"There is a broader discussion to be had within the industry of what does an end-of-life cycle look like in games"

GamesIndustry.biz's resource offers insights, analysis, and news coverage of the video game industry. Readers can learn about gaming trends, business strategies, and industry developments. With articles, interviews, and opinion pieces, GamesIndustry.biz provides  insights and expertise for professionals working in the video game industry.

GamesIndustry.biz

GOG's managing director warns that requiring developers to maintain games online indefinitely could reduce new game releases due to increased long-term funding requirements. The comments address ongoing debates around game preservation, sparked by campaigns like Stop Killing Games following shutdowns of service-based titles like Ubisoft's The Crew and EA's Anthem. While acknowledging preservation as important, Gołębiewski argues that excessive regulatory barriers around end-of-life cycles could discourage game creation, as studios would need to budget for potentially decades of server maintenance on top of development and marketing costs.

GOG MD warns fewer games may come out if developers are forced to keep them online forever

Or just give players the power to host their lobbies p2p or with their own servers. Just like 10 years ago.
It was greed in the first place that made developers/publishers go for the “we own everything, you own nothing, just give us your money and stop crying” attitude. It’s not only stupid, but factual ignorance of the culture and history of gaming to claim that the only solution is that less games will be released.
When have we started to ignore facts for the sake of justifying greed? My father called shit like this “late roman decadency”. And year by year I am starting to understand it more and more.
If a system’s goal is to grow, then it will grow itself to death, treating stagnation as something bad.

I have stupid idea, allow to connect to any server and release server with the game. Like every indie game is doing.
I know, unthinkable

False. It’s simply not true, that you need to infinitely pay. All you have to do, is to make the game’s server self-hostable, ideally open source. That’s it. No infinite online requirement for the official servers. It just must be possible for players to host their own servers without restrictions.

or… a developers can just design and produce a game in a way that allows running custom/community servers.

i really hope not everyone will jump on this bandwagon bs discussion point of “oh if this goes through, we have to host the server for ever to have everyone be able to play online”.
The main point of the “Stop Killing Games” is to be able to play the games, even when the publisher can’t or won’t host it anymore. to have a chance to still play them, when you want. not be at the mercy of the publisher / developer / market.