You are wrong. A corporate entity will always provide some service under any version of “SKG”.
I guess you could make it so it doesn’t, but then all console games are excluded (since they all use some central first party API), all Steam games are excluded for the same reason and you’d be forcing developers to build their own substitutes for everything from hosting platforms to login platforms.
I suspect you’re misunderstanding what some of the stuff means or you’re visualizing something that just doesn’t fit how online games are built. Are you picturing a situation where no third parties are providing anything at all? No Steamworks, no Xbox Live, no servers of any kind hosted anywhere? Because that can’t be the requirement, unless you want to make every game since Quake 3 illegal.
Yes, the legal requirement would (or should) mean after EOL absolutely no dependency on outside services unless the infinite availability of that service can be guaranteed, which is of course impossible.
None of the currently existing services like Steam, Xbox Live, etc are technically needed to run the games. They offer additional services. Hence they are called services. But you do not need any of them to run the core games.
I’m not advocating for developers to implement these services themselves. I’m advocating for the absence of these services not making my games unplayable. I’m willing to compromise for that to only be the case after support for my games was dropped.
You are factually wrong about that. A whole bunch of running an online game is dependent on the platform, depending on how you’re running it.
If you built a game without cross-play and are relying on the first party for some of the online functionality, then making it work outside of it is extra effort. And even if that third party service isn’t Xbox or Steam it is very likely to be a third party service like Pragma or whatever, so it’s still something you’d have to replace.
So no, most of your Xbox games won’t work if you remove all traces of Xbox Live. That’s not how this works. And if your answer for future games is for it to be illegal to buy third party networking tools then your plan isn’t going to work, either.
But also, it’s not what’s being proposed in the first place. This Ross guy even assumes it won’t work like that explicitly. His argument is that third party providers would change to comply. Which… maybe? But then you’re just moving the problem around. How would they change to comply? Who handles their costs when a client drops support? That’s not how any of this works, their services aren’t free for a reason, you can’t just have them continue to provide them for free to every client by law.
You are wrong. A corporate entity will always provide some service under any version of “SKG”.
I guess you could make it so it doesn’t, but then all console games are excluded (since they all use some central first party API), all Steam games are excluded for the same reason and you’d be forcing developers to build their own substitutes for everything from hosting platforms to login platforms.
I suspect you’re misunderstanding what some of the stuff means or you’re visualizing something that just doesn’t fit how online games are built. Are you picturing a situation where no third parties are providing anything at all? No Steamworks, no Xbox Live, no servers of any kind hosted anywhere? Because that can’t be the requirement, unless you want to make every game since Quake 3 illegal.
None of the currently existing services like Steam, Xbox Live, etc are technically needed to run the games. They offer additional services. Hence they are called services. But you do not need any of them to run the core games.
I’m not advocating for developers to implement these services themselves. I’m advocating for the absence of these services not making my games unplayable. I’m willing to compromise for that to only be the case after support for my games was dropped.
You are factually wrong about that. A whole bunch of running an online game is dependent on the platform, depending on how you’re running it.
If you built a game without cross-play and are relying on the first party for some of the online functionality, then making it work outside of it is extra effort. And even if that third party service isn’t Xbox or Steam it is very likely to be a third party service like Pragma or whatever, so it’s still something you’d have to replace.
So no, most of your Xbox games won’t work if you remove all traces of Xbox Live. That’s not how this works. And if your answer for future games is for it to be illegal to buy third party networking tools then your plan isn’t going to work, either.
But also, it’s not what’s being proposed in the first place. This Ross guy even assumes it won’t work like that explicitly. His argument is that third party providers would change to comply. Which… maybe? But then you’re just moving the problem around. How would they change to comply? Who handles their costs when a client drops support? That’s not how any of this works, their services aren’t free for a reason, you can’t just have them continue to provide them for free to every client by law.
That’s continued support. Not EOL. As long as a corporate entity is providing service the game is not EOL and beyond SKG.