As frustrating as it is, I don’t see this going anywhere. If it’s been 15 years and they’re shutting down the server, it’s going to be hard to pressure them into open sourcing something or making it easy to rent servers. Even if they can keep pulling money out of customers it won’t be enough to justify the time.
At some point you just need to buy the new version or play a new game
it’s going to be hard to pressure them into open sourcing something or making it easy to rent servers.
Assuming it goes anywhere, the point of the petition is to craft law requiring them to do so. It would only apply to new game development, so presumably they would consider all that before building their platform on top of licensed middleware that can't be freely released at EoL. It's a trivial ask.
It's also intentionally left vague. Ross is hoping the game publishers can work out exactly how to make the game still playable in some form, without forcing them to "open source" their code or anything like that if they don't want to. It certainly wouldn't require them to rent their own servers. They could release binaries that players can run on AWS for example. Most of the games that get killed are not truly online games but have been intentionally crippled with GaaS connectivity as a sort of planned obsolescence. For example it might have a single-player mode but it has to ping a central server to download rankings or something.
As frustrating as it is, I don’t see this going anywhere. If it’s been 15 years and they’re shutting down the server, it’s going to be hard to pressure them into open sourcing something or making it easy to rent servers. Even if they can keep pulling money out of customers it won’t be enough to justify the time.
At some point you just need to buy the new version or play a new game
Assuming it goes anywhere, the point of the petition is to craft law requiring them to do so. It would only apply to new game development, so presumably they would consider all that before building their platform on top of licensed middleware that can't be freely released at EoL. It's a trivial ask.
It's also intentionally left vague. Ross is hoping the game publishers can work out exactly how to make the game still playable in some form, without forcing them to "open source" their code or anything like that if they don't want to. It certainly wouldn't require them to rent their own servers. They could release binaries that players can run on AWS for example. Most of the games that get killed are not truly online games but have been intentionally crippled with GaaS connectivity as a sort of planned obsolescence. For example it might have a single-player mode but it has to ping a central server to download rankings or something.