If they're not actually allowed to sell their product, then they shouldn't pretend they're selling it. They should be clear that it's a rental by offering it as a subscription only in that case and thus not be bound by that requirement.
>
> Ah, yes the simple option of "completely tank your playerbase".
And gamers at large shouldn't pretend that they are going to be shelling out money for subscriptions. There is a reason that even most MMOs switched away from mandatory subscription pricing (apart from the outlier of WOW), and it's not to make the publishers filthy reach, but often barely viable.
"We released MyGame 3 a month ago, sales aren't looking great, announce EoL for MyGame 1 we released 6 years ago to get those bums off it." (or the more charitable version where money's tight and the AWS costs aren't helping)
The goal here is to disallow this, as it's obviously what everyone would do if allowed to.
They'd just sell every game with 1 year EoL and keep the servers running however long they feel like.
There are in total ~15-30mil paying subscriber that pay subscription fees to a single game. That's 1% of all gamers globally.
But sure, let's slap a $5/month subscription fee on all upcoming games that would have the chance to be the next Among Us / PEAK, and let's see how well that works out for indie developers.
Most indie games don't rely on servers for the gameplay loop because those are expensive and an indie studios can't afford it. They instead rely on P2P networking for the gameplay loop, and at most have a matchmaking server to both give a nice experience to find other players to play with, and to allow NAT traversal.
You can easily design a game like PEAK/AmongUs in such a way that, even if the matchmaking server is disabled, the game still works because it has a direct connection or LAN option.
PEAK is listed as an example of using the Photon Fusion Shared Authority model[0]. AFAIK Photon Fusion doesn't allow for any proper P2P in any of their network topologies (apart from the fully offline single-player mode).
[0]: https://doc.photonengine.com/photon/v1/photon-products#the-q...
Besides, PEAK has offline mode already built in, so no subscriptions needed.
Yes, single player offline. SKG is specifically about deactivating the online/multiplayer component in games, so if PEAK were to deactivate their online coop mode, they would definitely fall under it (ignoring grandfathering).
[0]: https://youtu.be/sEVBiN5SKuA?t=1967
[1]: https://youtu.be/36qDEeTDXNE?t=2378 - Statement by affiliated Pirate Party member
No, this is false. SKG also includes singleplayer games which require constant online connection.