Ab1921 in california doesn't propose this. Its either an offline copy, a copy that works without servers, or 100% refund. Basically patch or refund.

I can't wait to see "you haven't met your patch obligations" on a balance sheet and a full indie game being underwater

The government will release it with all the copyrighted code and assets that's owned by a bunch of third-parties?

Ex. if I license my artwork, music, characters, code library, etc. to a game developer and they don't create a legally releasable version of their server, then the government will forcibly break our licensing agreement and I just get screwed?

So you're assuming game devs write every line of code in their server infrastructure. First, could be using a third party library you have license to use on a limited number of machines that make up your backend servers. Second you could be paying for third party API access to something like snowflake.

You either have to rip out the code (which may or may not break the server, but still requires developer time to do) or write replacement code which likely takes even more dev time to do or you would have done it instead of paying for the library/access to the service.

Gamedevs dont' use git (not the serious ones anyway) they use Perforce or PlasticSCM on self-hosted servers.

What you're saying is true for the californian legislation, but not the EU which is currently being drafted (in a different direction) - nor the direction of the authors article, and like I replied in a sibling response: it's not like people would be pleased to get our binaries.

Second: anti-cheat itself is a fucking joke. A crutch, a last ditch hail-mary because we ran out of time to batten down the hatches or things were changed so often from the start of the project to the end that we couldn't add safety into the protocol design properly.

Exposing how our systems think about how you move, how you shoot, when AI ticks, when loot ticks, behaviour trees and how phase transitions are computed: gives an attacker a hell of a lot of leverage.

To put this into broader easier to understand terms: ask yourself why it's so easy to cheat in Unreal Engine games vs Battlefield.

It's not the anti-cheat. It's the complexity of digging through the engine and knowing what the memory is doing and what the server is doing.

I think what I'm trying to explain is that we barely make it work by the skin of our teeth, and adding more requirements means fewer features.

The extra point I made was that it's actually kind of costly to run these systems, and I promise you publishers would love to push that cost onto the community with community run servers (think: CS1.6) but the reason they don't is because developing systems that way takes much longer and cannot be properly secured (mostly due to cheating but also from an entitlement standpoint).

So, I think either multiplayer games will get much more basic, with simple gameservers. No more large multiplayer RPGs.

Or, there will be fewer multiplayer games, because it's even more risk in an already risky business.

It's not a lost skill.

Spinning up a binary and replicating actors across two computers that both have a connection string to a server is.. for all intents and purposes: easy.

Where it falls down is when you start to have complex interactions with AI that's serverside, or you have a dynamic world that changes based on player behaviour, or you have cross platform requirements, integrations with companion apps and above all: matchmaking.

If you're a looter-shooter, there's a whole host of complicated interactions too.

A game like Apex Legends could probably distribute their server binary, but if you require online, as in, not just a single match, but an economy- a dynamic matchmaker and a dynamic world (meaning: when you kick a box it stays kicked) and a persistent account (you keep your loot): then that doesn't work well anymore.

The interactions are just too complex to batten down reliably, they'll be exploited, there'll be no fun, or: it just won't be possible for certain features, regardless of safety.

You can see how this looks by trying to use one of the many unofficial versions of Runescape.

Community backlash will be fierce if it's not actually runnable.

Ubisoft doesn't have the most stellar reputation for example (I don't work there anymore) so people look at things we do by accident as if they are intentionally malicious.

Also, the California law is one law, the EU is also looking at this and it's likely to look different - that's why "Stop Killing Games" doesn't really mean anything yet, even people within the movement have differing definitions.

>My reading of the law is that you need to make the binaries accessible, you don't have to provide the hardware to run it on.

if no one can run the binaries, despite them being accessible, then the regulation has failed and there will be a new movement to alter the regulation.

the spirit of the law is that i can reasonably spin up an instance of the server for me and my friends to play.