A year ago, I had the opinion that it'd be too expensive for developers to support offline mode, peer to peer, or community servers after shutdown.

Today, I don't. I think it's probably a week's worth of work with AI and 1-2 developers.

However, enforcing this law is going to be tricky. How well does the peer to peer have to work? How about off line mode? How much support does the developer provide for community servers? Is it only a one-time support?

A developer going bankrupt isn't going to be able to do too much.

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anonymous908213 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Literally all they'd have to do is release the server executable(s) they already have. The community will do whatever work is necessary to get them running even if they require a cursed stack and client modifications.

	▲	NegativeLatency 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		At least now it’s pretty straight forward for a hobbies group or individual to reverse the protocol and implement something that’s open source along with patches

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Shank 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I had the opinion that it'd be too expensive for developers to support offline mode, peer to peer, or community servers after shutdown

It’s never like the server becomes lost media when they shut down services. Most development studios have an easy way to run the server stack locally for development anyway. The problem is forcing someone to actually spend several hours doing packaging to get it deployable and the general reluctance of companies to “lose control” of what they have. There are many alternate servers that have existed that developers have intentionally axed like AlterIWNet because of control reasons, not because the complete solution already existed.

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jjulius 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Why is this an existential issue? Every game that could be played, on all platforms, from all studios, for decades, met this requirement because they could be played offline right out of the box.

Allowing your game to not require an internet connection or checking in with servers from the get go is the way. Easy peasy.

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brookst 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Permutations of environments are the bane of quality. Designing for offline is easy. Designing for online is easy. Designing for both isn’t impossible, but it’s certainly harder than designing for one or the other.

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Rohansi 12 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

It's not at all harder on a technical level. Offline is the same as online with only one player. Many games boot up a server automatically when you play singleplayer.

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jjulius 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

And yet, also for a couple of decades or so, we could play video games that would function just fine offline and could online in multiplayer mode.

This take, and OP's, both feel like they're ignoring nearly half a century of how games have functioned in favor of the over-engineered industry of the past ~15 years. Again, as I said in my first response I'm maybe speaking out of ignorance here, but why are we acting like it's incredibly difficult to do something we were very capable of doing for a very long time, and for less effort than what we put in now?

	▲	Terr_ an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, it's not that companies "forgot" how to design for offline use. They deliberately chose to design against it, because they discovered they can extract a lot more money by offering paid Progression Boosts so that players can more-quickly acquire Artificially Scarce Reward, or selling additional draws of a virtual lottery. So it's a business thing. In terms of technology, it's the opposite: Offline play is more feasible for more kinds of games than ever before, since local AI (of various types) has improved, reducing the need to recruit a human counterpart over the internet.

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matheusmoreira 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They don't have to do anything. They just need to stay the hell out of our way. They don't even need to release anything, we'll do it all ourselves at zero cost to them. Just don't bother us with idiotic lawyer nonsense, that's literally the only thing they have to do.