A company runs an online game. The actual online infrastructure is a bunch of different services that are held together with string. They have licenced some propriatry database. The studio runs out of money and lays off all the staff.
What happens?
What happens?
>For existing video games, it's possible that some being sold cannot have an "end of life" plan as they were created with necessary software that the publisher doesn't have permission to redistribute. Games like these would need to be either retired or grandfathered in before new law went into effect. For the European Citizens' Initiative in particular, even if passed, its effects would not be retroactive. So while it may not be possible to prevent some existing games from being destroyed, if the law were to change, future games could be designed with "end of life" plans and stop this trend.
Alternatively they can use proprietary technology in the backend without permission to redistribute, so long as it is replaced before support is ended.
Categorisation, maybe like even how cigarettes are sold, with big warnings and steam made to add a filter that doesn’t show games with no eol support will go a long way in the market coming up with solutions than just legislation forcing creators to make games in one way.
If the company fails to do this, they are effectively committing theft, and should be punished accordingly by the law. If studio execs think this it's an unreasonable thing to do, then they're free to not release their games to the public and keep their proprietary services to themselves.
Well, yes. As in any case of any decisions that result in violation of the law by companies.
I'm afraid if this is pushed through, the studios will just switch all online experiences to be fully subscription based. No more purchasing the game, you just pay for a month of the experience.
And there's already software to emulate Steam's matchmaking because it's so common.
> And some games have online components. Do I expect, for example, Bungie's multiplayer servers to stay up until the end of time? No.
> neither does it expect the publisher to provide resources for the said videogame once they discontinue it while leaving it in a reasonably functional (playable) state.
https://citizens-initiative.europa.eu/initiatives/details/20...
Why do you think that?
Multiple questions are about online-only games.
> We are in favor of publishers ending support for a game whenever they choose.
1 do not sell such a game, use a subscription
2 If you sell a online game you need to release the a server, not the source code but binarties, yes I know it is more work, but also lazy people were complaining that adding the mandatory "Unsubscribe" button in email is too much work or even impossible but they eventually do it and nobody dares today to defend that this rule was bad
3 make your game/software work offline, this entire thing was started because a greedy company killed a game that also had a single player mode. So if I bought Minecraft to play mostly single player I will be super pissed if Microsoft kills it because they were really special bastards that decided to force the Microsoft login to let me play the game. When they will abandon the game they need to make a final update and disable the online requirement.
4 The game will not be sold but will be "rended for N years", the customer knows what to expect and the developer is forced to keep the game working for N years from last purchase or refund the users. So if you launch soem AAA battle royale shit and it fails you refund your customers if you don't wana keep the servers running.
5 if all above is too much work then do not sell in EU or whatever USA state is demanding that you will not brick your sold software or hardware when you stop your servers because reasons.