Saw people talking in comments at several places now, expressing animosity towards them to say the least, always presented as something that everyone seems to know about.
Saw people talking in comments at several places now, expressing animosity towards them to say the least, always presented as something that everyone seems to know about.
I read the proposal.
As a software developer, yes you are 100% asking that, up to the limit of “within feasability”
And guess what, 100% of the time the answer will just be “no, its not feasible, fuck off” by every publisher ever, so its a total waste of time.
There’s no feasible/safe/secure way to hand off your entire application stack for people to run locally, you just have to get over it. The publisher isn’t going to give you any kind of access to even an old copy of their auth servers, and basically every “phone home” video game ever uses an auth server, so you are already dead on arrival with this sort of requirement.
There’s no way to decouple off from the auth server when the entire online functionality is deep rooted in the concept of you having an account to auth with.
I’m a software developer too, funny that.
I have also read the proposal. They ask that if it is not feasible, that publishers put an expiration date on their products, to clarify that the “game purchase” is actually the purchase of a limited-time license that is not guaranteed to continue working. The current practices are deceptive.
So firstly, that’s extremely easy to achieve, no more onerous than a decent warranty (or even a disclaimer that there is no warranty and it’s mever guaranteed to work), but also, there are third party hosting companies that game publishers could hand off hosting duties to without open-sourcing, creating a final “single player only” patch, or otherwise creating a gentler off-ramp to allow the community to continue to maintain games on their own dime.