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Legendary Half-Life YouTuber plans class-action lawsuit against Ubisoft for killing The Crew
(www.pcgamesn.com)
this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
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My personal favorite is the "companies are obligated to support it forever, or open source the server software hosted by a third party, hosting paid for up front for at least a year."
They get to keep my money forever don't they?
While I love the spirit of this idea, it gets complicated fast. Worlds adrift is a great example. The game’s server was created using some closed source libraries with a paid license. So when the owning company (Bossa Studios?) went under, they were unable to open source it.
A law like this would effectively kill all licensed software that isn’t a full product. I do agree though; we need a solution
IIRC Bossa tried to open source it but they used a license for Spatial OS, which provided the backbone of their game. They were unable to make a stable game without it and opted to not open source it. But they were also in an early access that would probably provide an exception for a game closing down.
Bossa did leave the island creator active and has spun up Lost Skies on the same engine, which wouldn't be possible if they open sourced WA.
Ultimately the issue should be GaaS and MMOs are offerings service while other games are goods which have an artificial expiry date. This is a good test of software judication.
The subscription model makes plenty of sense. But there are loads of games that rely on server side components. That includes basically every multiplayer game that isn’t peer-to-peer. Any very many of them aren’t on a subscription.
I would love to require all that to be open source. But I still don’t see how to do it practically.