Perhaps from a technical perspective, but rarely from a legal / IP perspective.

Oh so releasing the game client is easy but releasing the game server is a legal/IP problem suddenly? I think you are concern trolling.

It is a valid concern as to why companies don't do this already. In the face of the legal requirements the initiative is attempting to establish, however, the IP problem would be pretty easily resolved, as companies that sold their server libraries/services with a prohibition on redistribution would either need to change those licenses, or lose customers who want to be able to sell in Europe.

There are some enormous unwarranted assumptions behind the assertions of "just" or "pretty easily" in this thread.

The consequence of this kind of regulation are easy to predict:

- fewer games will be released

- games will be more expensive

- larger game studios will extend their advantage over smaller

How so? Or, more specifically, what method of action are you predicting will produce those outcomes?

From my observation, smaller studios are vastly more likely than larger ones to already be in compliance with this initiative's requests: It's not the giant, AAA games that are having community servers or peer-to-peer networking. Companies that are doing that already have to change nothing to be in compliance.

Studios that have private, monopolized backends merely need to release their server binaries at the end of life. That's not a significant expense, either (you already have access to file distribution in order to distribute your client in the first place). Assuming that the studio is paying directly for file distribution (not the case for most), and that the server binaries are 100 GB (an obscene over-estimate), and that every single user downloads the server files, you're looking at a couple of cents or so a user. Which again, smaller studios don't pay for file distribution, that's coming out of the platform fees that you're already paying.

The only hard and fast, "this might cost us money" position I can point to is the large studios that release franchises lose the ability to use cutting off people's access to previous games in a series as a motivator to purchase newer ones in the series. And that's an ability exclusively available to massive studios that put out entire franchises of games.

That does happen a lot. They get licenses to use but not distribute software for example. Servers are hard so it makes sense they'd want to buy rather than build.

It's the same reason most games aren't open sourced when their commercial viability ends: lots of third party software with no public source.