That’s exactly the benefit of a law - it’s a forcing measure to require businesses to invest in processes to understand open sourcing, and to go forward when otherwise no one would make a business case for approval.
Or it could make it a lot cheaper, if the server were developed entirely on open-source infrastructure from the start. Hopefully the actual game logic would be developed entirely in-house, making it easier to audit before releasing.
Huh? Client-server architecture does make things more complicated to implement but it's not THAT bad. And you (usually[1]) do it in service of multiplayer, not because you're big budget or just want to complicate things.
Among Us was literally a three-person team.
[1] I find there are some major benefits to it, especially in post-LLM-world, and have been strongly considering it for some of my solo-dev single-player projects.
It's now a lot more tractable to build a multiplayer game, on the other hand balancing it is a whole other kettle of fish
Didn't stop it from being a fun, successful game but there's no comparison to the work and complexity involved in larger games.
Recap:
> Client-server architecture does make things more complicated to implement but it's not THAT bad. Among Us was literally a three-person team.
The scope of the discussion extends beyond simple games like Among Us and some games require highly complex networked architectures that would be non-trivial to open up.
That said, I don't mind a tangent, and I have built services for large multiplayer games and it really is not that bad.
Untangling the entire lot to make the game available upon closure would be a nightmare in some cases.
I've also contributed to game server emulation (pre-professionally) to keep them alive, so preserving games is a cause I support, even if I don't think it's necessarily always going to be trivial.
This is only true if the game wasn't architected with open-sourcing in mind. Which affects how this kind of law should be structured.
For example, it makes sense to require the server code to be submitted to an escrow service from the beginning. Part of that process would be a license evaluation, which acts as a forcing function already during the development process.
Yes there was. It was a 3 person team. That's a good enough reason to not have almost any feature that requires any amount of work, including UI work, because there is always a whole mountain of stuff that you're not doing that you'd like to do as a 3-person dev team.
Designing a game to use developer hosted servers is a choice they made. Probably to squeeze money from microtransactions.
This. I mean, modern game companies could setup a common (for every game) Headscale or similar solution, let group of friends create their own private VPN between them punching through any NAT and host their own distributed multiplayer game. Yes there is still some involvement server aide from the company but it could be easily shared between games. And if support ends, you still leave players with the option to use their own LAN/VPN system.
Timing issues can be worked around and GPS modules are cheap.
NAT problems aren't usually that bad. Only a minority of networks use symmetric NAT implementations, with most seeming to be using port-restricted cone NAT (EIM/APDF), which can still communicate with any other NAT implementation using endpoint-independent mapping (EIM). Most CGNAT implementations that I've encountered use EIM, with some also doing endpoint-independent filtering (EIF). Between UDP hole-punching, UPnP, NAT-PMP, and IPv6, it's usually possible to establish a P2P connection between 2 endpoints.
A game could use a hybrid client/server and P2P model, with the option to run entirely P2P while accepting its limitations.
Centralised servers allow for subscriptions and other stuff.
It might make a community rewrite of the server code easier, but that would likely only be attempted for very few games.
When the library vendor licenses some proprietary crap to a game server vendor, they take on the risk that their library may fall under the open source requirement when the game server shuts down.
At shutdown, criminal law says the library vendor must open source. Since criminal law preempts contract law, no amount of weasel words in the software license change that.
Even if the upstream vendor is out of business or something and did not provide source, surely, the binaries fall under the the open source clause.
Problem completely solved, and no lawyers need to be paid after the fact. (Library vendors might want to pay lawyers to tell them not to license to game servers, or not. Either way, that's not the customers' problem.)
And its not like its a bad thing for a company to calculate in the full cost from the start rather than offloading it onto society when they drop the product.