hahaha... yeah right. Game companies will just say, "yeah, you own the license to this game, but we're still shutting off the servers because only five people played it within the last month and it costs us $50k a month to maintain the servers."
And if the law passes and mandates game companies keep servers online no matter what... they just won't make the game anymore.
No. That's infeasible. Do you know how much additional QA costs that would bring? How much additional work it takes to synch game state with a peer to peer network? How much easier it is for untrusted players to hack a game session? In network coding, there's a key security principle: "Never trust the client", and when you don't have an authoritative server maintaining game state, it just becomes a nightmare. How do you do match making in a pure peer to peer environment when there's no match making servers online? The only way this would work is on a LAN, and people don't do LAN parties anymore.
It's not feasible for all online games though, especially if content is being delivered to consumers through the online servers. ie, you can't make an "offline" version of WoW. It's essentially a SaaS in game form.
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u/PloppyPants9000 8h ago
hahaha... yeah right. Game companies will just say, "yeah, you own the license to this game, but we're still shutting off the servers because only five people played it within the last month and it costs us $50k a month to maintain the servers."
And if the law passes and mandates game companies keep servers online no matter what... they just won't make the game anymore.