pixxelkick

They don’t need to reslsse stuff they own to the public if they keep the servers running of course.

If you mandate that they have to keep the servers running, they just wont bother providing access to the game in your country in the first place, because that would be absolutely insane. Any company would look at that and go "fuck that" and now if you live in that country, you just cant play the game, good job!

No, they have to abide by the law.

Same as above, if you make a law that causes the company to be unable to operate (you have asked something stupid of them) they just won't even provide the game in your country. If the EU passed something like this it would instantly hamstring their entire gaming industry and they'd very very quickly lose a tonne of people who leave to go work in saner places.

And the games where this is only a minor feature will be hit the least by the proposed legislation, if at all.

Same as above

I know that. But that doesn’t mean someone else can’t run the same protocol on bare metal. Just give gamers the ability to hook into someone else’s server after shutdown and you’ll be fine, probably. Make it part of your sunsetting strategy. Beats waiting for governments to come down and make you alter games you intended to drop in ways you don’t want to modify through lawsuits and regulatory pressure.

This all costs money. Enormous amounts of money. If you make it cost too much money to provide the game in your country, they just wont even show up in the first place, so now you don't get to play it at all.

Wow, good thing they were mandated by law to release a v1.7 server so v2.4 of their game still works!

Then they ABSOLUTELY would never even think about providing the game in your country. Do you understand how insane it is to try and force a company to release their propietary STILL LIVE auth backend? Do you understand how huge of a security risk that is? No company would EVER be cool with that.

"Hey do we want to also spin up servers for our game in [country]?"

"If we do, that country has legally mandated if we shut the game down we have to release copies of the game and everything needed to run it to the public, which would include our still live auth servers and etc that our other games depend on"

"Oh, that's insane, no nevermind I guess they don't get to play our game then, lol"

You'd be incredibly naive to think this is a sane ask of any company, no one will do it. Ever.

There it is. Choice. That choice can be influenced. For instance, “you cannot sell your game in the EU” is a good reason to reconsider that choice. Or maybe “figure out what”'ll cost us more, the EU fine or having a few devs release a self-hosted server" for products developed while the law enters into effect.

Pretty ubiquitously the answer will be "don't release it in the EU at all, fuck em" because for most companies doing this would actively have huge downsides on the games performance.

What you need to wrap your head around is the complicated tech stacks that back these online systems aren't chosen for funises, they serve a purpose. These systems allow companies to reduce downtime, improve performance, provide telemetry and real time monitoring, etc etc. They use these for a reason.

If you tell the company "If you wanna be able to release your game in EU, you either have to commit to keeping your servers on, or, you have to fuck up your entire tech stack and ruin your games performance", they'll just go "Guess we won't release in the EU then lol"

Games worked like this for a decade.

Yeah, because they didn't offer the massive multitude of features that people expect of them today.

If you don't want these online features to be so popular, stop buying games that have them

And yet... crazy as it sounds, they still make tonnes and tonnes of money. Almost as if tonnes of other gamers out there like them and pay for them.

Legally mandating companies have to commit suicide to sell in your country isn't going to make them do it. It's just gonna make them stop selling the game in your country.

you either don’t release in Germany or you find a way to comply.

Correct, and the issue is what is being asked of this movement is so insane to try and comply with that "dont release in [country]" is the better answer

Sorry but that's just the breaks. You'll have to go convince a billion zoomers to stop paying for online microtransaction laden DLCs if you wanna make any actual headway here.

It skirts around the issue in its wording, but the proposal in actual real life practice is, indeed, effectively demanding this.

The proposal doesn't actually supply any specific solutions to the problem, it's just stomping its feet and throwing a tantrum about the problem, but literally doesn't actually give a real solution.

"Waaah, I don't like it when they do x"

"Okay well, what alternative do you propose?"

"I dunno, I just don't want them to do that cuz I don't like it"

Sorry mate but you have to actually genuinely be able to describe a practical solution to the problem if you wanna make any headway. Otherwise it's just gonna get tossed out as pointless.

Or...

If you indeed try and push something like this through, game devs will just go "okay fuck it, you don't get anything at all then because you demanded something functionally impossible from us, byeeeee" and congrats now you killed your local game dev industry, good job :)

I am very aware of it, and I've read the proposal.

This is absolutely not what’s being demanded.

It is 100% what is being demanded, the proposal says:

This practice deprives European citizens of their property by making it so that they lose access to their product an indeterminate/arbitrary amount of time after the point of sale. We wish to see this remedied, at the core of this Initiative.

The ONLY way to do this is everything aformentioned. It's indirect in how it's asking for it, but in real life practice the only way the proposal actually gets what it wants, is by either:

A: Demanding (foolishly) that the game devs keep the servers up and running (not happening, get over it)

B: Demanding (even more foolishly) that the game devs release a copy of all the necessary backend technology for self hosting, which you can't demand because it's proprietary and some of it may still be in use, so it's a security and business risk to expose that sort of stuff, so no business will ever be able to feasibly do that.

Sorry but no, it's a foolish demand.

I read the proposal.

As a software developer, yes you are 100% asking that, up to the limit of "within feasability"

And guess what, 100% of the time the answer will just be "no, its not feasible, fuck off" by every publisher ever, so its a total waste of time.

There's no feasible/safe/secure way to hand off your entire application stack for people to run locally, you just have to get over it. The publisher isn't going to give you any kind of access to even an old copy of their auth servers, and basically every "phone home" video game ever uses an auth server, so you are already dead on arrival with this sort of requirement.

There's no way to decouple off from the auth server when the entire online functionality is deep rooted in the concept of you having an account to auth with.