alt Hacker NewsIt would result in fewer online games that stop working altogether when the publisher wants to stop it.
All the publisher would have to do is to create a "mini self-hosted server" application and provide it and they would follow the law on this.
It's really not that complicated. Not "free", of course, but it's not exactly expensive either if you plan to do that from the moment you write your first line of code.
Game developer here. If it were “just” that easy I’d love to support this.
> All the publisher would have to do is to create a "mini self-hosted server" application and provide it and they would follow the law on this
You’re making a huge assumption here both about the scope of the law, and about how straightforward this is to do. I’ve worked in games where we could drop a server binary over the fence an that would be fine. I’ve also worked on games that have required a bunch of different standalone services just for core logic - running it requires a combination of dynamodb, Kafka, a few microservices on lambda, and massive third party dependencies. Getting a “mini self hosted server application” out of this is a rewrite.
> but it's not exactly expensive either if you plan to do that from the moment you write your first line of code.
The vast majority of games use existing technologies. First line of code was 30 years ago for any unreal game, for example. This effectively bans any third party non redistributable libraries (of which there are many), using many open source licensed projects for the backend.
What if I rely on steam, or epic for P2P and they shutter the service? What if playfab discontinue their offering, or AWS decide to remove a service that our “mini self hosted server” relies upon. Games aren’t some magical piece of technology, they’re just software like everything else.