alt Hacker NewsThere's so many renditions of these style bills that it's hard to keep track what's in this specific one.
From what I can tell this one doesn't include provisions to protect indie shops/solo devs. The entire time spent developing a game is a net loss until release (and probability wise, probably still a loss then). So this is adding more upfront cost to devs.
The bill text I found is also one of the more generic versions I've seen. Specifically this line
>the ordinary use of the game
This is quite broad. I've seen some supporters of this style bill push for 'offline play' being a requirement. For instance, an mmo raid may require 20 players. If after the death of the game getting 20 players is impossible, I have seen people push for ai (just the game version) so it would be possible, or a patch to make the content possible for 1. Each of which are development time that serves no benefit to making money.
There's also the likelihood of the server architecture requiring many moving pieces. Think if fortnite died tomorrow how many different servers it would take to host. Could an argument be made that an end user couldn't be expected to launch a dozen aws services? More dev time, more costs.
Now the day 1 proponents would probably focus on the obvious provide the server exe cases, but these are concerns down the line.
Also at least this one doesn't do the 'development bond' idea I've seen to protect against the entity going bankrupt, essentially requiring every dev to pay for some sort of insurance before releasing the game (more costs for indie devs).
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It adds costs if you built it that way. I don't think many games are built that way. Developers need to be able to test their games in isolation, and it takes effort to remove that scaffolding from release versions (so people can't use it and bypass your monetization).
The real reasons to not just toss your backend over to the community and make it their problem are business reasons like 'it will dilute our brand' or 'it is a violation of licensed IP'. Or embarrassing reasons like 'we have lost the source code' or 'we can no longer build new executables'.
> I've seen some supporters of this style bill push for 'offline play' being a requirement.
That seems a bit silly to my eyes, self-hosting a server seems sufficient. But not included in this bill, so not an issue here
> Think if fortnite died tomorrow how many different servers it would take to host. Could an argument be made that an end user couldn't be expected to launch a dozen aws services? More dev time, more costs.
In this specific case, it's not so hard to imagine a single home computer handling the traffic of 100 connected users for a game of battle royale, the server compute for those kinds (baked-in world, low physics) games can be cheaper than running an instance of the game. Just some physics calculations, networking, and game state.
The main point would be if you start development from the premise that your server executable will be released to the users, the architecture/performance considerations are not that different at all.