Stop Killing Games fails to secure EU law despite 1.3M signatures

How is LAN susceptible to DDoS? I think you're thinking of P2P, unless you're worried about your LAN buddies trolling you I guess.

Regardless, whether the quality of LAN games is good or not is wholly irrelevant to the SKG initiative. If players want to play an apparently inferior version of the game, they should be allowed to, and LAN is hardly going to be an inferior version of the game anyways.

> This is only feasible if the multiplayer backend is a simple server binary, which in many cases it's not anymore, but a full cloud architecture you would find for any SaaS app. There additionally is the issue of licensed libraries, which may prohibit redistribution of the server binaries (and may e.g. be bound to a per-host pricing).

Comparing your game to a SaaS app is an interesting approach, because SaaS apps are generally sold as subscriptions, not one-time purchases that would otherwise immply ownership. If the game is genuinely SaaS-like, maybe price it like one and stop selling it like a regular product.

Also this would only really be the case for AAA games, and they have more than enough cash to figure out a proper sunsetting strategy.

Again, it doesn't have to be a perfect experience or anything near it, as long as people can somehow keep playing the games they paid for, even if they're the ones to bear the costs of hosting (which isn't even a rare thing in gaming, there's many old games with community servers out there that to this day have healthy playerbases).

In my experience the community servers usually beat the experience on dedicated servers anyways though, modders are usually more passionate and have more freedom to make things work well than the devs do. See the shenanigans with Titanfall 2's servers as an example.

> Take your pick from[0] or a competitors website: PEAK, Content Warning, Gorilla Tag; All games from indie developers that heavily rely on good networking that wouldn't be feasible to be replaced.

The games being cited to defeat this legislation are indie titles with small userbases and tight margins. The legislation is being discussed largely because of what EA, Activision, and Ubisoft do to games with millions of paying customers. Letting the hardest edge case set the ceiling for consumer protection is a convenient outcome for the people least affected by it.

And regardless, games like Minecraft and Terraria started off as small-studio indie games that built their own networking without Photon or anything like it. The self-hosted server support is a huge part of why those communities are still thriving today, many years later. The "it's too complex without third-party services" argument is newer than the practice of indie devs doing it themselves.

> Ah, yes the simple option of "completely tank your playerbase".

The implication that informed consumers are a problem for the industry is a pretty damning admission about how the industry currently operates.

Don't make your game be a spaghetti mess of dependencies.

Or.

When you decide on your dependencies, make sure they are compatible with the regulations. The chances of middleware developers not updating their middleware and/or licenses to comply with these regulations are practically zero: there will 100% be market need for compliant middleware and others to provide it, so the existing middleware developers will update theirs too.

> What if I rely on steam, or epic for P2P and they shutter the service?

That's the easiest of the bunch because Steam already has at least one opensource reimplementation of the API (probably multiple) so all you have to do is drop a DLL in your game's directory and you get Steam independence.

The other person is arguing that those two entities are not equal and should not have equal weight in affecting the decisions of the European commission.

Calling them malicious for having a different view of the _purpose_ of the commission is kind of wrong (it's independent of being malicious), and from the outside just makes you look dishonest.

If privacy regulations can break your business, then I think there’s a very high chance what you are doing is exactly the sort of thing the regulations are explicitly designed to discourage.

> now there's a whole CMP TCF2 protocol you have to implement.

That’s exactly what I’m talking about. There’s no regulation saying you have to implement that. That’s a consequence of you making the choice to trade user data. Somebody who does not choose to do that has much less work to do. This is an example of the regulations working as intended. You’re supposed to see the friction and make better choices up front to avoid it, not make the same choices then complain about the friction.

> eventually they screw the little guys more than they screw the bad actors.

Little guys are often the bad actors.