Uh... If they're 3rd-party servers then hosting isn't paid for by the publisher. Additionally, game publishers don't pay for hosting of Discord/Reddit/ Lemmy communities. And even if they did if the game is EOL they'd axe that too if it induces any COst.

Now you misunderstood the statement. When the game is still hosted by the original devs/publishers, in-game bots would 1) tank the user experience (imagine tf2 but like half a year after launch) 2) put strain on the servers, the ones that still belong to the devs/publisher While that is going on, bots spamming media related to the game would tank engagement (who would want to play a game filled with bots that also has like no public community around it that isn't ruined by other bots). All that would make the revenue crash, and turn the game into a huge financial burden, causing the eventual drop of support/bankruptcy

I won't pick the rest of the comment apart, since you didn't quite get how this extortion scheme works (partly due to my poor explanation, but still)

[–] unwarlikeExtortion@lemmy.ml 4 points 3 months ago

Is such a strategy really feasible? Adding legislation that a game has to be made operable in a reasonable manner after the publisher discontinues support for it in no way influences this strategy.

If someone wanted to do such elaborate botnet defamation attacks in hopes of getting the game playable on 3rd party servers they could've done that already without legislation.

Bots making the game unplayable is a problem, but opening the servers in general would help the problem as private servers can implement harsher requirements for players than official ones usually do, opting to rather make a huge bot-filled cesspool as you've already said.

However, this proposal isn't a general "all games must have FOSS self-hostable servers" proposal. It's just a "if you kill a game it still has to be alive afterwards" proposal. Whether publishers open servers or not before they shut theirs down is their decision without the proposal as much as it is with it.