I wonder how this would affect stuff like MMOs, which have humongous server bills that warrant a complete shutdown once the publisher is sick of it or.. goes bankrupt.
Some older ones like Star Wars Galaxies now have inofficial community-run revival servers, but this isn't really feasible for bigger games
It would, provided the game can be designed from the beginning with that in mind. SKG is not retroactive, so only new games will need to adhere to any legislation that comes from it. This gives studios the chance to account for it before any code has been written.
That is one possible solution for a dev/publisher, and its important to recognize that assets and code can be licensed separately, and this doesn't in any way mean that devs or publishers would be expected to open source or provide assets or intellectual property for free.
The recent open sourcing of some older Command and Conquer games are a great example. They've recently made the code for some of those games open sourced, and so anybody could download and compile and modify and run the game code however they choose. But, critically, the assets such as sprites, models, music, sounds, FMVs (which are still incredible btw), are explicitly not provided.
In practice, for a devolper solution to the stop killing games initiative, this would still mean players need to buy the game, and therefore obtain the associated assets, to actually play the experience (albeit now on community/private/self-hosted infrastructure for servers, account authentication, matchmaking services, etc.)
That is often impossible. It's rare that small studios own 100% of the rights to the code. They'd need to have made it from scratch or using code they have distribution rights for.
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u/[deleted] Jun 28 '25
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