Gaming companies did not need to insert themselves into the process in the first place. I could conceivably continue to locally run Doom, Quake, Unreal Tournament, etc forever because there is no external server component.
replyNot every game has a server architecture like that. There's been a Renaissance of indie multuplayer due to good libraries and third party dependencies.
replyPretending that not doing that is bad design would have a chilling effect on novel games.
I'd be 100% for "if your game has an easily releasable server you have to release it on EoS" but this bill isn't it.
Some games are perfectly fine without online features yet they still got shut off. Mirrors Edge Catalyst only used online for leaderboards and challenges, everything else was entirely single player, yet it’s not possible to play it anymore because they wanted to shut off the servers yet designed the game to not run without them, even though it’s a single player game.
replyThat should not be ok. It wasn’t sold with a disclaimer or expectation that it could be switched off.
This is the reason I buy many games twice: once when they release on Steam, and again (if I loved them) when the come out on GOG, with Doom Eternal being the most recent example, but also Doom 2016, Skyrim, Dying Light, Tomb Raider, etc. I want to reward the devs with money for giving me a copy that doesn't need servers to run. It's work to produce it, and it has value for me, so I don't mind paying. CDPR is particularly good about this (obviously, since they run GOG), but the fact that such an amazing AAA company has this stance is amazing to me.
replyIf you have add a "easily releasable" clause then the game companies could just do something that makes it not-so, e.g. a shell company that owns the code and they only "licence" it without permission to release it or whatever would fly under that law.
replyEffectively you're saying it's ok to steal, because "it's just from 60 people, c'mon".
replyTry stealing from 60 different corporations and see how that works out.