Stop Killing Games

1. Not a problem because it's not being applied retroactively, but it should be included in the design from the start for new games

2. It is a problem now, but the license for those can and will change if the law mandates it. Unless addon authors don't want to make any money, that is.

3. I don't get the argument. If it works at the time of release - you're good. You're not expected to keep updating it to work on modern systems.

4. This is just point 2 repeated.

5. This is still just point 2 repeated and reverse engineering is allowed in EU, whether they like it or not.

6. Why do you need to change the way networking works?

Not op but worked on multiplayer.

If your game uses matchmaking or is multi region or crossplay it’ll be depending from a lot of different services, and tightly integrated with them.

Latency concerns, for example, might be handled at several points in the flow that would stop existing for a standalone server. None of the code involved is reusable because it was written for a completely different context.

There is nothing preventing you from writing an abstraction that supports both the fancy middleware as well as direct IP connections.

I can say this with certainty because I've also worked on multiplayer in several shipped multi-region cross-platform games, and this sort of arrangement is precisely what we have shipped. Granted, Direct IP connections are usually only supported on PC, but they are there, they do work, and our PC players appreciate that piece of mind.

I guess we could have made two different games at once, but we just needed one game that would work all the time for everyone. If we'd had the time or money to actually do that we would have used the time and money to made a completely new game in parallel.

I suspect you overestimate the amount of time or effort needed to write such an abstraction. Our base multiplayer abstraction is about 3k lines of C++, and once you have that in place there are a number of battle-tested low-level netcode libraries that can help implement the UDP subclass. Doing this also pays dividends during development, as it allows you to diagnose and fix issues with the application layer of your netcode far easier than having to navigate the authentication rigamarole of a middleware first.

Granted, I do realize that it is an additional lift. It helps that we reuse our engine between projects, and the games that we work on tend to be amenable to traditional client/server setups. We also don't support certain features over UDP, such as matchmaking or VoIP, and we also file the task of players actually finding and connecting to each other over UDP as "not our problem" unless they're on the same LAN segment. Our games also don't have in-game stores or microtransactions, so there's no digital goods to protect either.

However, in practice, the existence of the UDP layer was far and away the least difficult part of making a working multiplayer game. The most difficult parts are the same ones you run into on any normal multiplayer project - figuring out how to get the uber-flexible middleware you're using to play ball, solving the application layer bugs, and satisfying the certification whims of the platform owners.