Just saying, if my highschool programming classes are any indicator, there's a ton of released binaries out there that use copywritten and otherwise plaigarized code

EvE Online doesn't use root access anticheat software. I know it doesn't because it runs on Linux just fine. That particular player base is the worst hive of scum and villainy that you'll find outside of government. Clearly the anticheat software isn't as essential as game studios would have you believe. The only major cheating I'm aware of in EvE was the BoB scandal, and that involved Devs cheating because they were Devs.

I could imagine third-party companies springing up whose entire business model is JUST providing unofficial servers for discontinued games and moderating them

That kind of already exists, you can buy hosting for Minecraft and other games. AFAIK, moderation isn't a part of it, but many private groups exist that run public servers and manage their own moderation. It exists already, and that should absolutely be brought up as a bill is being considered.

Totally agree but the person they’re responding to implied they were some scrappy indie production. Ex33 (there are caveats/asterisks here but still) is a much better example. I think at its peak the whole team was like 40 people with hired hands.

Everyone knows where the proprietary code is. It doesn’t just get merged in “by accident” unless you are a really shit developer (and to be fair some are).

Heh. You are still overestimating the average developer. Random code gets copy-pasted into files without attribution all the time. One guy might know, but if he gets moved to a different team, the new guy has no idea. That can be a ticking legal time-bomb.

If it means developers won’t make “live-service”/trash games anymore, we should hasten the SKG movement.

That's easy have some self control and only buy games that respect you

If it means developers won’t make “live-service”/trash games anymore, we should hasten the SKG movement.

Let's be real, open sourcing it isn't "hardly any work". All the code has to be reviewed to make sure they can legally release it, no third-party proprietary stuff.

The original article completely misrepresents the initiative:

We appreciate the passion of our community; however, the decision to discontinue online services is multi-faceted, never taken lightly and must be an option for companies when an online experience is no longer commercially viable. We understand that it can be disappointing for players but, when it does happen, the industry ensures that players are given fair notice of the prospective changes in compliance with local consumer protection laws.

Private servers are not always a viable alternative option for players as the protections we put in place to secure players’ data, remove illegal content, and combat unsafe community content would not exist and would leave rights holders liable. In addition, many titles are designed from the ground-up to be online-only; in effect, these proposals would curtail developer choice by making these video games prohibitively expensive to create.

...

Stop Killing Games is not trying to force companies to provide private servers or anything like that, but leave the game in a playable state after shutting off servers. This can mean:

• provide alternatives to any online-only content
• make the game P2P if it requires multiplayer (no server needed, each client is a server)
• gracefully degrading the client experience when there's no server

Of course, releasing server code is an option.

The expectation is:

• if it's a subscription game, I get access for whatever period I pay for
• if it's F2P, go nuts and break it whenever you want; there is the issue of I shame purchases, so that depends on how it's advertised
• if it's a purchased game, it should still work after support ends

That didn't restrict design decisions, it just places a requirement when the game is discontinued. If companies know this going in, they can plan ahead for their exit, just like we expect for mining companies (they're expected to fill in holes and make it look nice once they're done).

I argue Stop Killing Games doesn't go far enough, and if it's pissing off the games industry as well, then that means it strikes a good balance.

Can the EvE online method be applied to dissimilar games like e.g. fps games?

Another part of it is that if they discontinue support, they can’t stop the community from creating their own server software.

There are so many ways to approach this. The point is ensuring consumers retain the right to keep using what they purchased, even if they have to support it themselves.

honestly with online only games i’d be “okay” (not that it’d be great but okay) with them just releasing a bunch of internal docs around the spec. you’re right that open sourcing commercial code is actually non-trivial (though perhaps if they went in knowing this would have to be the outcome then maybe they’d plan better for it), but giving the community the resources to recreate the experience i think is a valid direction

They did not, they said you can be successful without corpo overhead and bullshittery.

When the law passes, the owners of proprietary functionality will adapt their licensing to meet the requirrments or go out of business when everyone stops using them.

Anti-cheat is a necessary evil for competitive online games. No one wants to play a game against cheaters since they typically have an unfair advantage. If you can't combat cheating then you might as well not make the game since no one will want to play it. Fine by me since I don't care for such games but I could imagine people who like playing them might prefer to play against as few cheaters as possible. What are the alternatives?