Comment by tyleo
7 hours ago
I happen to be shutting down an online game right now.
https://www.tyleo.com/blog/sunsetting-rec-room-how-to-give-a...
The sad truth is that these things have high operating costs, especially if they need moderation. I would guess this bill just makes it more risky to make the games in the first place. It’s already brutally hard to make money on games.
I feel like the effect of this might just be that shutting an online game makes it more likely to take a whole company down if you have to issue refunds. Alternatively, it might push multiplayer games towards other business models like ads, free-to-play, or subscription.
Sorry to hear about your situation. For the game you're shutting down online services for, forgive my nieve question but how much work is it to expose an environment variable called `GAME_SERVER_URL` and then document the API contract it expects on the other end?
Servers have a real cost, nobody is denying that, but I think the people who bought the game should have an option/alternative in case the servers are down.
At least part of the answer is this doesn't meet the requirement of the proposed law. You need to actually provide the functionality of the server-side, not just its API.
We looked into it. Hackers got part of the way there so we decided not to make a change. They might be able to do it after the title is fully sunset and the team disbanded.
We basically have to get as much done on a 3/4 month timeline as possible and it isn’t a priority like saving content or refunding gift cards is. Shutting down is a lot of work.
Anything you can add to the knowledge pool is already going to be of immense help for your community reverse engineering in the future. Be it as simple as stuff like "Our in-game chat runs over IRC" for example - that already simplifies that entire part of figuring it out of machine code out once servers are gone. ANY knowledge you can share no matter how small it is always helps when all you have is a binary file and no server to respond to your requests.
Is the game p2p or dedicated infra? Best thing you can do is provide the infra files that you can. Doesn't even have to be turn key. Also for the coordinator API service, anything you can provide there as well. Couple those with a configurable base url and the hackers ought to get it the rest of the way
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What are the insurmountable obstacles to releasing the server code for the community to run?
As I understand it, the obstacles are mostly legal. Our development team would love to just throw the code on GitHub.
Sounds like if it was mandatory to make a server release, legal would mostly shut up and it would be low cost. In other words, minimal change in risk.
The refund thing is just there to force action by putting a dollar value on inaction. Pretty much no company is expected to actually choose refunds.
> Alternatively, it might push multiplayer games towards free-to-play if in-app-purchases are excluded.
Good point, the law had better not exclude those.
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Sometimes, when a game developer shuts down, their computer equipment is liquidated with useful information still on it.
Do you think any compagny would want to release some very sensitive / secret sauce code?
Tbh I think engineers gladly would. I think most folks want the content out. It’s the legal obligations that always get in the way.