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Comment by flyt | Hacker News Reader

Not for game servers. We're talking about full applications that have to run somewhere, written years ago, by people that may not be at the company. Each additional game they have to support as a 24/7/365 service incurs some support costs that don't necessarily decrease over time, or with the active number of players.

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Ideally once the game is shut down, the server becomes free or open source for users.

...and then a fun game becomes a deterrent to buying the newest games. Of course, if the game is still fun, why not just keep the servers running and keep making money in subscription fees? What is the point of demanding that people pay for a new game when you can just charge them for old games?

most of those games are not sub games. they are just matchmaking and DRM.

What if the code in the game server contains non-GPL/free libraries? What if it includes bindings to proprietary services and sensitive data? How much time should EA devote to repackaging game server code for open source release, knowing that it will barely get any use and could only result in less sales in the future?

I can't imagine it would be more than a couple of hours work. Simcity is just authentication and saves, most games are even less than that. Heck, Battle.net is just a modified IRC server.

It would avoid a lot of the poop storm EA is facing with this. It's presumably costing them millions, and it's something they could have predicted when the beta crapped out.

You're typically talking:

* Matchmaking

* Authentication

* Stats

* Chat

Things have come a long way since Battle.NET, you're really not going to find that backend servers for any modern game are a simple thing.

Hell, any game that makes use of GFWL is going to be heavily dependent on the GFWL SDK. You can't release that, as it's under a fairly strick NDA. The same with any SteamWorks game.

> I can't imagine it would be more than a couple of hours work.

It's always easier spec'ing the amount of time something takes when you have no idea what goes into doing it and its not your job anyway.

While the SimCity servers handle those functions, apparently large portions of the economic and simulation calculations for regional activity in the game (i.e. what happens between cities) occurs on the server and would also need implementation and support.

> I can't imagine it would be more than a couple of hours work.

Then it shouldn't take you more than a week to emulate it from scratch, right?

Nope, because then that would eat into EA's profits for [insert brand new title here]. That's just business sense!

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