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Comment by furyofantares | Hacker News Reader

I'm aware. What's that got to do with anything?

I'm countering your argument that it's "not that bad". If that wasn't your point with mentioning the three person team, what was?

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.

Ah, I see. Well, the post I was responding to reads to me like a denial of the existence of games like Among Us when it says it wouldn't affect three person dev teams making games on a shoestring budget, and gives off the weird implication that it would only affect big budget games.

That said, I don't mind a tangent, and I have built services for large multiplayer games and it really is not that bad.

I've also worked on MMOs and the architectures there can get quite hairy, particularly when they're deeply plumbed into shared services and infrastructure that they couldn't operate without. Those layers occasionally have closed-source licensed tech mixed in there.

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.

> Untangling the entire lot to make the game available upon closure would be a nightmare in some cases.

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.

Oh yeah, I definitely agree with you there.

A simple multiplayer game like Among Us would also have a similarly simple server. There was never any reason not to have included that code in the client to support LAN play from the start. In concept, the gameplay is no different from a deathmatch game in, say, Quake 3 Arena. It's a small group of players sharing a level and interacting with each other in various ways.

> There was never any reason not to have included that code in the client to support LAN play from the start.

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.

It's more work to implement the server as a separate program that you additionally have to keep running and load-balance than to build the server into the game.

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