I’ve been wodnering how regulations about not killing games deals with compaines running multi-player servers?
For single player games or games with single player modes it seems easier to implement.
I’ve been wodnering how regulations about not killing games deals with compaines running multi-player servers?
For single player games or games with single player modes it seems easier to implement.
My hope is legislation will force companies to release private server options.
This.
This was the standard for years. Matchmaking kinda killed it.
There were 3rd part server browser services that could fill the gap, though. I wanna say GameSpy or something was a popular one in the late 90s
Epic did the right thing, after almost 20 years of running the Unreal Tournament 2004 master server, they announced that they were shutting it down, within days a new fan run master server was setup and working, migrating to the new was a simple thing, just edit the main config file and it worked.
Plenty of patched copies of the game can be found on archive.org
Multiple approaches have been suggested - from local multiplayer (which can potentially be extended to the internet) over releasing server binaries or source code, to providing documentation that allows to recreate a server.
This is the correct answer. The last step in shutting down servers should be to release a server binary for people to continue using.
Source code would be even better, but we’ll take what we can get. I imagine a lot of code might be re-used for later games, so they may not be keen on open-sourcing it.