to work for free to offline the game, or they go to jail? or the company eats a massive fine when they're already going bankrupt?
it makes sense to keep sony/ea/microsoft more honest but it also might chill out smaller developers from being able to deliver products at all
I think you're missing the point. The need for the game to remain functional after the servers shut down should be planned for from the beginning, not left as a last-minute obligation once the studio is already out of money.
so instead of those small companies getting fined after their game fails they never take a risk - an issue that the industry already faces with the major publishers. But now being an indie dev is a risk to you an order of magnitude more.
That would be a surefire way to ensure we get no creativity from the industry again.
Are you a dev? This is not some insurmountable technical challenge that suddenly requires a massive amount of work when the servers shut down. If end-of-life support is a requirement from the start, you design the architecture with that in mind.
Maybe it should have been developed from day 1 for it to work offline? Obviously there needs to be some nuance to it, am mmo for instance can't be expected to be turned into a single player game, but a game with a massive single or co-op sorry should be made to work offline.
This conversation started around 2012 and is (hopefully) finally coming around to roost. Always online single player games faced a lot of criticism because that was not how they were developed prior. There was pushback but the companies that wanted better DRM kept pushing and now it is standard. Online multiplayer games had issues with client-side hosting and server-side hosting rapidly improved the experience, a la Counterstrike and Halo. But even World of Warcraft had people modding the game and hosting private servers.
The point is that it is a design choice to be online only and it doesn't have to be that way, because it wasn't always this way. Even MMORPGs could be dead man switched to provide documentation for private hosting.
Just wait until big publishers start spinning up shell publishers for each individual game. A game shutters, and you find out the company that owned it was Emyxteris LLC and they were leasing the rights to use EA logos and branding on their content.
Making something work offline/locally is generally easier than making something work well online, they have distinctly different challenges and I would expect that most games would have had builds where it all worked locally before transitioning to any cloud infrastructure.
In the ideal scenario all that this changes is that when someone sets out to develop a game they ensure that functions aren't constrained to a proprietary server that must always be running for the game to function. Whether that means that they have to create a self host server equivalent for when they decide to kill the game, or just that if that server isn't up, the game just works regardless.
If a company is truly that destitute, then surely they have nothing to lose by open sourcing the code used to host those servers so individual communities can do it themselves.
The real crux of the issue lies in your response here - most companies don't have the rights to their own full source. It's frameworks and engines licensed all the way down. Companies could release a portion, but it certainly wouldn't be playable. It'd just be like design docs for gameplay mechanics that just need an engine, assets, and implementation pipelines.
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u/The_True_Gaffe 22h ago
It’s both pro consumer and pro gamer, only people that will whine about it are company shills