Stop Killing Games

Lots of bad takes in this thread. The whole idea behind this is just to stop defrauding customers that buy your software and then are left holding the bag. Nobody is asking for developers to keep running server infra for eternity.

Any of the following options are enough to satisfy this proposal:

- Put an expiration date on the storefront and make it clear that your software is not guaranteed to continue working after date X.

- Have your server source code (stripped down of proprietary stuff) ready for public release at EoL.

- Allow customers to reverse engineer the binaries and communication protocol after EoL.

- Package dedicated server binaries with the game and allow customers to connect to it via a LAN or direct IP option.

> Lots of bad takes in this thread.

Seriously.

It's like people forgot what multiplayer gaming was like pre-2005. Everyone ran their own servers. You could run your own Half-Life game server and other users merely pointed their game client to your IP address.

The only exceptions back then were the MMORPGs.

There's no reason we can't go back to the way it used to be. I used to run multiplayer Starcraft on a LAN without an Internet connection. Why can't I do that with Starcraft II? We used to play Quake on custom servers. Some servers had fun communities. All that is gone in favor of live services that can be shut down on a whim.

I don't even think requiring server source code to be disclosed should be necessary. Merely the binaries with some basic instructions on setting it up (which could easily be based on internal documents for setting up test servers) would be sufficient.