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.
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.
This is such an overstated issue. There's not really that many MMOs. It's hard to say, but I would estimate that there are ~600-1000 MMOs total. Many of them are quite simple (like Club Penguin, MapleStory, ...) or already have third party servers running (WoW, City Of Heroes, ...).
Also, your example doesn't really make sense. First, no one is arguing that companies should right now go revive all past MMOs. This is something that would affect future products.
Additionally, why are you making a sequel to a product that already failed?
Yeah I remember this argument from decades ago where people claimed that WoW required specialized hardware to run that would be far out of reach of community server operators. What a bunch of bs that turned out to be.
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.
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.
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.
What does an indie game that's starting to get a little bit of funding from sales do? You know, the way they take off and quit their jobs, deliver excellence, etc.
Do they now have to throw that money into an endowment in case their game starts failing and they can't afford servers? (enough to cover the time to patch in a local update).
Take all the games that started being able to make multiplayer with the steam SDKs. If steam changes their P2P relay (which they've done), what obligations does an indie dev with a defunct game have? Also extend this argument to all the amazing middleware that's helped indies do multiplayer well; are they just back to open source first principles? (side note: Godot stuff is quite nice now, but a law limiting it to that is pretty harsh; I'd much rather have people be able to license their middleware).
Your "games were like this before" comes off ignorant like a "we've always used rocks to make fire" type argument; you can of course ship games without any third party abstractions, with dedicated client server architectures, but I'd rather not have the option to not do so structurally financially kneecapped. Shipping a multiplayer game has gotten WAY easier over the past 10 years
Of course there ARE modern games like this, but not all modern games are like this. Just because it's possible doesn't mean it's easy. There are tradeoffs that I feel aren't being considered.
his bill would create an incentive that I just don't think the juice is worth the squeeze.
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Take among us; what does it do for matchmaking architecture?
If this bill had a carveout for games with under some ~$200k+ of sales, it wouldn't be a problem, but I'm worried about structurally affecting the multiplayer landscape for indie devs. I want them to be able to patch in their multiplayer after they get some sales without having to immediately make some contingency plan, since the time when you're considering this seems to be when indies are pretty vulnerable.
Dude, your entire argument is welfare for the software makers, not fair business practices. You want developers to continue externalizing the cost of architecting their game in such a way that hosting is expensive for them. Consumers do not care about that and also shouldn't. This law actually would prevent you from doing such boneheaded financial decision. The consumer shouldn't be holding the bag because you thought you needed to design a web of microservices for what is just minecraft. Nobody is stopping you from making a multiplayer game. The law is stopping you from making one that no one can afford to keep running.
What you're noticing - that companies suddenly started closed-sourcing their server code, isn't just something that happened for no reason. Internet connections got fast, and it enabled more complex games like MMORPGs and MOBAs which are an order of magnitude more complex than the shooter games you're probably thinking of (Quake III?)
A LOT of architectural thinking goes into scaling MMORPGs, and it starts at the data model. I've watched quite a few interviews with WoW devs, and the data model for their system is counter-intuitive. That constitutes a trade secret in my mind.
And that's something that companies that produce MMORPGs/MOBAs/etc. can conclusively demonstrate in court.
That said, it's possible that companies could release a "nerfed" version of their server code with trade secrets removed for the community to run once the official game servers are taken down. It isn't clear if that'll be in scope of the law, or if that's even what proponents of Stop Killing Games would be okay with. We'll have to see.
This whole thing doesn't apply to MMORPGs to begin with because they're all already subscription based. If I understand the main grievance correctly, the problem is giving the consumers the wrong impression they're making a normal one-time-payment PURCHASE and then rendering the item they purchased unusable later.
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.