> There additionally is the issue of licensed libraries, which may prohibit redistribution of the server binaries (and may e.g. be bound to a per-host pricing).

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.

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hobofan 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> > you can just make your game into a service requiring a monthly payment

> 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.

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lan321 43 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Doesn't have to be a monthly payment. If you can give me an EoL in the store page and sell it to me as a license, I'm happy. What sucks is that games currently get killed when the corpo decides. Without regulation, as with everything else, it'll slowly but surely go towards:

"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)

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roblabla an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

WoW, FF14, Elder Scrolls: Online, runescape. That's a lot of outlier I can cite off the top of my head.

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hobofan an hour ago | parent [-]

> WoW, FF14, Elder Scrolls: Online, runescape

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.

	▲	roblabla a few seconds ago \| parent \| next [-]
		PEAK uses P2P networking as far as I can tell. AmongUs has multiple mods that allows P2P gaming[0]. 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. [0]: https://github.com/InvoxiPlayGames/AmongUsP2P
	▲	sensanaty 23 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Or, as SKG has been saying, make games like Among Us or PEAK have some way for players to self-host the games. It'd be absolutely ridiculous if the devs behind PEAK decided to one day say "Y'know what, we're shutting down PEAK and you can no longer play it" when nothing about the game needs to be tied to a persistent internet connection at all. Besides, PEAK has offline mode already built in, so no subscriptions needed.