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Comment by bob1029 | Hacker News Reader

Imagine this from the perspective of a small indie studio, not from the perspective of a gamer. Lots of collateral damage with our first principles thinking here.

If we want to get serious about this there need to be exceptions. You can't force a one man shop to sing and dance the same rule set you would apply to all of Microsoft. At least, if your goal isn't to kill indie gaming and further expand the moats of the very people who would be inclined to lobby for this kind of moat expansion legislation.

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What issues do you see? From the article, when selling a game you either have to ensure its continued online functionality or have to provide an offline mode. That seems reasonable to me.

It would actually be beneficial for end-user software in general.

> What issues do you see?

Well, there is no actual bill text because this idiot is more interested in announcing what "he will introduce" than actually writing legislation.

But let's assume it has a hard requirement that a game work offline. Let's say an indie developer releases something where some component that fails when some random server stops responding. If the law or regulation is poorly written, that could create liability for them. Hell, it could create an opening through which well-funded studies could target indie competitors.

You haven't said what the indie studio perspective is. What damage would this do to indie gaming? Does it come above consumer rights?

"would also require publishers to keep the game functional after support ends"

You are signing up for a life sentence of maintenance. No thanks.

"Games with online functionality would also be required to provide an offline mode before the servers supporting them are shut down."

Providing an offline mode doesn’t imply continued maintenance.

Potentially it adds a lot of work depending on what kind of game it is. Some make no sense without the online component - think something like Counter-Strike

I think parent meant "offline support" meaning you get bots (PvE) and LAN/custom server (PvP), which CS is perfectly capable of since 1.6.

That sounds like maintenance to me.

> Providing an offline mode doesn’t imply continued maintenance

There should be a liability cap for developers under a revenue ceiling and an exemption for free games. An indie developer shouldn't be worried about getting sued because a component of their game wasn't properly audited for offline use.

Release the server code, job done.

> Release the server code, job done

Sure. Let's say you bungle that. Should it cost you your home? What if you die before you finish that work. Should your family lose its estate?

More trivially, what if you were a muppet and put a bunch of critical stuff in your environment, forgot to export that, and then shut everything down to deal with, idk, an illness or a child or any of the other stuff that might cause someone just making stuff for fun to change directions.

Release it open source in the first place

> Release it open source

Sure. Then just come out and say only large corporations can make a living from making games anymore. I don’t think they can do that because they haven’t thought any of this out, they’re just putting out press releases in campaign season because this isn’t actually a priority.

Bungle it how? If you release the code you are dropping all liability for it working or continuing to work after that point. You have no requirement to make it easier to use or set up. The only reason you would have to do any work at all is so you don't have to release your server code.

> If you release the code you are dropping all liability for it working or continuing to work after that point

Says what?

A simple legal requirement isn’t magically safe harbored.

Indie developers don't build online games in general so you're making up strawman scenarios to defend multi-million corporations.

> Indie developers don't build online games in general so you're making up strawman scenarios to defend multi-million corporations

How does a revenue cap “defend multi-million corporations”?

Also, your premise seems wrong [1]. And plenty of offline games have online PVP functionality that I can absolutely see a small developer forgetting to configure in a way that has zero external dependencies.

[1] https://steamdb.info/charts/?tagid=492

What happens when the OS updates and your game doesn't work on that OS anymore?

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