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Comment by theptip | Hacker News Reader

> to leave said videogames in a functional (playable) state.

Yeah, I like the general goal, but I worry about the corner cases; is an MMO “functional/playable” if you just release a localhost server? Are we forcing indie shops to pay for servers indefinitely now? Great way to ensure no more indie MMOs get built if that ends up being the text interpretation.

And, as you say, the question you should always be asking about EU legislation - how does this affect the small/medium shops’ competitiveness? Counterintuitively, compliance can hit the small guys relatively harder and entrench the big guys.

Not to say that we shouldn’t try to fix the problem. But agree that skepticism about EU regulations has some historical merit.

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> is an MMO “functional/playable” if you just release a localhost server? Are we forcing indie shops to pay for servers indefinitely now?

The man behind Stop Killing Games has made it perfectly clear that they do not want to force game developers to continue operating servers. Rather, as you suggest, releasing server binaries would be acceptable. Although a mere "localhost" server would likely not be sufficient, because (if I interpret your suggestion correctly) it takes away the multiplayer funtionality of the game. I think it would be reasonable to require developers to release online multiplayer capable server binaries.

> I think it would be reasonable to require developers to release online multiplayer capable server binaries.

Not a game dev but would there be concerns about forcing devs to ship binaries for a codebase that was previously purely SaaS and proprietary, and likely containing logic that is a reusable for future games? The edge cases here seem a little gnarly. (Maybe it’s not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, how much competitive advantage comes from the MMO server code? I gather it can be tricky to do some things well like AoC pushing high player counts.)

The game itself also contains code that might be reusable for a future project. Among other things, the game engine itself. They have no problem shipping that to people though? Why is server code any different?

Perhaps mandatory Docker container packaging for EOL multiplayer games?

Ross addresses these things in his videos on the initiative. For one, the game doesn't have to be 100% functional, it just has to do a bare minimum.

They might not even need to release server binaries, even. I would think releasing documentation on how the network commication runs, and adding a box to enter a server IP into the client at EOL would be sufficient. The community, if enough people care, would then be empowered to write their own server implementation without needing the reverse engineering step.

Online games like MMOs and live service games generally have tooling for developers to run the game on their local machines for obvious reasons. Releasing said tooling would also be an option.

> compliance can hit the small guys relatively harder and entrench the big guys

This is almost always the case, actually. Regulation and compliance are taxes on the productivity of an organization. And the "shape" of the tax is mostly flat - the burden is sublinear in the size of the organization, so the relative effects on smaller companies are bigger. And smaller companies already have significantly less available resources, and especially less legal resources (no lawyers on retainer), to handle it.

Obviously that doesn't mean that regulation shouldn't be passed, just that you have to write it very, very carefully - think embedded systems rather than web frontend - minimizing complexity and aggressively red-teaming it for loopholes and edge-cases.

OTOH an indie dev probably isn't running some massive server farm with 20 linked microservices that would be hard to replicate.

Yes, that's true, but to be clear, even if the actual compliance isn't that much of a problem (as you correctly point out here), just determining how to comply is burdensome and may require expensive experts (or even lawyers) to verify - see the confusion around GDPR, for instance.

Again, I'm not saying that it isn't worth regulating, just that you need to design the regulation as carefully as possible. You'd probably agree that the best regulation is that that minimizes burden on companies while maximizing positive effects for consumers, no?

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