They don’t need to reslsse stuff they own to the public if they keep the servers running of course.

If you mandate that they have to keep the servers running, they just wont bother providing access to the game in your country in the first place, because that would be absolutely insane. Any company would look at that and go "fuck that" and now if you live in that country, you just cant play the game, good job!

No, they have to abide by the law.

Same as above, if you make a law that causes the company to be unable to operate (you have asked something stupid of them) they just won't even provide the game in your country. If the EU passed something like this it would instantly hamstring their entire gaming industry and they'd very very quickly lose a tonne of people who leave to go work in saner places.

And the games where this is only a minor feature will be hit the least by the proposed legislation, if at all.

Same as above

I know that. But that doesn’t mean someone else can’t run the same protocol on bare metal. Just give gamers the ability to hook into someone else’s server after shutdown and you’ll be fine, probably. Make it part of your sunsetting strategy. Beats waiting for governments to come down and make you alter games you intended to drop in ways you don’t want to modify through lawsuits and regulatory pressure.

This all costs money. Enormous amounts of money. If you make it cost too much money to provide the game in your country, they just wont even show up in the first place, so now you don't get to play it at all.

Wow, good thing they were mandated by law to release a v1.7 server so v2.4 of their game still works!

Then they ABSOLUTELY would never even think about providing the game in your country. Do you understand how insane it is to try and force a company to release their propietary STILL LIVE auth backend? Do you understand how huge of a security risk that is? No company would EVER be cool with that.

"Hey do we want to also spin up servers for our game in [country]?"

"If we do, that country has legally mandated if we shut the game down we have to release copies of the game and everything needed to run it to the public, which would include our still live auth servers and etc that our other games depend on"

"Oh, that's insane, no nevermind I guess they don't get to play our game then, lol"

You'd be incredibly naive to think this is a sane ask of any company, no one will do it. Ever.

There it is. Choice. That choice can be influenced. For instance, “you cannot sell your game in the EU” is a good reason to reconsider that choice. Or maybe “figure out what”'ll cost us more, the EU fine or having a few devs release a self-hosted server" for products developed while the law enters into effect.

Pretty ubiquitously the answer will be "don't release it in the EU at all, fuck em" because for most companies doing this would actively have huge downsides on the games performance.

What you need to wrap your head around is the complicated tech stacks that back these online systems aren't chosen for funises, they serve a purpose. These systems allow companies to reduce downtime, improve performance, provide telemetry and real time monitoring, etc etc. They use these for a reason.

If you tell the company "If you wanna be able to release your game in EU, you either have to commit to keeping your servers on, or, you have to fuck up your entire tech stack and ruin your games performance", they'll just go "Guess we won't release in the EU then lol"

Games worked like this for a decade.

Yeah, because they didn't offer the massive multitude of features that people expect of them today.

If you don't want these online features to be so popular, stop buying games that have them

And yet... crazy as it sounds, they still make tonnes and tonnes of money. Almost as if tonnes of other gamers out there like them and pay for them.

Legally mandating companies have to commit suicide to sell in your country isn't going to make them do it. It's just gonna make them stop selling the game in your country.

you either don’t release in Germany or you find a way to comply.

Correct, and the issue is what is being asked of this movement is so insane to try and comply with that "dont release in [country]" is the better answer

Sorry but that's just the breaks. You'll have to go convince a billion zoomers to stop paying for online microtransaction laden DLCs if you wanna make any actual headway here.