It's like people forgot what multiplayer gaming was like pre-2005. Everyone ran their own servers. You could run your own Half-Life game server and other users merely pointed their game client to your IP address.
The only exceptions back then were the MMORPGs.
There's no reason we can't go back to the way it used to be. I used to run multiplayer Starcraft on a LAN without an Internet connection. Why can't I do that with Starcraft II? We used to play Quake on custom servers. Some servers had fun communities. All that is gone in favor of live services that can be shut down on a whim.
I don't even think requiring server source code to be disclosed should be necessary. Merely the binaries with some basic instructions on setting it up (which could easily be based on internal documents for setting up test servers) would be sufficient.
Seriously.
It's like people forgot what multiplayer gaming was like pre-2005. Everyone ran their own servers. You could run your own Half-Life game server and other users merely pointed their game client to your IP address.
The only exceptions back then were the MMORPGs.
There's no reason we can't go back to the way it used to be. I used to run multiplayer Starcraft on a LAN without an Internet connection. Why can't I do that with Starcraft II? We used to play Quake on custom servers. Some servers had fun communities. All that is gone in favor of live services that can be shut down on a whim.
I don't even think requiring server source code to be disclosed should be necessary. Merely the binaries with some basic instructions on setting it up (which could easily be based on internal documents for setting up test servers) would be sufficient.