If they dont want to release the source then just keep running the servers! I think its ridiculous that people can buy games and the games just stop working and its ok because of some legalese that literally no one reads. Alternatively, why not just align your incentives with the user and charge subscriptions.

Games are interesting because players will sink a lot of time and sometimes money in and so it goes beyond a smart alarm clock or a fitness tracker imo.

If this was about open source software I’d agree about not forcing people to do additional work, but if you’re selling something for money you should be obligated to do the bare minimum of stripping secrets out of a binary so the product you sold can actually work (and this will be barely any work if it’s designed with this in mind in the first place)

We already obligate them to do other basic necessities for consumer protection such as refunding or replacing faulty products

> The server binaries will almost always include other proprietary information that the studio will not want to release.

Or even information that they are contractually forbidden from releasing. A typical scenario would be a game developed as a fork of a proprietary codebase which was licensed from another company. Forcing the licensee to release material would infringe on the rights of the licensor.

> now you are also compelling the individual or business to do additional (presumably unpaid) work

This is not unpaid work as they had already received payment at the time of purchase of the game. They should take into account the cost associated with this work at the time of sale.

True. Better would be to eliminate society damage like "intellectual property" and require everything to be available regardless

Company's only exist so far as state law allows them to operate within them. It's not forcing them to do something after some point in time, it's a requirement to be a business at all.

The binaries can be obfuscated.

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So what, dedicated hackers will find a way around that. There's bigger fish to fry.

> It can be a mess of a system that relies on all kinds of services

Nowadays, this is much less of a "can" and more of a "definitely is" :(

Based on what I see as (non-game) security consultant in terms of service complexity, what modern FOSS projects consider a normal container constellation, and on what I see from at least one indie dev whom I personally know. It has been a topic I've brought up since he put so many hours into it and the game is fun and the binary didn't even run if you don't have a compatible Google Play Services version, much less the various back-ends that it connects to for accounts, level data, level thumbnails, matchmaking, etc. until you even get to the real-time multiplayer server

At the very least this hopefully stops them from suing modders that recreate the server software.

> Government forced speech is never reasonable.

Government forced speech includes food companies needing to add ingredient labels on packaging including allergen info, landlords needing to notify tenants before entering their homes, stores having to post accurate prices for the products they sell, and employers having to provide workers with safety data sheets for the hazardous materials they work with. These are all perfectly reasonable. Thanks to government forced speech we have more freedom/rights and better lives.

There's always someone willing to blame the victim.

The answer to companies committing fraud is not "buyer beware".