Stop Killing Games

I think a legal remedy here won't work. It can't magically produce money or desire to keep something runnable indefinitely. And any regulation that tries to compel work without payment seems like it will just hurt indie developers more.

Bunk. Nobody expects you to do unpaid work. Just don't make the game depend on the availability of your server, or other forms of planned obsolescence.

You could also comply by providing a self hostable server, or even source code that might be convertible to a self hostable server.

Requiring an "end of life plan" in the ToS would be a start.

I don't understand the expectation of being able to play a multiplayer game forever.

Then don't. There is a growing number of single-player games that want an internet connection and even an online account.

I can still play multiplayer Doom, multiplayer Warcraft 1, and many, many more. Seems eminently reasonable to me.

When I buy the game, tell me, "this won't exist after 2030". Done!

Or allow the community to build and host reverse engineered servers after your game is dead. Don't go out of your way to sue and destroy community efforts.

You realize that APIs can be reverse-engineered and new clean-room servers created? It has been done for a bunch of old games.

An attempted legal remedy is still better than the nothing we have now.

For indie games, would an exclusion like "games with less than 1 million lifetime players" be enough? That's not an unsolvable issue, especially as indie games are not the main games people are worried about being killed. Most indie games will not be 'killed' by the developers because they're not releant on servers that the developer cannot afford to host.

Lots of indie games I see just use the storefront's APIs for multiplayer matching, not even requiring a matchmaking server.

Or even just binaries. As big of a radical copyleft OSS advocate as I am, I think it'd help this particular movement to steer clear of "just release your source code" as a solution.

These days, indie devs seem to be the only ones to still allow self-hosting of servers. Take for advantage New World Interactive (makers of Squad, Squad 44, etc). Their servers are self-hosted, though, there is an "official" license you can apply for given an application form. So there are dev "blessed" servers, but no centralization. It's what PC gaming should still be.

I got the devs mixed up. New World Interactive made Insurgency. Offworld Industries is responsible for Squad.