What are the insurmountable obstacles to releasing the server code for the community to run?
The refund thing is just there to force action by putting a dollar value on inaction. Pretty much no company is expected to actually choose refunds.
> Alternatively, it might push multiplayer games towards free-to-play if in-app-purchases are excluded.
Good point, the law had better not exclude those.
It's the same as GPL and similar licenses. If you don't want to publish your source that contains trade secrets then don't incorporate GPL licensed code.
There are also already various laws which compel certain types of speech. Consider things like nutrient labels or ingredient lists.
Unfortunately, it is not you define whether it deserves. It's a court, ultimately SCOTUS.
This case illustrates this point fully:
https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2019/08/settlemen...
If you still choose to license something you can't release later, and it's critical to the game's operation, then that's a deliberate liability and you'll need to replace it.
And it's not expensive for Photon to do that, so I don't see why they wouldn't add that feature for a modest price or even free. (And that's assuming the license doesn't already allow it.)
Either way, there's not much revenue coming in to most games by the time the developer wants to abandon them, and Photon's not getting paid much either. There's a lot of ways to make this work out monetarily.
I’d love to see you rise to the challenge. If you think there’s an opportunity to make money here, “lots of ways to make this work,” perhaps take it up yourself.
Can you name something that's stuck on the cloud on a technical level and also couldn't be substituted with a mild dev effort?
Right now I don't think it's a good money making opportunity. Becoming one would need Photon or some other significant service provider completely refusing to license their software in a way that's compatible with this law, and assurance that they'll continue to refuse while I build my entire product around supplementing/replacing them.
Take I’d for example. They released source code for genre defining extremely popular games and were fine.
And how often is code reused anyway? Every online game seem to either use mostly stock server code that comes with the engine or build anew every time.