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Stop Killing Games

(www.stopkillinggames.com)
253 points MYEUHD | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.243s | source
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Apreche ◴[] No.44446392[source]
I’m curious how this can be enforced. If a game requires centralized servers, and the company goes out of business, you can’t force a bankrupt entity to keep the system running. Even if they published an expiration date, if there is no money left to run the servers, there’s nothing to sue for, nobody to fine, and no money to run the server.

You could force the company to release their code upon bankruptcy, but what if another company wants to buy those assets? What if some other IP that they might use on other games is mixed in there and required for the game to work?

You could make a prohibition on live service games to begin with. You could require all games with online components to make their servers runnable by users from the outset. The problem here is economic.

Game companies can’t go back to the old model of lumpy cash flow. You can’t have one huge pile of money come in when the game launches, and then a long miniscule tail. That doesn’t keep people employed. It’s also super risky when a game with a huge budget and long development time flops. You have to have some kind of constant revenue stream from subscriptions or micro-transactions to stay afloat. If users can run their own servers, that can never happen.

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1. raron ◴[] No.44448698[source]
If a company goes bankrupt and dissolved (usually) it's assets are sold to cover it's liabilities.

The code of server would be a perfect match to cover the company's liabilities of keeping the game playable.

If someone wants to buy the bankrupted company, they gets it's liabilities including "keep the game playable", too.