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by ldoughty 690 days ago
Who will pay devs to convert World of Warcraft into a single-player game?

This is probably covered by "reasonable means to continue functioning" and the answer will be "there are no reasonable means".. but the comment parent's point somewhat stands.

Even moving a DLC check can be complicated. When you game is done, do you disable all DLC since you can't verify someone purchased it, or do you make it freely available? Who will pay for that additional data streaming (assuming it's not on something like Steam) ?

I am not disagreeing with the wish of the initiative, just providing some food for thought on the potential costs to a company.

2 comments

Cost of business that was previously avoided, to the detriment of consumers. Who pays for required warranty reserves? It is built into the cost of good sold model (EU requires warranties of no shorter than 2 years).

If you sell something, it should continue to be usable after you as a business are gone. A game producer can always not make games if you find the regulation to be overly burdensome, that is a choice. It is unlikely this stops games from being made. This policy encourages the feature as part of requirements gathering and roadmap planning.

warranty reserves are incremental and predictable. Development is unpredictable. I'd hope people on HN would understand not comparing tech to an assembly line.
It doesn't necessarily mean to turn WoW in a simgle player game. Just being able to setup servers in a reasonable way (i.e. not reverse engineering and emulating how they work, like people have done for WoW).

Look into World in Conflict, its a great example of what to do: https://github.com/ubisoft/massgate