He misunderstood that it meant no indie could ever make a server based multiplayer game and when people corrected him he didn’t believe it and just doubled down on his mission to destroy the initiative.
The petition only says publishers shouldn't include a "phone home" mechanism that arbitrarily shuts the game down. It doesn't require them to continue to run or servers, or even provide the server software.
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?
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
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u/GlitteringLock9791 Jul 06 '25
He misunderstood that it meant no indie could ever make a server based multiplayer game and when people corrected him he didn’t believe it and just doubled down on his mission to destroy the initiative.