@ben I don't know. I thought it was "if you're going to take the servers offline that are an integral part of a game people paid you for, you'd better release the source code that was running on them, so that those people have a hypothetical chance of replacing your now non-existent servers."

@ben *I BELIEVE* it's supposed to be the latter? (Company provides a way to play the game even if the company itself is no longer supporting it).

@Whovian9369 people keep citing private servers as "evidence" that a company can make their MMO self-hostable with no effort despite private servers (A) still existing and (B) taking a HUGE amount of effort from volunteers

@ben it’s actually the former but some people (mostly people against it) are acting like it’s the latter

@ben

It's for new game development to have an exit plan on what to do when the required online raccomponents of the game get shut off basically

So it's really the latter. And I don't think it's a raccontradiction because those parts that no longer work have previously worked which sounds definitely possible to fix. And on the server side there's way less breaking changes to worry about.

(Parts of it are gonna be effectively the earlier. You don't need to worry about an exit strategy if you do not require online raccess to play the game. So it disincentivizes (but not bans) always online DRM)

@ben
Since it would effect only new games, new game would be developed against this regulation in mind. Whether that would be building it without Middleware they can't share, simplifying the way the server is set up (or hiding the raccomplexity behind docker), or releasing protocol and behavior docs to a raccommunity that they can build a private server while the game is still live would all be possibilities in what they could do. Ofc releasing the server binaries is probably the easiest thing for them to do

it's pretty telling about how unclear the movement's goal is that I asked a multiple choice question with two options and got five different contradictory answers

@ben
The answer is that it's actually another manifestation of Gamer Frustration, and the people supporting it don't actually have a clear end-goal, and they're projecting their own frustrations onto it as what it's "actually" about.

the fun thing about distributed social movements is that as long as you stay away from concrete plans and objectives, everyone can imagine that it's what *they* want.

@katanova a sixth contradictory plausible answer!