Gaming companies did not need to insert themselves into the process in the first place. I could conceivably continue to locally run Doom, Quake, Unreal Tournament, etc forever because there is no external server component.
Not every game has a server architecture like that. There's been a Renaissance of indie multuplayer due to good libraries and third party dependencies.
Pretending that not doing that is bad design would have a chilling effect on novel games.
I'd be 100% for "if your game has an easily releasable server you have to release it on EoS" but this bill isn't it.
Some games are perfectly fine without online features yet they still got shut off. Mirrors Edge Catalyst only used online for leaderboards and challenges, everything else was entirely single player, yet it’s not possible to play it anymore because they wanted to shut off the servers yet designed the game to not run without them, even though it’s a single player game.
That should not be ok. It wasn’t sold with a disclaimer or expectation that it could be switched off.
This is the reason I buy many games twice: once when they release on Steam, and again (if I loved them) when the come out on GOG, with Doom Eternal being the most recent example, but also Doom 2016, Skyrim, Dying Light, Tomb Raider, etc. I want to reward the devs with money for giving me a copy that doesn't need servers to run. It's work to produce it, and it has value for me, so I don't mind paying. CDPR is particularly good about this (obviously, since they run GOG), but the fact that such an amazing AAA company has this stance is amazing to me.
I tried to play it about two months ago and it pops up a notice and quits. I found on Reddit that the notice is “we are Rory, but servers for this title have been shut down. Thank you very much for playing” which is roughly like what I remember.
According to Wikipedia: “in December 2023, all servers for mirrors edge catalyst were shut down by EA” but that only says online content was disabled.
It’s possible that the game is only unplayable on PlayStation, but still playable (without online features) on PC. But it does seem to still be listed in stores (steam and PlayStation) so I’m not sure exactly what’s going on. I’d have to redownload it to test it again.
> Pretending that not doing that is bad design would have a chilling effect on novel games.
Well, the comment that you replied to said “Gaming companies did not need to insert themselves into the process in the first place.” If the gaming company inserts itself into the process in such a way that the multiplayer part of the game would stop functioning if the game company were to disappear, then the game company is a single point of failure. And it would be a single point of failure that cannot be repaired or replaced by end users. In general, I would consider single points of failure to be design flaws. In this particular case, I would consider it to be a particularly egregious design flaw because it’s actually easier to create a multiplayer game that does not have the design flaw (e.g., local split screen multiplayer, releasing the server binary) than it is to create a multiplayer game that does have the design flaw. In this case, it really is bad design.
Also, I’m highly skeptical that this would have a chilling effect on novel games. Could you give an example of a game that might be chilled in this situation?
If you have add a "easily releasable" clause then the game companies could just do something that makes it not-so, e.g. a shell company that owns the code and they only "licence" it without permission to release it or whatever would fly under that law.
Pretending that not doing that is bad design would have a chilling effect on novel games.
I'd be 100% for "if your game has an easily releasable server you have to release it on EoS" but this bill isn't it.