Aside from the fact it’s proprietary stuff they own… you can’t just mandate that a company must release stuff they own to the public.
They don’t need to reslsse stuff they own to the public if they keep the servers running of course. And they can alter their client side software to accept a third party game server and let the fans do the rest. Kind of what the EU has forced Meta to do through the Digital Markers Act.
They own it, they can do whatever they want with it.
No, they have to abide by the law. Apple, Google, Meta, and many other billionaire tech companies have already been forced to alter and open up access to their software. Hell, games companies have already been forced to remove lootboxes in “their property”.
Except for the fact for most games the online play is an extra feature and not the core game.
And the games where this is only a minor feature will be hit the least by the proposed legislation, if at all. Same reason the cybersecurity legislation mandating the availability of software patches doesn’t affect devices without network connectivity much. An RC car doesn’t need firmware updates, an app-controlled RC car has terrible costs associated with it if you don’t build your code right.
Modern game servers for major games are simply just not designed to be run locally bare metal.
I know that. But that doesn’t mean someone else can’t run the same protocol on bare metal. Just give gamers the ability to hook into someone else’s server after shutdown and you’ll be fine, probably. Make it part of your sunsetting strategy. Beats waiting for governments to come down and make you alter games you intended to drop in ways you don’t want to modify through lawsuits and regulatory pressure.
Plus, you think the people developing the netcode need to provision a full multi continent cloud every time they test their protocol?
Now that v2.4 copy of your game server stops working cuz it’s not compatible with v1.8 of their auth system, so it’s now just dead.
Wow, good thing they were mandated by law to release a v1.7 server so v2.4 of their game still works! After all, the servers have been shut down, so v2.4 is the very last version the developer will need to care about. Barring the mandatory support period for the Cyber Resilience Act, of course. Or maybe they could make backwards compatible APIs, though I doubt game developers still know how to these days.
You can’t mandate they keep updating their old code on a game they don’t support anymore.
First of all, sure you can. It’d be stupid, but you can.
Designing a server to be self hosted is a critical choice you make very very early on in development
There it is. Choice. That choice can be influenced. For instance, “you cannot sell your game in the EU” is a good reason to reconsider that choice. Or maybe “figure out what”'ll cost us more, the EU fine or having a few devs release a self-hosted server" for products developed while the law enters into effect.
it will stop working eventually when external upstream apis stop being compatible
What upstream APIs? The game has been abandoned. The server code is no longer being worked on. The auth is done server-side on servers they don’t even control. There is no upstream to break.
You seem to take the current state of the game development industry and extrapolate from the game publisher’s point of view what would be achievable without losing money. That’s not how the law works. The law doesn’t care. It the law says “no visible blood in your zombie game”, you either don’t release in Germany or you find a way to comply. Nobody in the government cares about the complexity of remodeling games, all the hard work the colour designers did, the way the shaders were written, it just says “get rid of the blood or fuck off”. In this case, the law would say “make your game work or fuck off”.
Games worked like this for a decade. They can be made to work like this again. “Modern” doesn’t mean “better”, it just means “different” when it comes to game servers. The only thing stopping games companies from doing that, is the financial incentive not to. Threaten 'em with a couple billion dollars of fines and they’ll realign their incentives. It worked great for social media companies and ad agencies.
Some free-to-play video games would definitely fuck off. The companies willing to put up half a dev’s time every month to sync their protocol changes to their self hosted servers will be there to take gamers’ money they would’ve spent on the free to play stuff. There are billions at stake, and games companies are legally obligated to gobble up as many of their billions for their shareholders as they can.
In a way LinkedIn is federated. You create a profile or post, and within minutes hundreds of shady data brokers and contact details resellers have a copy of your post available for their customers!
I don’t really see the benefit, though. LinkedIn is functionally almost the same as Facebook, and can be replicated by adding a theme to a Friendica instance with a few custom fields. The biggest difference is that LinkedIn allows recruiters to
spam and stalk youoffer you jobs, other than that it’s just Facebook where most adults have decided to only talk about work stuff.