So now it becomes way more expensive for small studios to come out with games that have online features. This is a huge win for big studios who will suck up all that market share.

Handing over a standalone server to the public is a massive engineering, financial, and legal headache. Modern multiplayer games rarely run on a single isolated program. They rely on a huge network of interconnected cloud microservices.

A single match might require separate proprietary systems for matchmaking, player inventories, anti cheat, metrics tracking, and database management. Many of those come with licenses that don't allow you to just give away the code for free.

Disentangling the actual game logic from these third party platforms like AWS or Epic Online Services requires months of rewriting code. At that point you're basically re-inventing the wheel on so many technologies that your costs go up exponentially.

Games are rarely built entirely from scratch by a single company and are usually packed with licensed third party software like proprietary network code, commercial physics engines, or specific anti cheat software. Because the studio doesn't own the rights to distribute these proprietary tools to the public for free then releasing a standalone server forces them to spend extensive legal and development hours stripping out the restricted code and replacing it with open source alternatives.

Releasing server code also exposes the inner workings of the company's technology. If a studio uses the same proprietary engine or backend framework for their active money making games then releasing the server code for a dead game essentially hands hackers and competitors a roadmap to exploit their current profitable titles.

▲

dminik 7 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive was a game running all of these things (matchmaking, skins, anticheat ...). After Counter-Strike 2 was released, the servers for CS:GO were shut down. Yet, the game remains mostly playable. Sure, the skins no longer work and there's no official matchmaking, but third parties have stepped up. That's because Valve released (and have always released) server software.

I find this argument quite bad. It was done in the past and it's still being done today. There's nothing preventing any company from doing it except for a combination of laziness and greed.

▲

chromadon an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Does it though? Just release the a standalone server once the game is done making money.

▲

phyzix5761 an hour ago | parent [-]

Updated my original post to explain why this wouldn't work.

▲

ablob 19 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Somehow I highly doubt that a small game company is going to run a "huge network of interconnected cloud services". I've also yet to find a small game company running their own big online multiplayer game.

	▲	okanat 9 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		And most of the indie publishers usually comply with the law by not fucking over their customers by providing independent server executables or not releasing a server-tied game. AAA studios are the biggest offenders and they deserve to be fucked.

▲

okanat 10 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Your argument still doesn't hold, sorry. The law won't apply retroactively so the existing games can be killed. However, if the law passes, the EOL plan just becomes another product requirement you have to plan for. So you won't "rewrite" the server code, you write it to comply in the first place.

This was also the excuse people gave for GDPR and California's privacy law and everybody got forced into complying after the date of validity. Simply having an "excuse" of money loss due to engineering your game user-hostile in the first place (especially after the law became valid) isn't a good argument. It will have some preparation time and if you didn't plan for it, it is your fault.

▲

braiamp 31 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How many small studio games have online multiplayer? Like really?

▲

StableAlkyne 24 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

> Releasing server code also exposes the inner workings of the company's technology.

And yet releasing standalone servers back in the 00s was the norm, rather than the exception. I don't buy the argument.