It's wildly immature to assume these guys are just rolling in dough and swimming in a vault with Scrooge McDuck in every instance. Just off the top of my head, Ghost Ship Games and Fatshark would have major exposure under rules like this.
No exceptions.
It is irrelevant how big they are or how much dough they are swimming in.
Ghost Ship Games from what I know would be the first to jump on board of the initiative.
Fatshark has about 180-200 devs. Indie my ass. But any company, indie or not, capable of running GaaS, has the pittance amount of resources required to ensure players will be able to play it (again, in
some form).
This isn't some gigantic budget needed - they literally only need to either enable offline play (which any game can already do, eg via running their own local test server, how do you think they test their own games internally?) or hand over the server executables and maybe a "manual".
Done. Wouldn't even scratch on a budget of a million.
Also, hell, Deep Rock can ALREADY be played solo - that's all that would be asked (though, of course, providing even more would be welcome).
Sure, in that solo mode you are still technically online, but that could very easily be mocked locally (which is a process they will already do for internal testing).
Probably enough to not even release Deep Rock Galactic and Darktide.
Bullshit, a cost factor increasing the entire development by way, way, WAY less than 1% of any given online game would not make or break anything.
Source: I've been working as a backend software developer for over 15 years and have a background in game development, I can estimate costs quite well at this point and more importantly: I know that this would actually be very easy to do compared to the complexity of developing the entire game & server structure.
Besides, all of this would be known before development even starts (the initiative is not retroactive, laws generally cannot be), it wouldn't be some "sudden" cost factor, but an abysmally small amount of work to be happening at the end of life.
This has nothing to do with costs, it's simply to get suits to do the right thing, even if it would cost them 0.000001% of profit.
Too complex for a simple server exe drop, but not big enough to have that corporate pocket depth to pay for such an undertaking.
Please refrain from talking about software development processes or costs.
You are so far off here that you are making an absolute donkey of yourself.