Comment by jfengel
10 hours ago
Bankruptcy is a universal get-out-of-punishment free card. At least, if you're a corporation large enough and foresighted enough to shove your liabilities off onto a fictional subsidiary before starting.
10 hours ago
Bankruptcy is a universal get-out-of-punishment free card. At least, if you're a corporation large enough and foresighted enough to shove your liabilities off onto a fictional subsidiary before starting.
If the bankruptcy process already involves identifying and administering the company's assets, I feel releasing the server software (as-is) to owners of the game could be part of that.
Presuming that the code is the company's asset, and doesn't use third-party licensed assets. Otherwise you'll be in line for a refund with all of the other company's creditors. Or you get part of the code that you can't use.
I don't think most game owners could take the server side software and assemble it into working servers their game could contact and use. This isn't realistic and needs something to change at the fundamental server design side and the game development side. A silly answer is regulations about how you can and can't make a game. Another silly answer is a cottage industry doing game server hosting that's required to be third party by law. I don't have any good, realistic ideas that aren't just trying to force game developers to build games differently (or build different games). Maybe that's the cost here but is that better than just letting angry customers influence the market?
It doesn't matter if they personally could do it. As long as they have the ability to contract someone who can do it to do it.
And yet kids take Java server components and mod components and assemble them into Minecraft servers for their friends, and there’s a whole industry around providing pre-configured servers for games like Minecraft, project zomboid, rust, etc. and those services have been around for decades. So I don’t know what the issue is.