You haven't said what the indie studio perspective is. What damage would this do to indie gaming? Does it come above consumer rights?
You are signing up for a life sentence of maintenance. No thanks.
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.
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.
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.
Says what?
A simple legal requirement isn’t magically safe harbored.
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.