Tried using muted words for certain tags, but it's not always tagged. Maybe there's a general art feed that expires furry/lewd stuff?

It's not always NSFW tagged either

I feel like the headlights and wet streets are working really well!

Yeah I think if it was just "Game Client + Server need to still work" then that would be actually not that hard, because those two pieces are somewhat easier to get rolling. The platform controls so much though. For the player to have skins, champs, parties, etc. you need the platform

For LoL, unless something changed since my time, there is no solution to run the game that doesn't require dedicated servers.

For eSports LANs, they used to have their own locally hosted platform + game servers, which took whole teams of people with inside knowledge to set up and operate

ONE MORE THING - games are getting more expensive to make, so good ROI is harder to achieve. This is because devs make more money than we used to. Yay!

As costs go up it's going to get harder to get funding, so I hope further cost increases happen due to devs getting paid, not extra regulations :(

See e.g. kotaku.com/old-games-20... as an example for why it's so hard to break out in this field - new games having extra requirements that won't affect these games is just another incumbent advantage for huge studios with massive audiences

Overall, I feel like it's already exceptionally hard to make a game that anyone cares about at all, let alone a commercially successful one, and it's only getting worse. I think the barriers to achieving that are a bigger problem than the very rare case of the "bad publisher" killswitching a game

For anything that has a fully solo mode, or a preexisting ability to host local servers, e.g. Civilization games, it's totally reasonable to make sure there's no "killswitch" behavior.

The UK response to the petition indicates clearly that you could likely sue and WIN a case if a dev does that

I don't think it's great for the industry if a developer trying to make a game like Concord has to then, by law, do the extra cleanup work to make a publicly releasable version of the game after having a really unsuccessful launch and no real playerbase to show for it

I think for games that run on entirely developer-hosted servers and cannot be played solo at all, it's a bit of a hard sell to me. If LoL shut down, would Riot just stop updating the client/server and just let people host it? There are 100s of microservices that are required to make it work

e.g. Titanfall servers were shut down years ago, so the game's code was forced to be released. A studio could pick through the code to "rebuild" the secret sauce movement that the Respawn team worked so hard to fine-tune.

Now competitors could beat them to market for Apex Legends, in some respect

I think the idea that devs can just "hand over the code" for something like this is pretty off. I don't think it's really that simple. There are many "trade secrets" hidden within the code of popular games that I don't think publishers would want to part with just because a game had to be shut down.

I've only worked on GaaS for the decade or so of my career, so I can only speak to that side.

I think it depends heavily on the product. Games as a Service would need to spend more time & energy on platform "stuff" to make this feasible. I don't think anyone is developing with this in mind

I welcome the VTubing community with open arms!