Post #1826439

I imagine you see the undue burden as a mandate to keep running the game servers yourself when you have no income to do so. Once upon a time, the norm for exclusively online games was to provide a hostable server so that any third party could host, because the game companies didn’t want to bother with hosting themselves, so at most they owned or outsourced a hosted registry of running servers, and volunteers ran instances. Then big publishers figured out that controlling the servers and keeping the implementation in-house was a good way to control the lifespan of games, and a number of games kept it closed. So the remedy is to return to allowing third party hosting, potentially including hooks for a third party registry for running game servers if we are talking more ephemeral online instances like you’d have in shooters. One might allow for keeping the serving in-house and only requiring third party serving upon plan to retire the in-house game, but there’s really no reason in that scheme to keep the hosting exclusively in-house since you can’t control things by shutting it down anymare.