We appreciate the passion of our community; however, the decision to discontinue online services is multi-faceted, never taken lightly and must be an option for companies when an online experience is no longer commercially viable. We understand that it can be disappointing for players but, when it does happen, the industry ensures that players are given fair notice of the prospective changes in compliance with local consumer protection laws. Private servers are not always a viable alternative option for players as the protections we put in place to secure players’ data, remove illegal content, and combat unsafe community content would not exist and would leave rights holders liable. In addition, many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only; in effect, these proposals would curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create. We welcome the opportunity to discuss our position with policy makers and those who have led the European Citizens Initiative in the coming months.
Don’t even need to release the code. Just the server binary of the game.
This is short sighted. Architectures can and will change in the future. I’m running game servers on my aarch64 devices, if I wasn’t able to compile, and sometimes even edit, the code I wouldn’t have been able to run these servers. Emulation isn’t always ideal, janky or even non existent.
Sure, but the point is to be realistic and not put undue weight on the developers, right? Binaries can generally be much more permissive than source code when proprietary dependencies are involved, and easier to release “clean” than source code.
Yes, of course and it’s a lot better than what we have at this point, it’s a great first step. I still remember the days of Id Software releasing their game (logic) under the GPL.