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Comment by tempfile | Hacker News Reader

From the link:

> neither does it expect the publisher to provide resources for the said videogame once they discontinue it while leaving it in a reasonably functional (playable) state

This could not possibly mean forcing e.g. WoW to keep their servers running forever. It just means that if your game could be written without a phone home "feature", then it must be.

In other words, it would not justify an increased price. Publishers may choose to increase the price, because they don't actually need a justification in order to do that. But this legal change would not be a good reason.

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One scenario I wonder about is what would be required to happen before and at the time of a company running a game closing themselves.

Say you have a proprietary game/service now that could include some third party middleware they're not allowed to share, and the game relies upon an online service - right now that's allowed, and there's the scenario where the company is ongoing and want to cease the game the may be obligated to do work to make a community effort to have the game survive viable. If the company is closing, presumably they'd either be obligated to do the work for a release up-front (and maintain it over versions?) and keep it in escrow as when they won't be able to do the work later, or if any other company wants to buy their assets they either inherit the obligation to work on a free/libre release or keep the game/service running even though it may have contributed to sinking the previous company.

The simple answer to this any server-side middleware would need to have distribution rights for end-of-life. And maintaining it is not difficult as all you're doing is essentially releasing the server side binaries. The only complexity would come in ensuring distributed systems (for load balancing) also work fine on a single system server.

> The only complexity would come in ensuring distributed systems (for load balancing) also work fine on a single system server.

This isn't part of this petition though. It would be fine to release server binaies that rely on distributed infrastructure. It would be up to fans to make it work. Which is fine by me personally.

I think as soon as you say "the game relies on an online service" it's exempt from the provisions of this initiative. Of course anything can be pretended to be an online service (that's the whole point of SaaS) but all the initiative concretely says is "phoning home for no reason is not a service".

There's a faq around the petition. It's specifically about multiplayer games and others claiming to be a "service."

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