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Comment by hombre_fatal | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that you can easily create negative effects that hurt all developers while only imagining the impact on profitable AAA games which seems to be how most of these discussions go since people always bring up blockbuster games like Lineage 2 and World of Warcraft.

Ensuring that the multiplayer server component of your game is a standalone end-user distributable is a huge task to impose on every game that wants to have a multiplayer component. Especially once you consider the vast majority of games that never even get traction much less turn a profit.

So, the second someone buys your prerelease indie slither.io game, what exactly does this checklist look like? It needs to also day 1 launch with a self-hostable standalone server distro instead of the crappy spaghetti mess you live coded on an EC2 machine?

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I fail to see the impact it would cause on a smaller studio - a lot of the times the games from those are usually are already pretty simple to self-host, as they don't want to bear the load of maintaining servers besides maybe a master-server (e.g. Valheim and the like).

> Especially once you consider the vast majority of games that never even get traction much less turn a profit.

Which is the whole point. Believe it or not - people who slave away on the game for years want people to maybe get to play it and enjoy it? Cause it's also art and not just business and there's a preservation angle to all of it?

> It needs to also day 1 launch with a self-hostable standalone server distro instead of the crappy spaghetti mess you live coded on an EC2 machine?

Not by day 1 launch, by day "we shut everything down". Not on an EC2 machine - as I mentioned in the thread above, even dumping your cloudformation templates and saying "enjoy all these queues" will satisfy the requirements.

I think the fact that you used the word "studio" kinda betrays a disconnect here. What about all the games that aren't built by "studios" and don't have "cloudformation templates" and have barely any sales?

They also need to have had invested in the extra work so that hypothetical players can have the opportunity to self-host the server on day 1 for a game that never caught on in the first place?

Yes?.. It does not have to be pretty. If you're able to deploy it, your community will be able to deploy it.

If you really don't want to bother with that - don't sell the game, sell timed access and shut it down once the last subscription runs out.

Fair enough, but that's a huge imposition on everyone for what probably comes from a very specific instance in your life of a single game that you loved having its server die after a while, long after you got your money's worth.

It seems short sighted.

> It seems short sighted.

In my opinion it's the other way around. It's short sighted to throw away so much of the medium's history with no way to preserve it.

How is dumping your server files in a file upload server somewhere a "huge imposition"?

Nobody is even asking you to maintain the code. You had it working when I purchased the product that required the code. Just share that code. I'll even fiddle around with hard-coded paths or whatever you think is making this impossible

IMO, I'd be content with "dump the server binaries in a file server somewhere" as an adequate, if less than ideal, option. If the binaries are available, it'd take work, but not that much work, to wrangle them into something hostable by me. Some containerization here, some packet redirection proxies there, I can make it work.

In many cases, this means you would have to design the server significantly differently as you may use proprietary first or third-party technology in your server that you cannot redistribute.

THAT is exactly why this whole thing is best solved by law, rather than consumer action, because that is a coordination problem. To be compliant with the law, you would have to not use software that you can't redistribute to make games that will be available to citizens of the EU (or, at the very least, that consumers can't reasonably get their own license to). Which in turn means that third party library developers would have to figure out a licensing model that works under the new legal framework.

Who pays for that server's continued availability?

Even if the company's file server is only available for a fixed period of time, as long as they announce it some fraction of the playerbase will pick it up. Or release it as a torrent, if you really want to cheap out.

If you mean the servers to actually host the self-hosted solution, then "me" is a perfectly reasonable option. Server hosting is far from an insurmountable hobby expense.

> Ensuring that the multiplayer server component of your game is a standalone end-user distributable is a huge task to impose on every game that wants to have a multiplayer component.

Is it? Your hosting it somehow? No one is asking for a 1-click installer. What do you do? Let us do that.

The requirement is not to be standalone end-user distributable, the requirement is that it be somehow possible for an end user to set it up, which is a lot easier, unless the developers don't even know how to set up the backend. But that's a low bar still.

I've built a couple multiplayer browser games and getting the server component to a state where it's end-user distributable probably involves another 50% of the work that I put into building it in the first place since I'm just rsyncing code onto a VPS.

It's like thinking that just because the code exists, then it's in a state that could be pushed publicly to github, and that's not the case for almost any codebase.

To think that I would need to do all that the second I charge $1 seems unreasonable. And I think you underestimate how true this is for most games you see on Steam.

> since I'm just rsyncing code onto a VPS.

I mean, this covers it. Put that code out, and some one else can rysnc it to a VPS. The ask here in not that it's nicely bundled up into a single click deploy. It's that a path exists at all. If I need a fleet of servers and some technical know how, that's fine. Even expected for many games.

This is a proposal for new games, not existing games. If the requirement for this is there in the design stage then it incentivizes developers to design it in from the start and pushes the implementation costs down signficantly.

If a developer decides to not take that requirement in the design stage then that is their prerogative, but not even doing it would be like not following any other EU consumer protection law.

> It needs to also day 1 launch with a self-hostable standalone server distro instead of the crappy spaghetti mess you live coded on an EC2 machine?

If you can't meet these very achievable goals, perhaps the game isn't at a point where it should be sold for money. What are you going to do when that ec2 instance gets randomware and becomes inaccessible, just tell all the people who paid you money to go home and forget about it?

I love indie developers, but if one can't have a modicum of professionalism, then they shouldn't ask people to pay for a product.

Why not apply this only to AAA games, if that's your objection? You could say that only companies with annual revenue over $100 million have to follow the rule.

(Usually I don't like regulations that blatantly favor small businesses like this, because they're coming from a misguided place. But in this case, the benefit of the regulation scales with the number of customers of a given firm, while the costs are fixed per firm, so applying it to large firms but not large ones won't much encourage fragmentation and could capture most of the benefits of applying it to everyone without most of the costs.)

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