Online games to be handed to players after support is cut

Legal challenge to force developers to hand over code once they stop supporting a game.
Text: Bengt Lemne
Published 2014-11-04

Has a favourite game of yours ever been taken offline and abandoned much to your despair? If that's the case then a new legal challenge from the Electronic Frontier Foundation might well mean that it never happens to you again.

The challenge calls for developers that want to abandon online games to hand over control of their titles to the community.

If the petition is approved, gamers would then have legal access to any abandoned online game's code for the purposes of "continued play, preservation, research, or study." That said, it's notable that the challenge doesn't include MMOs, games with a "persistent world".

How realistic it is that the EFF would win out is another matter altogether...

Thanks, Gamasutra.

The official GameSpy-powered servers of Battlefield 2 have been shut down. The EFF wants to legalise and facilitate player efforts to maintain online services for games such as BF2.

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