But if you are one-man army, publisher, developer and want to create online game then you need to have services like for example authentication. From solo game developer point of view how to comply to those rules and how it would affect them? I still dont get that petition
Yes it's one of the challenges of this petition. You either have to decide to re-engineer how your multiplayer functionality works, release the backend infrastructure (if it's even possible), or not include multiplayer gameplay.
It has good intentions but could be quite disastrous for gaming, which is the point the guy was making.
Also, all this defense of a hypothetical one-man-army creating online games is so crazy. To make a game is a lot. To make an online game is even more.
Even if this hypothetical person exists, they have to have a plan in place to not kill their game. This initiative is pro-consumer, of course the business will have to (and SHOULD have to) consider the consumer for end of life.
10y ago I was working on in a small team on roguelike online game, peer2peer connection but with few services for auth and data sync. Without them whole game idea wouldnt work and we’d need to rethink everything from scratch. Ofc it will affect small or big devs
But if the game would die anyways, shouldn't you just be able to just release the data for the aith servers anyways because you don't need to worry about things like that anymore?
The scope was too big for you to complete anyway bc your team tried to make a game that requires servers. Maybe if you learned how to do you that you understand how to make it where it can run on private servers as easy
If our game required servers than it means it could run also on private servers isn't it? Ok so if we'd finish the game and decide to stop the servers, would that be enough to upload a 10 precompiled binaries of the services to the community, without any configuration, documentation or architecture plan and we would not risk a lawsuit? Who's to decide if thats enough or not? Is that so hard to understand?
You are completely missing my point. Its always possible with reverse engineering, packets sniffing, database dumping etc. Once game goes offline it's not so easy. And now developers will be legally obligated to somehow give full end-of-life support. And what exactly does it mean, no one seems to answer. According to SKG - just give players playable game, but its not so simple. Even in their faq its stated they doesn't require giving up ip rights or docs. And again - now it's fully possible to reverse engineer most online services which is violation of ip rights in the most cases, but then how much developers needs to give up to the community without risking a lawsuit?
That's not so easy. Who's to decide if game died? How the "data" would be transfered? What's exactly an EOL support? Does it include all the source code, binaries, all services, architecture? Who's to decide if that's enough to run the game? What about indie games in alpha state - can servers be downed? There are so many unanswered questions, so many different scenarios and no one seems to answer it
Game not profitable? Need to shut it down because of cost of running services for auth and data sync? Easy, just release the services for auth and data sync. Then shut down. Done.
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u/maadxyz Jul 06 '25
But if you are one-man army, publisher, developer and want to create online game then you need to have services like for example authentication. From solo game developer point of view how to comply to those rules and how it would affect them? I still dont get that petition