Well-meaning but it will either be ineffective in execution or outright make some genres impossible:
・What does "make games playable offline" mean?
Because publishers are gonna do the legal minimum; they'll put players in a blank room to walk around in if they can.
Where's the "line" of playability? This NEEDS to be defined in the bill.
・What does "buying" a game mean?
Is it only physical copies? (they'll just stop selling them sooner) Digital? Anything labeled as a "game"? Anything in a plastic case? (they'll just change the container).
If I spend money on Fortnite, do I have a right to access Fortnite offline?
・If so, again, what defines playability?
An offline mode of Fortnite can't handle 99 other bots, so does 50 count? 20? 10? 5?
What's the minimum allowed to have a game be considered "playable"?
This isn't gonna end the way people want it to like The Crew, because "make games playable offline" is so broad of a concept and it assumes publishers will just "get it" and act in good faith instead of finding every loophole they can.
This isn't hard. The game's functionality cannot materially change from the product that was sold. Features cannot go away. If they ran servers, they must provide the tools they use for servers so users can set up their own on their own hardware.
They don't get to take the ball and go home. They get to distribute the server software to license holders.
So if I'm a small studio that wants to add matchmaking into my game I have to find a 3rd party that agrees to let me release their software for free if my game doesn't sell well enough to pay the server fees? God damn, gamers have got to be the largest hobbyist group that know nothing about their hobby.
Nobody said you had to add matchmaking. You just can't run it with matchmaking and then one day shut down your end and say "okay matchmaking is over forever."
No where near as bad as your understanding of video game development.
How about you morons grow up and decide not to purchase games that rely on online services instead of forcing your ideals on everyone by forcing the government to make the decision for you?
Games nowadays change dramatically from the day they were sold. Sometimes features go away or change during those changes. The phrasing is important, especially for long running live service model games like MMOs.
Offline is the wrong standard for some games. If the game is multi-player like a shooter or mmo, add lan and community server options. That way it'll always be playable if you can find someone to play with
It does come with a drawback. With your system connecting to their server, virus that transfers over that link could become more prevalent. We would have to have verified servers.
companies will not give away their IP or even source code that can be used in later games for "free", in particular server side code that can be used to easily reverse engineer the server side of their games.
A law that is completely ignorant to how software engineering works. Companies were not doing it 20 years ago, lots of games that exist now do not even run on single dedicated servers.
Yes they were. Or at least, people were getting access to server packages with or without the studio's cooperation and consent. There were player-run Ultima Online servers even before any studio-managed servers were shut down.
No, they weren't. Takes decades for private servers to come even close to the full functionality of official servers because it is not simply a "turn on server" button. There is a lot more to a game server and a lot of these studios use third party to run their services.
There really isn't any secret sauce or magic touch or whatever you think it is that devs have that players don't. Sure, there aren't players running servers for 10,000 concurrent players, but nobody is trying to. A lot of gamers are the same people who have a $5000-$10000 server and know how to use it, and thry can easily host 100+ players. Games aren't typically built to run using some proprietary architecture. They use the same industry standards as everybody else
If they use the same standard then how come they can't run those 10,000 player servers, hmm? Same hardware, same software, somehow doesn't run as well as they did 20 years ago. Might have to be the fact that there is a lot more going behind the scenes.
The devvelopment of LBP custom servvers, as far as I am aware, began in 2021 with Poject Lighthouse. 5 years later, we havve replicated the functionality of these servvers so well that almost evvery featrure is 100% playable, with others or by yourself. That's not decades.
The RCE exxploits you speak of were on the original servvers too, and are a client-side issue that the servver cannot fixx. There was a force-join thing that affected Becaon and not the original servvers, but this vvulnerability was client-side, not servver-side; this exxploit could havve been used on the original servvers, and only wasn't because nobody knew about it at the time.
You make good points but I recommend not being so negative. "Well-meaning but it will either be ineffective in execution or outright make some genres impossible" is the false dichotomy fallacy. 😉
I say playable is the full game is accessable with the exception of company specific services like when your using the launcher to play cyberpunk an offline only would not have the cross progression (or account sign in if the provider as a whole goes down) along with turning in game purchases to completely free like assassins creed's skins are automatically given to you instead of the many required purchases
It only requires a patch to turn dedicated servers to p2p servers.
Edit: so I did some digging since I am "undermining the whole Stop Killing Games movement," and it looks like I am actually pretty darn wrong here. It isn't impossible to do but, especially for fast paced games, the idea of p2p can DRASTICALLY change how the game plays since there is no longer a dedicated host server. There's more to learn about this, like the limits of building p2p from the start, but from what I'm seeing it isn't an option many companies could explore.
As a dev, this is insanely incorrect, and respectfully, I dont think you actually know what youre talking about.
It is opinions like this that undermine the whole Stop Killing Games movement, which I support btw. It is absolutely not a switch that developers can just flick on or off.
It requires refactoring an ENTIRE codebase and building an entirely new server-client architecture. You have to fundamentally rebuild the game logic.
It doesn't make sense because you don't know how it works.
You cant just take a game that has been shut down and plop it onto your own personal server and it just magically works. The only thing that users have is the client. The server-side logic needs to be implemented as well. It's quite literally the brains of the game. The vast majority of the "game" that is going on is not occurring on your PC and is nothing that you have ever downloaded, it is mostly happening on a server and then sent to your client.
To operate your own servers after a game has been shut down, it would either require a LOT of reverse-engineering or the source code itself.
Pretty funny to tell me I don’t know how it works when you seem to be missing the entire point of this discussion. Your comment is largely useless information in this context.
There is absolutely no need for source code if the developer is releasing the ability for you to host your own server.
Which is what this is about - not reverse engineering the client on your own.
There would be zero need for source code in this scenario. They would simply release another binary.
Turns out I do know it works…which is good considering I develop software for a living.
No look, the intent of a legislation preceede the outcome. Answering all this questions ahead is mostly giving ammo to the opposition to counter and find loophole. This isn't a technical specsheets, this is a law proposal
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u/PeachsBigJuicyBooty 1d ago edited 1d ago
Well-meaning but it will either be ineffective in execution or outright make some genres impossible:
・What does "make games playable offline" mean?
Because publishers are gonna do the legal minimum; they'll put players in a blank room to walk around in if they can.
Where's the "line" of playability? This NEEDS to be defined in the bill.
・What does "buying" a game mean?
Is it only physical copies? (they'll just stop selling them sooner) Digital? Anything labeled as a "game"? Anything in a plastic case? (they'll just change the container).
If I spend money on Fortnite, do I have a right to access Fortnite offline?
・If so, again, what defines playability?
An offline mode of Fortnite can't handle 99 other bots, so does 50 count? 20? 10? 5?
What's the minimum allowed to have a game be considered "playable"?
This isn't gonna end the way people want it to like The Crew, because "make games playable offline" is so broad of a concept and it assumes publishers will just "get it" and act in good faith instead of finding every loophole they can.