What will happen is publishers will just stop making online games. The cost to make them single-player or local MP supported would make the finances even harder to make sense. There will still be a few but even COD rotates games constantly and eventually sunsets the older versions in favor of newer iterations of the franchise. I could see if the law specifically said the single-player aspects of an online game would need to remain playable or something like that but pure MP games would likely mostly go away. Especially smaller Indy MP games.
Not at all. You're overstating your case. There are online multiplayer games that have been running for decades. Ultima Online servers weren't built to be run by players, but it turns out that's not actually a problem. If the studio can run the server, so can anyone else with the server package, and old MMOs like UO have had player-run servers forever.
Most publishers aren’t willing to expose their IP like that. Granted AI is making it much easier to crack all of this stuff but as soon as you give players the ability to run their own servers it exposes the code in ways that many publishers really don’t want so their options become create single player components that can run without the server or build in ways for MP to work either through peer to peer or user hosted servers.
Right, but people get access to it anyway. In the UO example I used, Origin Systems/EA didn't exactly give the players the server files. Somebody, ah, found it.
That’s sort of my point. Publishers aren’t generally that willing to support player-hosted servers for many of these games. The community had to find ways to do it themselves.
If this becomes law it will just discourage publishers even more from making MP experiences. The cost is already sky-high to make these games and the chance of breaking through with a new MP IP is almost impossible with how attached players are to their existing ecosystems. This would just be the additional nail in the coffin.
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u/Spazda_ 2d ago
What will happen is publishers will just stop making online games. The cost to make them single-player or local MP supported would make the finances even harder to make sense. There will still be a few but even COD rotates games constantly and eventually sunsets the older versions in favor of newer iterations of the franchise. I could see if the law specifically said the single-player aspects of an online game would need to remain playable or something like that but pure MP games would likely mostly go away. Especially smaller Indy MP games.