Comment by LocalH
7 days ago
The answer to that is simple, and has been used by other media (to the chagrin of fans of course). When it comes time to "kill" the game, make a final update to strip all such licensed material out of the game.
The companies that develop and publish games amortize plenty of things out into multiple years. That's why live service is so increasingly common. The same developers and publishers should also factor in that they might have to remove some assets when they want to stop providing active support.
So if they strip the libraries out and the server cannot run id that okay?
They shouldn't use libraries that don't allow them to release a server at the official game's sunset. There's been a lot of rhetoric from the publishers about "developer choice", which is really publisher's choice, but that's the whole problem. They are choosing to make games with a hard shelf life, and that's contrary to the copyright regimes of most jurisdictions that have some sort of eventual public domain mechanism. What's the use of a public domain if the work is intentionally destroyed by that point. I consider that theft from the public, in a way that mere copyright infringement can never equate to.