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.
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.
-----------------------------------
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.