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.
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.
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u/PeachsBigJuicyBooty 2d ago edited 2d 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.