A European initiative is now underway for videogame preservation and consumer protections against publishers “killing games.”
I could see this leading to standardizing and outsourcing multiplayer services, which would be interesting.
That being said, before that happens, as a developer I’d be like: here’s a zip file with all of our proprietary stuff ripped out. Have fun spending the next few months getting it to work well. Congratulations, you’re now supporting a game that did poorly enough for us to drop it.
But seriously, go sign it. Long term it should be a good thing.
Have fun spending the next few months getting it to work well.
judging by some fan mods out there, i think many people would genuinely have a blast doing this (and do a much better job than the original developers)
Sweats in GameSpy
Honestly, it would probably lead to the major distributors also having control over that… So I guess one more yacht for Gaben?
Kinda funny that people on this platform consider that centralization of the service would be a good thing.
On one hand, I’d love to see drop in replacements for steam services, especially something that could be selfhosted. On the other hand, if steam services ever goes down, there are metric megatons of reasons to reverse engineer a solution. The centralisation could end up being standardisation.
I was thinking more of an open API of how the game interacts with multiplayer services, so that in theory anyone could setup a server, or server services. In practice I completely agree with you though. Nobody wants to do the whole “Oh wait, you’re on that server? I have an account with that other server” thing. Steam, or some other party, would just become the defacto place.
The proposal is precisely about not letting your snake ass do that, since it would be no different than spinning a private server, customers shouldn’t have to learn how to analyse network packages and break DRM just to play a game they paid for because you turned off your server.
Either sell it as a subscription or sell it as packaged product, not both.
