Because people would use the self-hosted servers to route around the company’s rent seeking and control, and they might make less money. The compromise here is, if the game would be deleted anyway, they don’t even have that much of a justification.
Doesn’t Minecraft have its own controversies with Microsoft imposing various forms of direct control over ostensibly private servers? Anyway it’s obviously a special case regardless because of the unusually expansive modding community. It’s hypothetically possible for games to have a private server friendly business model, but the trend has been for the biggest successes to have a freemium business model which arguably would make less money if they offered private servers (because people would use them as a way to avoid the exploitative bullshit the game is trying to profit from).
Not to say that such a requirement would be bad for videogames. It’s just clearly a much bigger fight if companies have reason to believe a law is a potential financial threat to them, and they would have much more reason to think that with a private server requirement that isn’t limited to EOL games.
Because people would use the self-hosted servers to route around the company’s rent seeking and control, and they might make less money. The compromise here is, if the game would be deleted anyway, they don’t even have that much of a justification.
I get that that is how management types think, but Minecraft clearly demonstrates that both can exist side by side very profitably.
Doesn’t Minecraft have its own controversies with Microsoft imposing various forms of direct control over ostensibly private servers? Anyway it’s obviously a special case regardless because of the unusually expansive modding community. It’s hypothetically possible for games to have a private server friendly business model, but the trend has been for the biggest successes to have a freemium business model which arguably would make less money if they offered private servers (because people would use them as a way to avoid the exploitative bullshit the game is trying to profit from).
Not to say that such a requirement would be bad for videogames. It’s just clearly a much bigger fight if companies have reason to believe a law is a potential financial threat to them, and they would have much more reason to think that with a private server requirement that isn’t limited to EOL games.