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.
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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