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
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.
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u/The_True_Gaffe 1d ago
It’s both pro consumer and pro gamer, only people that will whine about it are company shills