Handing online servers over to consumers could carry commercial or legal risks, she said, in addition to safety concerns due to the removal of official company moderation.
Handing online servers over to consumers could carry commercial or legal risks, she said, in addition to safety concerns due to the removal of official company moderation.
SKG doesn’t specify how companies need to solve the problem, only that games need to continue to function after the company stops supporting them.
For some games (e.g. Assassin’s Creed), that could be as simple as disabling the online aspect and having a graceful fallback. For others, that could mean letting people self-host it. Or they can provide documentation for the server API and let the community build their own server. Or they can move it to a P2P connection.
Game companies have options. All SKG says is that if I’ve purchased something, I should be able to keep using it after support ends.
Hell just allowing people to build their own emulators of the server could be plenty.
Look to games like ragnarok online. While currently active, if and when it sunsets. All that would be required is the company not sueing the tits off people for running the game locally on a homebrewed server.
There’s an entire offline version of an mmo made from scratch!
Much of the time the biggest limitation is the legal ramifications of preserving the game after it’s sunset. Many companies just need to not do anything at all and they would be perfectly fine. But instead they choose to sue and litigate those who attempt to keep the games going.
They need not build it for us to come. They simply need to allow us to come on our own.