Comment by anonymous908213
1 day ago
Literally all they'd have to do is release the server executable(s) they already have. The community will do whatever work is necessary to get them running even if they require a cursed stack and client modifications.
It runs into the problem of region locked licensing stepping onto the toes of other regions.
Imagine a Korean company makes a game and sells a license to an American company to publish their game. Eventually the American company shuts down and is now forced to release the playable game.
This version of the game is now going to compete with the Korean version of the game, because nobody will be enforcing the region lock anymore.
Your reaction to this is probably "great, screw region locking!" but judging by how some of these Korean games do in the west it's entirely possible that they will forego a global/American release altogether. They make most of their money from the Korean or Chinese region. Why would they risk that for a smaller global region?
Personally, I wouldn't mind this, but I can certainly see how this could backfire and keep some of the eastern games exclusively eastern.
Once again, we're overthinking the problem.
All that needs to be done is to produce a game that will remain playable if the company shuts down. Simple as that. It doesn't need to phone home anywhere, it doesn't require an internet connection, it just... turns on and plays.
At that point, any company can just fold whenever they'd like without having to do anything in this area, and everyone who bought the game can breathe easily, double-click their icon and start playing while the publisher's employees go look for other jobs.
At least now it’s pretty straight forward for a hobbies group or individual to reverse the protocol and implement something that’s open source along with patches
Reverse engineering the protocol is not the same as reverse engineering the entire server, though. That would be very hard in most cases, especially when you don't have access to the server binary.
Do they even have server executables? Lots of developers use some hosted service like Amazon Gameworks for that. That code is not theirs to release.