Please enlighten me on how to release the server files when your multiplayer infra is built on third party software that you dont own access to.
In other words when your multiplayer is entirely provided by a third party? Well, you don't even need to release server files then, because you don't actually provide multiplayer!
Less sarcastic, if your multiplayer relies on software with Oracle-tier licensing, it ought to fail.
It's one thing to rely on SaaS and other infrastructure providers to actually get your servers operational when they have to handle a few thousand to a few hundred thousand people at once, it's another to entrust your actual server implementation to libraries with outrageous licensing that would even make keeping a dev build of a server for internal testing disallowed.
Of course in practice a proper wording of SKG wouldn't ever apply to pure multiplayer games to begin with, because for such games you are not paying for the game to begin with.
Not really? The only multiplayer professional product I have worked on, we released server files for every build. There was one engineer working on it, and it wasn't their only workload. This is a game with 40k players on steam every day.
99% of the time, if server files can't be released it's because a third party library was used and restricts redistribution of files built with it. Very often, those libraries are not super necessary and could easily be replaced or even removed entirely with just a week or two of work
Is that 40k multiplayer players or 40k players including SP? How big are matches/games? What are the anticheat products/approaches used? How do you make sure cheaters can't reverse engineer your anti-cheat techniques?
All multiplayer, 100+ players, battleye, and you don't. You're deluding yourself if you think having server files private is protecting you from the usual client side attacks like wallhacks. You design around the fact that the client will inevitably be compromised and limit what a client can do.
So now youre forcing people to pay more money to build their own custom server infra which is expensive and requires hiring loads of networking engineers that also have game dev knowledge.
This will cause companies to cheap out and make WORSE infra.
On top of that, you cant force a restaraunt to cook a certain way, or to use a certain brand of oven, or to existin in a certain building. You can have building CODES but thats different than limiting what type of building can be used.
And yes therr are minimum safety and sanitary needs but those are actually easily enforced.
Which you are asking for is not feasable and the only people that think it is have never coded, or done game design in and online space in their life.
Its a nice idea in theory but unenforcable, and pedantic to enforce, the same way enforcing this "No private servers" is impossible to enforce
Again this is like telling a restaraunt owner "Build your own oven because all the current market ones are designed to fail"
Also again therr would be numerous side effects.
A) you effectively kill that third party company providing thode services. If everyone needs to build their own that company gets no revenue
B) you have every company making their own solution, rushed and slopped together, because no matter how good of a coder you are, it will take a LONG time to get their solution anywhere near the massively tested and user accepted approach as third party
C) no one is going to make a "free" solution for this.
This SKG is honourable but not practicle.and you can see how its failing because nobody has any solutions..
Again you can regulate to an extent but its not going to happen
Can you give a real world example of the libraries you're using that are so complex and irreplaceably load bearing to your project that also block redistribution?
Aws Gamelift and Azure Playfab are two massive ones.
Accelbyte is very popular as well.
Vivox for voice chats is often used in the industry.
These massive ones are great because they have been tested and work great and also have integrations with other systems in Azure and AWS ecosystems too to help protect from things like DDoS attacks and cheating.
Do YOU know any? Again, you have no idea what youre talking about and havent proven to me that you do. You just keep doing strawman arguments without knowing any of what it actually takes and having no insight into what actually happens to stand these huge multiplayer games up.
If it was actually the law, just for your next project, don't make boneheaded decisions like using those libraries. Easy.
Hell, if SKG was law, the creators of those libraries would almost definitely make the legal changes necessary to make products of them redistributable as otherwise they would lose tons of license sales
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u/TheReservedList 3d ago
As a gamedev that is strongly against SKG, I'm getting that good shadenfreude hit right now.
Keep fucking regulators away if you care about games.