alt Hacker News> To be fair, the legislation also kills any sort of multiplayer games, so it's in the same spirit.
No, it doesn’t. It just requires that we go back to making multiplayer games the old-fashioned way (the good way). Descent 3 was released in 1999. You can still play Descent 3 multiplayer to this day if you want to [1], and there’s nothing that anyone can do to stop you from doing so. You can still play Descent 3 multiplayer because Descent 3 allows you to host your own servers and allows you to manually enter IP addresses in order to connect to servers (this is necessary because the services that Descent 3’s in-game server browsers depend on no longer exist). Descent 3’s source code was released in 2024 [2] which certainly helps with multiplayer preservation, but I can tell you that a small number of people definitely did play multiplayer Descent 3 in 2023 when the source code was not yet available.
Descent: Underground was released to Steam Early Access in 2015 [3]. Unlike the previous Descent games, Descent: Underground (or at least, that iteration of Descent: Underground) was pretty much multiplayer-only. The developers of Descent: Underground did not allow players to host their own Descent: Underground servers. (I think that they had some plan to allow for hosting your own servers in the future, but that didn’t get implemented in time). At some point, the official servers for that version of Descent: Underground were shutdown. As a result, you can no longer play Descent: Underground’s multiplayer.
The fact that I can play the multiplayer for a 27-year-old game, but I can’t play the multiplayer for an 11-year-old game is unsurprising. Many older multiplayer games did not have fatal design flaws that would cause them to die after certain period of time. Many newer multiplayer games do have such fatal design flaws. The good news is that this means that we already know how to stop killing multiplayer games. We just have to go back to doing things the way that we used to do them.
(In fact, some games don’t even need to “go back to doing things the way that we used to do them”. Take Counter-Strike 2, for example. Counter-Strike 2 was released in 2023 and does indeed allow players to host their own servers.)
The statement “the legislation also kills any sort of multiplayer games” is absolutely ridiculous.
[1]: <https://tsetsefly.de/>
[2]: <https://www.pcgamer.com/games/fps/descent-3-programmer-relea...>