This comes after a sea of games have been lost due to the creators turning off the servers. While community remake projects like RELB for Lawbreakers, Loadout Reloaded and a server emulator for The Crew exist, they’re miles behind where we’d be if publishers just released a way to host our own servers before killing their creations. They need more signatures from European citizens and then the proposal goes to a board who decide what to do with it.
That could be brutal on indie. There’d need to be something to protect indie publishers and not ironically give all power to big publishers that can afford to keep punching shit out if something goes wrong with the dev or any small teams involved.
Maybe if a title is over a certain price point.
This isn’t about games being buggy, it’s about live service games where when the servers are shut down the game literally cannot be played. If an indie dev is making a live service game they’ve just made a poor decision in the first place
Are there a lot of server based indies where you can’t run your own server? I might be totally off base because of the kinds of games I like, but MMO type games don’t really seem like the domain of indie developers.
If an indie goes for an “always online” model, they did it to themselves and deserve it. This is about you buying a game, and then losing all access to it because it needed to ping home, and home decided the game sold like shit so they won’t support it anymore.