[stale2002]

> What are the legal consequences of not releasing a functioning server if for some reason you can't?

How about "the government forces you to release the code"? That's seems fair.

Unless you hid your source code in USB drives under your bed, the government can probably just force GitHub (or similar )to release it. I bet they've got it backed up.

[DSMan195276]

The government will release it with all the copyrighted code and assets that's owned by a bunch of third-parties?

Ex. if I license my artwork, music, characters, code library, etc. to a game developer and they don't create a legally releasable version of their server, then the government will forcibly break our licensing agreement and I just get screwed?

[BlarfMcFlarf]

If everyone in the industry knows what the rules are, you can make contracts and agreements and licensing that works with those rules.

[knollimar]

Ab1921 in california doesn't propose this. Its either an offline copy, a copy that works without servers, or 100% refund. Basically patch or refund.

I can't wait to see "you haven't met your patch obligations" on a balance sheet and a full indie game being underwater

[runevault]

So you're assuming game devs write every line of code in their server infrastructure. First, could be using a third party library you have license to use on a limited number of machines that make up your backend servers. Second you could be paying for third party API access to something like snowflake.

You either have to rip out the code (which may or may not break the server, but still requires developer time to do) or write replacement code which likely takes even more dev time to do or you would have done it instead of paying for the library/access to the service.

[trinsic2]

I think this will bring everything back to where it needs to be. We depend way to much on third party stuff as it is.

[duped]

Genuinely curious - what third party closed source dependencies are they using? Like what is their purpose?

[dijit]

Audio subsystems (wwise, fmod).

Physics subsystems (havok, ISI).

Procedural systems (Gaea, Houdini)

Vegetation (Speedtree)

VFX subsystems (Nvidia Gameworks)

First party SDKs (Sony Playstation, Microsoft NDK, Horizon/Quest).

Pathfinding (Kytheria, Mercuna)

Cutscenes/Videos (Bink)

UI (Rive, Neosis)

Networking (Photon, Coherence)

Theres… thousands more, if you’d like me to continue.

[duped]

On the web backend?

[dijit]

The backend isn’t web technologies.

[duped]

I mean it absolutely is, but that's not an answer to the question.

[mvdtnz]

Web servers, message brokers, physics engines, anti cheat, fraud detection, flood mitigation, ranking systems, chat moderation, match making systems. There are thousands of possible components which may have been licensed in any given game server system. In some cases the entire game engine runs on the server.

[duped]

I guess what surprises me here is how much of this is 3p code that couldn't possibly be distributed. Like why would you not be using an open source web server, or widely available message broker? Things like chat moderation/match making/anti cheat/etc seem like add on services that would be implemented per game (well, maybe not match making) and aren't relevant to the problem that the "stop killing games" people are trying to solve.

[mvdtnz]

Frankly it's none of your business why, and it's completely irrelevant. The fact is that this 3p code exists and this law needs to account for it or it's unworkable.

[duped]

This is kind of needless aggression that doesn't help non domain experts understand.

I've worked on a lot of complicated and deeply optimized networked applications. They're almost all closed source. I know exactly how I would design a system to support these kinds of initiatives. What I'm curious about is why that's impossible for game developers, because either I'm missing something, or game developers are just bad at software design.

[TylerE]

A very large percentage of multiplayer games keep the backend in an MS SQL or Oracle cluster.

[duped]

Sure but you don't link in Oracle/MS's database cluster orchestrators to your server, right?

[TylerE]

THat really depends on how you define "the server",doesn't it? The intent of the bill seems to be a thing that actually play that game.

[duped]

The "server" being the computer program not running on a user device. The intent of the initiative is to allow people to substitute or replace that program to allow the game to continue to function even if the original publisher/developer disables access to it.

It's pretty obvious to me as a gamer and engineer what the intent and design constraints are here, so I'm just wondering what makes this seem impossible?

[TylerE]

And how do they force release of all the proprietary dependencies? Overriding contract law is a hell of a lift, and a terrible precedent.

The whole "Stop Killing Games" movement is deeply misguided, and most of the people supporting it have absolutely no clue about how software or anything computer related actually works.

[mvdtnz]

And you're... in favour of this kind of doctrine...?