I think the world "developers" means the studios here, which is mostly because the suits who know how to extract value from stuff others create like to cosplay as experts in the industry they are leeching off of.
Look at Musk, he's a rocket scientist / web developer / automotive engineer / civil engineer. Of course he is.
sometimes these words are used intechangeably, i think most people are aware the suits are to blame
Not all games allow for that unless there's a private server developed for it. The idea is to require companies to provide those tools once the game is taken down.
First and foremost: Maybe don't rally this around a game where basically everyone's response was "... that was still a thing?" and we were looking at very low (was it outright double digit?) concurrents leading up to it being killed.
That said: I also think this... completely ignores the realities of development and is dangerously close to a "lazy devs" rhetoric? The idea that devs "just" have to make an offline unlocked version before they sunset a game sounds great. Same with building out self-hosting infrastructure and... emulators for MMOs. Okay
(numbers might be slightly off, roll with me) January alone saw about as many layoffs across gaming as we had in all of 2023. The people who work in those studios don't have time to sit down and test out some self hosting infrastructure for the game they put their heart and soul into for the past two years. They are busy frantically calling anyone they know to find leads for a job, updating their linkedin, and ripping copper out of the walls in the hopes of making rent.
We are well past the era where "Well. This was a good run but let's quietly put down this game and get started on the next" is the norm. The reality is that you have smaller studios frantically trying to spin up two or three development pipelines to make sure they always have "a hit". And corporate studios who fully understand that the moment they are "done" with a project they are ripe to be laid off to increase profits for that quarter.
So I can definitely see an Embracer group signing this for the PR. And, having lived similar bullshit in a different industry, I can see them using this as a weapon against the workers. "Hey guys. I know we are all down because of the announcement that all of you are gonna go fuck off and die so that I can get a bigger parachute. But we have a responsibility to our shareholders and customers to finish this one last project. So we are going to pay you an extra two or three weeks to do these tickets. And if you don't accomplish your responsibilities we will fire you with cause and take your severance. So... get the fuck to work, I got a hooker coming at 10. Oh, and we don't need art assets so security will come and escort Johnson out of the building. Go team!"
I dunno. On the surface... this still looks naive. But I like the spirit and do wish more games would be developed with an offline mode (even if I know, as a developer/engineer, that that just means a lot of work for minimal benefit to customers). But this REALLY feels like it is going to be right up there with the other insanity if/when people talk about "gamergate 2.0". Like, I am getting MASSIVE Total Biscuit vibes where he is saying stuff we all are thinking but rapidly becomes a rallying cry for chuds and never does anything to really reject that.
they could release it all as-is under gpl when they sunset a game and then someone else would do all the work...
I know it makes people cranky, but look at Yuzu "becoming" Suyu. All the Suyu team really has is memes and the ability to selfhost a gitlab. They don't have the resources to maintain or develop the emulator themselves. And it is only a matter of time until one or more yuzu "forks" become bitcoin miners that improved support for the latest Mario game or whatever. Personally? I would rather NOLF remain in limbo than for it to become synonymous with viruses and stolen crypto.
Licensing? It depends how the company handled it but it is generally "a dick move" to change the license of an existing codebase without the consent of the developers. So you either end up flattening all history (and thus, nobody gets credit for the work they did) or you need to make sure that Jeff who left the company four years ago is cool suddenly getting pinged on issues with the cape physics code he forgot about.
AND that also assumes that it used no proprietary resources. Maybe that cape physics code is REAL good and the company doesn't want to have to throw that away when it can still give them an advantage for a new title. Or it might be as simple as depending on an internal build farm or tool. While we all make fun of them for it, there is a reason Facebook/Meta developers are fucking idiots when it comes to git. Because Sapling was designed to fit their needs and workflow and changes just enough that you can never trust a former meta dev to understand anything about VCS. But... that also becomes an issue if you are just uploading it to Microsoft's Github.
Also: This gets into territory that even as an anonymous user I am going to tiptoe around but understand that it is not uncommon to work with vendors and other support staff who will gladly contribute essential code that you more or less have a legal department's worth of paperwork saying you won't share.
