This would be a huge precedent for video-game preservation. IANAL but this would mean one of these two:
- service cannot be shut down without release of server source code
- whole game need to be reclassified as software service
Seems like the latter would be an easy loophole tbh.
Also NAL, but it seems like they aren’t arguing for server functionality but rather just the ability to play offline at all, which opens up the third option of requiring games to be patched to remove sever requirements if being shut down, in any case this will be a fascinating case to follow, and I hope they go through with the lawsuit.
True though that’s a bit of a potato/potatoh probpem as the easiest way to patch-in offline would be to run server locally rather than have 2 different architectures of offline and online plays. That’s already how many games work today actually - singleplayer is just a server with only you on it.
