[armchairhacker]

The problem is the “reasonable means” requirement. Modern MMOs are huge: they almost certainly require more disk space, RAM, and clock cycles than a mere consumer-grade laptop has. Moreover, they’re designed to run on distributed servers, constantly, by professionals; they’re not just an `.exe` that you double click on your laptop.

A consumer-grade laptop can run an OSRS because it released over a decade ago. It can run a Minecraft server because Minecraft also released a decade ago, and was designed for servers to be run by players; even its single-player launches a local server. Running a server for e.g. No Man’s Sky is entirely different.

Publishers can certainly release their server binaries. I don’t see any issue with them being forced to make it possible for a dedicated group to keep the game running. But at minimum, “reasonable” has to be clarified to mean that publishers only have to put in reasonable effort to make the game playable. i.e. publishers can’t make it harder for players to run the server; but if the server is a mess of binaries that only runs on a million-dollar distributed cluster, it's not like that for a stupid reason, and the game company runs it like that, they can release it like that.

[Zambyte]

If it "only runs on a million-dollar distributed cluster", they're probably wrong in that claim, and the community will be able to run it to support how they want to play. I agree that the developers should not be required to put in extra effort to be able to run on deployments other than their own, but I believe it would be reasonable to require the source code be distributed too. With the source code, the game will never die an artificial death.