[steelbrain]

Sorry to hear about your situation. For the game you're shutting down online services for, forgive my nieve question but how much work is it to expose an environment variable called `GAME_SERVER_URL` and then document the API contract it expects on the other end?

Servers have a real cost, nobody is denying that, but I think the people who bought the game should have an option/alternative in case the servers are down.

[tyleo]

We looked into it. Hackers got part of the way there so we decided not to make a change. They might be able to do it after the title is fully sunset and the team disbanded.

We basically have to get as much done on a 3/4 month timeline as possible and it isn’t a priority like saving content or refunding gift cards is. Shutting down is a lot of work.

[Fabricio20]

Anything you can add to the knowledge pool is already going to be of immense help for your community reverse engineering in the future. Be it as simple as stuff like "Our in-game chat runs over IRC" for example - that already simplifies that entire part of figuring it out of machine code out once servers are gone. ANY knowledge you can share no matter how small it is always helps when all you have is a binary file and no server to respond to your requests.

[tyleo]

Yeah, we published some protobuf schemas on GitHub so players can decode some of our binary protocols more easily.

[grayhatter]

> We looked into it. Hackers got part of the way there so we decided not to make a change. They might be able to do it after the title is fully sunset and the team disbanded.

This doesn't actually answer the question about how hard it would be. What's the specific level of effort required, and some amount of why so people can learn from your experience.

> We basically have to get as much done on a 3/4 month timeline as possible and it isn’t a priority like saving content or refunding gift cards is. Shutting down is a lot of work.

I'd rather have a working game then a refund of a gift card. Including if that means I have to stand up my own servers.

Priorities I guess

[tyleo]

The answer is, "not trivial but easy enough that smart players can probably do it."

To each their own on what they want. We obviously can't give everyone everything. Players don't want the game to go away at all. We still talk to players every day and have confidence we are doing the right thing with our limited time.

[Gamemaster1379]

Is the game p2p or dedicated infra? Best thing you can do is provide the infra files that you can. Doesn't even have to be turn key. Also for the coordinator API service, anything you can provide there as well. Couple those with a configurable base url and the hackers ought to get it the rest of the way

[tyleo]

Dedicated but our multiplayer is a P2P-like API because our original game server provider was Photon.

[lbrandy]

At least part of the answer is this doesn't meet the requirement of the proposed law. You need to actually provide the functionality of the server-side, not just its API.