We appreciate the passion of our community; however, the decision to discontinue online services is multi-faceted, never taken lightly and must be an option for companies when an online experience is no longer commercially viable. We understand that it can be disappointing for players but, when it d...
... as the protections we put in place to secure players’ data, remove illegal content, and combat unsafe community content would not exist...
There are third party options for this.
... and would leave rights holders liable.
Liable for what? A service everyone knows they're no longer providing? Are car manufacturers still liable for 50 year old rusty cars people still drive? Can Apple today be held liable for a software vulnerability in the Lisa or the Mac II?
In addition, many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only; in effect, these proposals would curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create.
Then don't design games that way. Don't make games like these. This is good news, actually.
Minecraft, the game that sold the most copies in history, has a huge infrastructure of community-hosted servers, some with tens of thousands of players playing at the same time. The community has created different flavors of the server software, optimized it, added mod support and even reprogrammed parts of it.
At this point, it's hard for me to believe how someone could say a community can't run game servers with a straight face.
I know. I like online content as well. Some of the games I spent the most hours in (Warframe, Helldivers 2) are these kinds of games. But if a corpo lobbying group is forcing the choice between "Enshittified always online" or "never any online content ever anymore" I'll choose the latter.