Just to correct the record on this more reasonably sized dose of surprisingly overt strawmanning, I don't think it's impossible for an end user to run a dedicated server.

Well then maybe you should have actually said that.

The way Scott presents the argument, even acknowledging that he argues that server code may need a dedicated server beyond the capabilities of end users, is just not feasible.

If you wanna say things that are, you know technical, complicated... maybe... do that?

But ok so you wanna be more technical now, let's see.

I think it's not feasible to require a version of a modern persistent game server infrastructure, from login to matchmaking to data storage, to be converted or provided to be run or financed by end users.

Ok, well, you are just objectively wrong on all of your clauses there.

Dedicated enthusiasts can and do build home servers, all the time.

People have been emulating and running long officially dead MMOs for almost 20 years.

Login, matchmaking, storage... yep, all of that stuff still works. Sometimes you have to figure out a bit of a workaround, or run your own little side shunt thing as I described via example of Battlefield 1942 in my post you didn't read.

These days, its easier and cheaper than ever to just rent a virtual server to host... literally whatever you want.

The only real problem that would occur is if say, OverWatch 2 suddenly died... and... a group of enthusiastic OW2 players wanted to be able to support the entire current playerbase.

Yeah, that indeed would likely be unfeasible.

But uh... all you have to do is meet the base requirements for the server binary, the now incredibly cheap compared to 10, 20 years ago storage requirements for the base system... and then you scale up to meet the actual traffic from the number of regular players you want to be able to support.

Theoretically, you could set up a nonprofit to legally finance scaling up to huge player counts, and have a subscription to this nonprofit server provider...

Or you could just have many, many, smaller independent post EoL, enthusiast servers, capable of more or less doing it out of an informal amount of charity.

The fixed costs of standing up a server are almost always so small as to be manageable by one or a few people.

The variable cost, where things can really get expensive... is from scaling up massively.

But you don't have to do that.

Especially not in a way that still allows pre-existing commercial clients to run normally.

TitanFall 2 has been dead for a decade. No more official servers.

Its got a community made custom launcher that hooks into the community modified servers they run.

Game is literally exactly the same.

You can go play this right now, if you have a legit copy of TitanFall2.

Basically its the same withing with StarWars Galaxies, to just give two examples right off the top of my head.

I mean, for one thing, would you be running one instance or several?

Could be either, depends on what the EoL game wants to do for its final shutdown server release.

Probably it would be much, much easier to both the business and enthusiast post EoL server operators to set things up for many smaller, distinct, divergent individual instances, instead of designing a lemmy like federation system.

You know, how like every major MMO ever basically has different realms or shards or whatever? Welp, now instead of 8 or 16 or 32.... theres 456 smaller ones.

Who's handling how to point the client at the right place?

Ideally this would be a very simple and minor patch to the client to enable this right before EoL, but as with examples I've already given, you can wrap the game in your own launcher, essentially 'hijacking' it in some sense, to be able to override the now defunct, default server address, and also include a server browser in that launcher.

Then, you have that custom community launcher open source, so everyone can verify it isn't malware.

But, there are many other possible methods and variations on this that are very specific to each exact game, that will or could work, even if the business doesn't bother to do a final patch on the EoL client.

Who's responsible for the legal obligations regarding data storage and personal information?

Uh, the people running the servers? The enthusiasts?

Why would they have personal information beyond a UID, login and password for the player?

The business would have to be immensely, catastrophically stupid to not scrub all other PII and financial type information out of the player db before they made a EoL final release version of it available.

How do you handle monetization hooks in games where scarcity is baked into the design?

Well there's many possible ways you could do this.

One would be... the business just rips em out, disables them entirely on EoL release.

Yep, that'd break shitty pay to win games that were designed with so much scarcity that obtaining game currency or items through gameplay alone is uh... unfeasible.

Or, you could, just quickly modify the giant basically ini file that describes all the loot drop rates for getting things in game by... 10, 100, 1000, whatever, or let the enthusiast server operators modify these drop rates on their own.

Or maybe its something like cosmetics you would normally have to pay real money for? They're all free now, woohoo! Just put in a little overide in the 'checks players real world bank account' routine to just return TRUE, basically, haha.

There are an astounding number of ways this could be handled, either by the EoL final patch/release, you could just basically rip all that out, make everyone have as much of it as they want, or give the enthusiast post EoL server admins some gui or cli access to the already existing code in the server system to allow them to do a more fine tuned and tweaking approach to this... maybe everyone just gets an automatic allowance of whatever $50 real world dollars translates into in the game currency(ies) every month, who knows.

All you have to do is say ok enthusiast server admins, you are NOT allowed to make money off of our compiled binary we are releasing to you, you have no right to do that, and we will sue you into oblivion if we think we can prove you are.

Existing computer laws and liscenses already very well cover companies going after people who decompile their proprietary code and make money off of it.

Whatever, the technicalities have been deliberated...

Yes, now they have. I made many of these points I made here, and more, in my post you didn't read, so, uh yeah, kind of a one sided discussion here with a person who's already made up their mind, yeah.