Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California | Hacker News Reader

Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California

arstechnica.com

596 pointsLihh27484 comments

It seems like the fair solution to this problem is to open source server code if you are going to cease support for an online game. That way the community has the opportunity to run their own servers if they want to.

I also really support giving 60 day notice if an online game is going to shut down. Places I have worked have had policies like that for games they are sun setting and I think the best game publishers think a lot about how to do that operation. It's not simple, because if people think a game is going away their behavior changes. And nothing sucks like buying online content for a game right before it shuts down. No matter what you do people will tell you they didn't know the game was shutting down. And if you give away content that you previously sold that also sometimes angers the community.

The problem is when companies know a game isn't working they tend to want to shut it down right away because the money they spend keeping it up is never coming back. And maybe the company is going to die too. So I do support a law for a 60 day notice.

> It seems like the fair solution to this problem is to open source server code if you are going to cease support for an online game. That way the community has the opportunity to run their own servers if they want to.

It's nice in theory, but in practice many (most?) games are using middleware they don't have the rights to redistribute as open source. IIRC when the source code for Doom, the first major commercial game that went open source, originally came out, it had all of the sound code removed because it was dependent on a third party library. Not that you're going to have sound code in a server, but you may be using third party libraries for networking, replays, anti-cheat, etc.

This has an easy solution. If the middleware cannot be used in a new regulatory environment then it will either die or adapt.

Sometimes the easy solution isn't easy for all sides or even realistic. "Fuck the publishers" is easy but not going to get a lot of publisher buy in.

We all agree there is a foolproof method to fixing all bugs - delete all the code.

We also all probably agree that isn't the optimal balance.

Should’ve thought of that before accepting significant amounts of money in exchange for a game they plan to kill when it’s no longer financially advantageous for the publisher. They’re so happy to rake in what, $60, now $70, soon $100 for a product they can disable access to for any reason at all or no reason at all, with no notice? How’s that fair? Why’s it only unfair when the hardship goes the other way around?

Right, like "Oh no, this first video game related regulation in the entire history of the industry is too much for us."

A lot of "hard" solutions are only hard until there is a legal/business requirement for them. Licensing is the poster child example for that.

This is not the only possible outcome. Another approach would be not to offer software within the affected region. U.S. local news is often not available to European visitors now due to GDPR. Similarly, Canadian news outlets are not available on Facebook due to Bill C-18. If I was an indie game developer I would consider this approach and simply avoid selling within California.

Larger game studios would likely adjust as you say. However they too could adjust in such a way that they only offer subscriptions within California as that appears to exempt them from this rule. Many outcomes are possible beyond simply adjusting to the legislation in the way you are suggesting.

Lets skip California, the 5th biggest economy in the world.

Ok, then customers in California/EU would be at least aware of the deal they are getting and more ethical companies would have a competitive advantage. Sounds good.

If bills like this pass there'd be financial pressure for middleware providers to either license under terms that allow distribution at the game's end-of-life, or allow their middleware to be easily severed while still leaving the game playable - else they'd lose out on all customers selling games in California/EU/etc.

Which is also a nice side effect to reduce intellectual property barriers for developers that do already want to distribute their server or source code.

Then don't. People will find a way to replace those.

So?

A) This state is not inherent but a result of there being no general requirement to release the sources. Middle ware would use different licenses if that was required to have any customers.

B) Omitting the sound code did not stop the community from releasing source ports based on that release, with sound of course.

It doesn't need to be open source, you only need to provide server binaries to download. This was the standard until circa 2010. People were able to host dedicated servers themselves.

I want to host a closed search server that's not being updated on today's internet. It might be good enough for home use, but definitely not if I want my friends to connect.

For playing with your friends you can use a VPN to not expose the potentially dangerous server to the wider internet. And sandbox both server and client as much as you feel needed depending on the value of "friend".

Although I get the idea of providing server binaries but if one has to absolutely do it, then provide great modding efforts behind it.

But I have found that the greatest modding efforts/community can be generated by open source. Balatro for example is easily modified in the sense that although it might not be open source but iirc its lua files are visible.

There are other games as well which have something similar imo although that being said its possible to create modding efforts without open source in general too with say something like for example old versions of counter strike.

Personally I would prefer open source though if its possible but I understand that some game studious might be worried about it but I don't quite understand it if they are shutting down the game anyway though. I think that @mjr00's comments are nice about third party library etc. which cause issues in open sourcing so its good to have a discussion about that too (imo)

That would be an improvement over nothing, but closed-source means that the game is still going to die as soon as someone finds a security vulnerability (or even just a gameplay glitch) that can't be feasibly patched.

Imagine an MMO where special text in the chat causes viewers' clients to crash, or a glitch exists to duplicate items or money, or where anybody can crash the server to run arbitrary commands.

I play SubSpace (a MMO spaceship game released in the 90s) to this day. It was shut down soon after release.

The original server binaries were left on the original CDROM by a programmer.

Then PriitK, a creator of Kazaa and then Skype and Joost!, went on to re-create the client due to cheating/hacking, naming it Continuum.

Years later the server is reimplemented as A Small Subspace Server (ASSS), making it a complete fan remake of the original game (sans graphics). This is also when we finally got server side mods, everything before that was client only or a hack.

We even got on Stream Greenlight.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/352700/Subspace_Continuum...

Props for bringing up Subspace! What a fun game that deserves more players! (And a new client ui)

Yeah damn that takes me back.

Thanks, it does. I've been playing since about 2000, came from Cosmic Rift / Infantry when they went non-free.

We're lucky we got Priit to release the encryption/security module so Continuum clients could connect to ASSS servers without the security warning. I doubt it'll ever be updated, someone will have to take up the mantle.

That implies the community that builds around it would not reverse engineer and remake the binaries. Which many already do (to be fair), it just so happens that it's way, way harder when the servers are entirely gone already for a game and you have no way to capture server/client traffic for example. Even if the binaries are flawed, just having those in there and being able to spin up a server to see the packet flow already greatly helps in preservation, much more if you have the binary itself and can also peek at server logic for certain things like conflict resolution, instead of having to guess post-game-shutdown!

Modern Warfare 2 and 3 have an unpatched RCE. Still available on Steam.

So perhaps replace "die" with "die or turn into a dangerous zombie"?

Either way, the point is that the difference between open-source vs close-source transfers is pretty significant.

So then you just only play it with trusted friends. It's still better than the current situation

> Imagine an MMO where special text in the chat causes viewers' clients to crash, or a glitch exists to duplicate items or money, or where anybody can crash the server to run arbitrary commands.

No need to imagine. Pretty much all of that (minus the last part) happened in Amazon’s New World MMO in the first few weeks.

Though I wouldn’t be surprised if the last part did happen and we just didn’t know about it.

Having a working implementation means that you have the means to re-make/re-build it from scratch. People are resourceful and would make a implementation without such limitations. Companies on the other hand after years of known vulnerabilities and still selling the game haven't fixed yet:

https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/28/gamers-are-fixing-a-video-...

> That would be an improvement over nothing, but closed-source means that the game is still going to die as soon as someone finds a security vulnerability (or even just a gameplay glitch) that can't be feasibly patched.

No, it just means you need need to limit players to a trusted community - but that is usually how things work anyway because malicious players don't need any exploits to make a game unfun.

Closed source binaries rot.

No worse than the closed source binaries of the games themselves, surely.

It would like a month to the community to figure out the APIs and few years to decompile it... If they really want to.

Codex could do it in a weekend.

GOG has a whole business around making old closed source binaries run

Technically most of their business is in packaging existing community-developed solutions to make the games run (dosbox, scummvm, compat shims and game-speficifc patches) into a nice installer. Not that that's a useless service.

I run a lot of closed sourced binaries that are over 30 years old.

False. Expectations and environments change, but if you choose to you can also keep those constant.

> That way the community has the opportunity to run their own servers if they want to.

That might be fine for very small titles - where the "game server" is a relatively simple binary that can be run anywhere. Larger titles depend on a huge amount of infrastructure, for authentication, progression, matchmaking, etc... It's not feasible to open-source all of that, especially given that it may well still be in use for more recent titles.

> It's not feasible to open-source all of that, especially given that it may well still be in use for more recent titles

If they're still running their authentication server (for example), then they wouldn't need to release that service.

Patching the game to no longer contact the authentication server would also be acceptable, for services that aren't a core part of the game. It's pretty likely the game already allows this for development/debugging.

If they've accepted money from people to buy the game, and don't want to keep the authentication service running, and don't want to patch the game to no longer require the authentication service, and don't want to refund people, and don't want to release the authentication service so others can run it - I think it's fair for a regulation to force one of those.

So do games just have to have a perpetual endowment to fund any shared component costs? This seems like a logical conclusion. You wouldn't get scalability from reuse (e.g. reusing an auth library).

Or what's likely cheaper is budgeting for that patch in the game.

You may bemoan "oh they just don't want to release the auth service", but it functionally shuffles the cost math.

I'd personally rather the 5% cheaper games than trying to play a multiplayer only game 20 years later wtih 6 people on the server.

> So do games just have to have a perpetual endowment to fund any shared component costs? This seems like a logical conclusion.

They don't need to keep services running perpetually. strags's objection seemed to be that it could be infeasible to release services like authentication that they're still running, to which I'm saying they don't really need to consider any of this until they stop running it.

> You may bemoan "oh they just don't want to release the auth service", but it functionally shuffles the cost math.

Releasing or patching it out is largely just fulfilling their side of the deal.

If I sell you a lawnmower that depends on some authentication server to start up, then shut down the server the next day (I got your money, why would I keep the cost?), and don't release the server code or a patch to work without it, then would you not say I've scammed you?

The resource cost of everyone I've sold to losing access to their lawnmowers would be far greater than what it'd cost me to release a patch, just that the former is not a cost borne by me if the law allows me to ignore it.

> I'd personally rather the 5% cheaper games than trying to play a multiplayer only game 20 years later wtih 6 people on the server.

Allowing a company to cut people off of their software (large cost) just to save having to push out a patch (small cost) will, on net, result on more expensive products - since on net you're wasting more resources.

Particularly when it comes to authentication checks, this doesn't just apply to multiplayer games. Imagine if this applied to other forms of media (already kind of happening with DRM), like if we couldn't read books from over 20 years ago.

"If I sell you a lawnmower that depends on some authentication server to start up, then shut down the server the next day (I got your money, why would I keep the cost?), and don't release the server code or a patch to work without it, then would you not say I've scammed you?"

A lawnmower isn't a piece of software. It's not licensed. There's an expectation it should continue working. The lawnmower is a single player game.

I think it's understood that online games are a license (read multiplayer ones, not the Crew).

If I sell you an IoT lawnmower, and you get 20 years out of it, do I owe you a full refund if I shut down my server? imo, any refund should be prorated.

I get your externalities argument, but I think multiplayer games should be treated differently if there's not an easy solution.

>Allowing a company to cut people off of their software (large cost) just to save having to push out a patch (small cost) will, on net, result on more expensive products - since on net you're wasting more resources.

I don't think all the patches are small costs when you factor in licensing, etc. Also keep in mind if you use a library for networking and the API changes, do you have to then roll it on your own? I'm skeptical of the middleware that's made life easier

This doesn't logically follow. Mandating you need to put out a patch creates a legal obligation that would sit on your books. Cutting the 12 people off your multiplayer game after 20 years isn't a large cost, and it's not going to make your next game more expensive. It was an externality that made consumers sad, not one making products more expensive.

>Particularly when it comes to authentication checks, this doesn't just apply to multiplayer games. Imagine if this applied to other forms of media (already kind of happening with DRM), like if we couldn't read books from over 20 years ago.

I think the DRM thing is a separate issue from the mandate for recoding games to be usable post server shutdown. I'd like it to be legislated separately as well. The books are analogous to single player games.

I think it's a slippery slope to turn that entitlement onto multiplayer games; if not that, then why not all software that you buy? Everyone should get a full refund when any software EoL's and companies go bankrupt whenever an online product stops being profitable.

You don't get a full refund in other sectors when they kill the consumable after a long while. Printer cartridges can stop being made and you don't get a refund for your printer. We didn't give HP the option "make your competitors ink work on your printer, give full refunds, support indefinitely, or open up your ink manufacturing line blueprints".

> A lawnmower isn't a piece of software. It's not licensed. There's an expectation it should continue working.

I believe we should be able to have the same expectation of software, at least where not specifically sold as "X months of access".

> If I sell you an IoT lawnmower, and you get 20 years out of it, do I owe you a full refund if I shut down my server?

Ideally, to avoid unnecessary e-waste, you should patch out the requirement or release the server-side code so I can continue using my lawnmower. Buying it off me might also work, if you're offering approximately what I'd get out of having it continue to work, but I'm not sure if that scales well.

> I don't think all the patches are small costs when you factor in licensing

If bills like this pass, middleware providers would need to license under terms that allow distribution at end-of-life, or lose out on all customers selling software in California/EU/etc. Should also help clear obstacles for developers who already want to distribute their server/source code even before this law but are held back from doing so.

> Mandating you need to put out a patch creates a legal obligation that would sit on your books

There's no issue with creating the patch/releasing the server-side software early, just that I assume they'd want to maintain exclusivity to milk profit for as long as possible.

> It was an externality that made consumers sad, not one making products more expensive

If you expend resources to create some media/software/product, then brick that product while customers would've otherwise still extracted value in excess of the patch's resource cost (developer time, not licensing price), then you're on net wasting resources and thus making products in general more expensive.

Issue is that because the cost of patch is borne by the company, whereas they get to ignore the cost to the customers of bricking the products, the latter is often preferred even though it's typically the more expensive option by a significant margin. A bill like this should fix that.

> I think it's a slippery slope to turn that entitlement onto multiplayer games; if not that, then why not all software that you buy?

I believe it should, and that for a lot of software the case is even stronger.

> Everyone should get a full refund when any software EoL's and companies go bankrupt whenever an online product stops being profitable.

If you take someone's money to buy a CAD package, then no longer want to provide some service it relies on (usually just for authentication reasons), then you should release the server software or patch out the authentication check.

> We didn't give HP the option "make your competitors ink work on your printer, give full refunds, support indefinitely, or open up your ink manufacturing line blueprints"

I'd 100% support doing that!

Plenty of games (especially MMOs) have lots of gameplay logic in the server. In many cases that is intertwined with the rest of the intrastructure, like databases, logging, deployment or even subscription services. Lots of games simply wouldn’t be functional without the publisher’s infrastructure.

Of course that is regrettable and could be changed, but it would require a significant change in incentives.

Authentication is an interesting example - it sounds like might be the easiest component to remove. But without authentication, you don't have identity. And without identity you have no viable notion of accounts - and without accounts you don't have persistence, entitlements, progression, achievements, or any of the meta aspects that are deeply entwined with modern games. Not to mention how extensively identity ties into Matchmaking - another fairly complex backend service.

This legislation might be more persuasive if it were tied to a reasonable time limit, but I don't see anything of that nature in the text. An obligation to support or refund customers that lasts for a fair timespan (ie. preventing rugpulls) is far less onerous than an obligation to release your code to satisfy someone's nostalgia.

For many games (and software, IoT devices, etc.), persistence/progression is tied to save files on your own device, and any authentication is more to the publisher's benefit of making sure you have an authorized copy - that's where it should be fine to just patch out the authentication check.

Even for games with centralized server-side progression, if you don't want to release the authentication service when you stop running it, then it could still be acceptable to patch out authentication by default and let those running community servers substitute in their own access system (like cracked/leaked unofficial servers already do).

> This legislation might be more persuasive if it were tied to a reasonable time limit, but I don't see anything of that nature in the text. An obligation to support or refund customers that lasts for a fair timespan (ie. preventing rugpulls) is far less onerous than an obligation to release your code to satisfy someone's nostalgia.

Should we be able to read books and watch movies that were released over, say, 20 years ago - or is that just satisfying someone's nostalgia? Maybe you don't think this matters for games, but with DRM it seems other media isn't far behind.

Excuses. If there is a legal requirement you can watch all those concerns evaporate away.

Game engines/code aren't all open source. The game developer might not have the legal rights to release the source.

Also, does this stop at games? Why not any online service ever? Why not any program at all?

Gaming might be unique in the sense that it's the only industry where 1) consumers make a one-time purchase of a product, but then 2) the manufacturer remains responsible for the online component.. forever? I can't think of any other examples in real life where this happens across an industry (maybe a few niche products).

Maybe this is the reason MS has been pushing Game Pass so hard, to get rid of the "purchase" part entirely.

> I can't think of any other examples in real life where this happens across an industry

Vehicles? Maybe not necessarily forever, but I'd expect the large car manufacturers to all still have some level of support for a 20-year-old car...

Large car manufacturers in the US are required to support their cars that they give warranties for by the the federal Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, which are 10 or 12 years long by this point.

The contracts underlying the support for consumer automotive commonly run around 10 years. After that it is best effort and unofficial support by other companies if there is enough money to be made by offering it.

Cars don't really need an online component in order to continue working. Some manufacturers have tried to force some features into online components, but the cars continue to work without it once they turn it off.

Amazon just ended support for older Kindles. Not sure how that's any different.

Well I don't want the company I bought the game from to be completely in charge of the online component. If it helps them make more money then good for them but they need a winddown plan.

Any company that willfully chains a device to their cloud platform in such a way should get the same treatment, whether the cloud offering is free as in beer or paid. It's happening a lot more than you might think.

The way Kindles are being forcibly deprecated lately is another good example.

Yes, cases where the service deprecation causes physical e-waste are particularly egregious but we should also not underestimate the societal cost to breaking peoples workflow just because some company can't be arsed to responsibly sunset a service in a way that gives users options to continue it themselves.

It's more like it's the only software industry that still has a relevant amount of non-subscription based one time sales. I guess this will be the end of that.

Or maybe it will allow those developers that still provide fully offline games to more easily compete now that others with less consumer friendly business models are forced to make their deal more clear to the customer.

Am I the only one who remembers that multiplayer was just peer to peer? Like we had multiplayer before every studio decided they wanted to host their own servers, it was just what the guy with broadband in the neighborhood ran or something my ISP provided.

The issue is nobody gets that option if the ability to run a server is made unavailable to the public.

An online service requires the continual investment in the costs required to run the service and comes with the expectation that the service happening on someone else's computer could cease to exist the second you stop paying or at the end of the current contract cycle.

A game although specified as a license is treated and described as a purchase that is expected to work forever on the end users device so long as it fits the specs.

I wonder where the 'extents' of the game product/service you buy can be defined. I could foresee a game client/server/toolkit like Bioware's Neverwinter Nights being released but as a barebones legally compliant framework that lets you play. Then on the other side of the line they have an optional online service that provides a scenario to play in (running the same server the public has), if that service goes away the game still works, just as buying a load of D&D kits doesn't give you a DM to run games in perpetuity. As another example, there's a lot of servers for games like Counter-strike where the experience and how it runs the gameplay is modded server-side only.

The public responds to complexity and ambiguity by not giving you any money whereby you get to make money making french fries. Logically the most trivial thing people are going to do is make a minimalist multiplayer mode which allows users to join each others games like we did in 1995.

> The game developer might not have the legal rights to release the source.

Then the game developer/publisher should choose to use another technology or be ready to replace that piece when game reaches EOL. If no game developer can use that technology, the vendor will end up loosing a lot of sales. They can then decide if more permissive license would make sense.

It's just going to push all multiplayer games to be sold as a service. The users will get used to this because they basically already are used to it for every other piece of software.

There is basically zero chance that when given the choice between "structure billing as a service" vs "rewrite everything and open source it" that they will choose open source.

> open source server code if you are going to cease support

When I was a senior exec at a big public tech company, there was a product we decided to discontinue and we thought would be nice to just open source. Somehow I ended up in charge of managing that process and was shocked at how complex, time-consuming and expensive it was in a multi-billion dollar, publicly-traded corp vs some code my friends and I wrote.

Legal had to verify that there was no licensed library code used and that we had clear, valid copyright to everything there. The project had been written over several years, merged with a project we'd acquired with a startup, some key people weren't around any more, the source control had transitioned across multiple platforms, etc. And even once we nailed all that down sufficiently, we didn't get an "all clear" from legal, we just got a formal legal opinion that any liability was probably under $1M. And then we had to convince an SVP to endorse that assumption of $1M potential liability and make a business case for approval to the CEO.

For a public company, the default assumption for any online game would be "the server side code WILL be open sourced" (under threat of prosecution). That means legal would mandate "No commercially licensed libraries can be used, any open source libraries will have to be vetted to ensure the license is compatible and everything else will need to pass IP and compliance audit." That will certainly have an impact on development time frames and economics.

That’s exactly the benefit of a law - it’s a forcing measure to require businesses to invest in processes to understand open sourcing, and to go forward when otherwise no one would make a business case for approval.

And makes it more expensive. There is the seen benefit and then the unseen cost. Every game released will have to account for the possibility of it, and will create issues for people who really didn't want those issues. After awhile people will forget there are associated issues and costs, but they will still be there.

Putting on my Pollyanna hat...

Or it could make it a lot cheaper, if the server were developed entirely on open-source infrastructure from the start. Hopefully the actual game logic would be developed entirely in-house, making it easier to audit before releasing.

Most likely the engine providers would spin off their server components as OSS for this express purpose so their customers can easily comply. This regulation could be a huge win for making the game industry adopt more OSS.

Every game released whose developers have chosen to complicate its design with a client-server architecture. It's not like this is going to hurt the little three-man teams making games on shoe-string budgets. Yeah, it's going to make big budget games a little more expensive, just like how cars with seatbelts are a little more expensive to build, and like how it's a little more expensive to do proper waste management instead of dumping sludge into a river.

What? This a mandate in law that requires a company to do work in order to comply. Studios will spin out LLCs for a game so that if it fails it doesn't end up as a liability. Unintended consequence: more dead games.

It's impossible for the law to cause more games to die, because already the default fate of online games is for them to die. If, with the law, a studio chooses to use an LLC to create the game to conditionally release sources once it shuts down, that was a game that without the law would have died anyway because the studio wouldn't have chosen of its own volition to release sources.

If a studio on it's last legs is required to service a failing product instead of working on a new one the studio will simply close and not comply. That's what tends to happen with forced regulations like this.

And it's what would have happened anyway without the law. How is this difficult to understand? It's not like it's only a few games that shut down without recourse for the players. Ross Scott already did the research on this. Something like 95% of all online games that shut down do so without providing any way for the players to continue playing in some way or without issuing refunds.

Different person here, it's probably because they defensively reject anything that forces anyone to do anything, or would increase prices outside of market forces. Every argument that's used against this kind of legislation was also used against putting airbrakes on trains. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Seriously. If you ever want to see a discussion thread that demonstrates the difference between “reasons” and “excuses” (by being full of the latter), just propose a law forcing game companies to do literally anything and watch the replies.

Yes, gamers can be very tribal and quickly become defensive when you are critical of the companies they have formed a parasocial relationship with.

If they're closing they have nothing to lose by putting the source code up on the internet and saying sue us if you want. It's continuing businesses who are scared of liability.

Really the parent company should be held accountable for that. But that is a more general problem with LLCs that is already causing significant harm.

If they're spun out as an LLC then there's also zero legal risk to to the parent company to dumping the server code to GitHub as open source.

Technically in both cases the risk is nonzero as a wholly owned subsidiary LLC doesn't just let you avoid all risk while still keeping the profits.

> Every game released whose developers have chosen to complicate its design with a client-server architecture.

Huh? Client-server architecture does make things more complicated to implement but it's not THAT bad. And you (usually[1]) do it in service of multiplayer, not because you're big budget or just want to complicate things.

Among Us was literally a three-person team.

[1] I find there are some major benefits to it, especially in post-LLM-world, and have been strongly considering it for some of my solo-dev single-player projects.

Agreed, I'm pretty much doing the same thing for my indie game

It's now a lot more tractable to build a multiplayer game, on the other hand balancing it is a whole other kettle of fish

A lot of games have tacked-on online features to excuse the existence of the server to enable DRM, and a lot of multiplayer games arbitrarily don't offer a way for clients to double as local servers like in the heyday of arena shooters.

Sure, but the existence of such annoying things does not mean that's the only reason to use a client-server architecture and that it would only affect those games.

It's not the only reason, but that does cover the vast majority of online-required games.

It's the main reason for keeping the server part away from players though.

Among Us is also incredibly simple compared to the services required to support some AAA games and even then, their networking code was riddled with exploits that no professional would have written, including RCEs.

Didn't stop it from being a fun, successful game but there's no comparison to the work and complexity involved in larger games.

I'm aware. What's that got to do with anything?

I'm countering your argument that it's "not that bad". If that wasn't your point with mentioning the three person team, what was?

Recap:

> Client-server architecture does make things more complicated to implement but it's not THAT bad. Among Us was literally a three-person team.

The scope of the discussion extends beyond simple games like Among Us and some games require highly complex networked architectures that would be non-trivial to open up.

Ah, I see. Well, the post I was responding to reads to me like a denial of the existence of games like Among Us when it says it wouldn't affect three person dev teams making games on a shoestring budget, and gives off the weird implication that it would only affect big budget games.

That said, I don't mind a tangent, and I have built services for large multiplayer games and it really is not that bad.

I've also worked on MMOs and the architectures there can get quite hairy, particularly when they're deeply plumbed into shared services and infrastructure that they couldn't operate without. Those layers occasionally have closed-source licensed tech mixed in there.

Untangling the entire lot to make the game available upon closure would be a nightmare in some cases.

I've also contributed to game server emulation (pre-professionally) to keep them alive, so preserving games is a cause I support, even if I don't think it's necessarily always going to be trivial.

Oh yeah, I definitely agree with you there.

> Untangling the entire lot to make the game available upon closure would be a nightmare in some cases.

This is only true if the game wasn't architected with open-sourcing in mind. Which affects how this kind of law should be structured.

For example, it makes sense to require the server code to be submitted to an escrow service from the beginning. Part of that process would be a license evaluation, which acts as a forcing function already during the development process.

A simple multiplayer game like Among Us would also have a similarly simple server. There was never any reason not to have included that code in the client to support LAN play from the start. In concept, the gameplay is no different from a deathmatch game in, say, Quake 3 Arena. It's a small group of players sharing a level and interacting with each other in various ways.

> There was never any reason not to have included that code in the client to support LAN play from the start.

Yes there was. It was a 3 person team. That's a good enough reason to not have almost any feature that requires any amount of work, including UI work, because there is always a whole mountain of stuff that you're not doing that you'd like to do as a 3-person dev team.

It's more work to implement the server as a separate program that you additionally have to keep running and load-balance than to build the server into the game.

Remember back in the old days when you could just run your own game server, even though it wasn't open source? That would work too. Or peer to peer LAN gaming, why is that not popular any more?

Designing a game to use developer hosted servers is a choice they made. Probably to squeeze money from microtransactions.

> Or peer to peer LAN gaming, why is that not popular any more?

This. I mean, modern game companies could setup a common (for every game) Headscale or similar solution, let group of friends create their own private VPN between them punching through any NAT and host their own distributed multiplayer game. Yes there is still some involvement server aide from the company but it could be easily shared between games. And if support ends, you still leave players with the option to use their own LAN/VPN system.

Currently one of the features Valve's SDK offers is free use of network relays for P2P gaming without revealing each others IPs. Big and small games have used it. The main downside is if a game wants to offer cross-platform cross-play.

Offering an .exe download is much less of a burden than open sourcing at gunpoint.

because real P2P is hard for realtime stuff. Be it timing or network port forwarding issues.

A self hosted server executable still works fine with that though. Plenty of games had that model.

Yes, but that's not what usually is associated with P2P. That is normal client-server model.

In my original comment I mentioned both options though.

Timing and scalability are probably the biggest issues with realtime P2P applications. Scalability is becoming a bit less of an issue; with mid-splits becoming the norm on cable internet services and 5G SA rolling out, there's just a lot more bandwidth to go around.

Timing issues can be worked around and GPS modules are cheap.

NAT problems aren't usually that bad. Only a minority of networks use symmetric NAT implementations, with most seeming to be using port-restricted cone NAT (EIM/APDF), which can still communicate with any other NAT implementation using endpoint-independent mapping (EIM). Most CGNAT implementations that I've encountered use EIM, with some also doing endpoint-independent filtering (EIF). Between UDP hole-punching, UPnP, NAT-PMP, and IPv6, it's usually possible to establish a P2P connection between 2 endpoints.

A game could use a hybrid client/server and P2P model, with the option to run entirely P2P while accepting its limitations.

Because they cannot profit from it hence why.

Centralised servers allow for subscriptions and other stuff.

Subscriptions are so last decade, it's all about microtransactions now. Not that this changes the motivations for having centralized servers.

Middle ground could be completely open API from the start, so community could build alternative server from the ground up.

Having a documented API and the game actually abiding by it would probably be way more expensive than ensuring you can dump the source code on the community on end of life. The latter is only (sometimes) costly now because the industry is not built around it.

Not everything that makes a product more expensive to release is the end of the world.

If you plan for it from the start, it's a small cost. And the simpler the game development process the cheaper it gets.

It is not. Most of the full online game stacks are not open source and most of the open source ones are poor and under featured

That could change once a law comes out requiring all new developments to be designed differently. Besides, no one is talking about open sourcing the server code. Releasing binaries and patching the client to talk to a local instance is perfectly acceptable. A developer would then just need the ability to redistribute compiled builds.

That was my initial thought as well, but on second thought it does not seem like such a good idea to provide binaries that will never get patched for a public-facing service. Sure, not the company’s issue anymore, but still…

It might make a community rewrite of the server code easier, but that would likely only be attempted for very few games.

It doesn't need to be public-facing. The point is not to be able to continue playing as if the game was still being supported, it's to be able to continue playing at all, in some way. You can set up a box at home and let two or three of your friends in through a VPN. Security is not a concern.

That’s a fair point

A lot of things are costly until they become required by law - then vendors have no choice but making that part of the price they compete on.

The beauty of making it a criminal issue is that those costs go away.

When the library vendor licenses some proprietary crap to a game server vendor, they take on the risk that their library may fall under the open source requirement when the game server shuts down.

At shutdown, criminal law says the library vendor must open source. Since criminal law preempts contract law, no amount of weasel words in the software license change that.

Even if the upstream vendor is out of business or something and did not provide source, surely, the binaries fall under the the open source clause.

Problem completely solved, and no lawyers need to be paid after the fact. (Library vendors might want to pay lawyers to tell them not to license to game servers, or not. Either way, that's not the customers' problem.)

The costs won't be high if doing things that way are industry standard as required by law so all middle ware is already certified for it.

And its not like its a bad thing for a company to calculate in the full cost from the start rather than offloading it onto society when they drop the product.

Yes, an many indie devs will not be able to clear it.

Seems like it would it would put smaller developers in a bind / limit what games even bother with server side systems.

Is your argument that companies would be forced to obey the laws if they are mandated to open source discontinued games? And it's a... bad thing?

Huh? The point is that game developers would never be able to use commercial libraries again. Thus making all development significantly more expensive.

But what commercial software licenses are you using to write backend server architecture for a video game? There's no need for a dependency on FMOD or anything (unless you're doing something very unusual)

Big AAA games have access to Unreal or Unity code and they change the code to fit their needs. They are not able to share the Unity/Unreal code

They are not able to share that code now because licensing the code in a way that it cannot be shared is currently a viable business model for Unreal and Unity - that would change with the proposed law and the middle ware providers will be forced to adopt different terms if they want to continue existing.

Not OP, but it's more the warning not to underestimate the cost required for compliance, and apprehension of this cost may deter their creation.

The final phase of Symbian OS was becoming the open-source Symbian Foundation. This required the existing codebase, hundreds of thousands of files, to be categorised properly (mostly homegrown, some acquired, some licensed) and where necessary restructured so that each directory only had one kind. Painful, exacting, tedious archaeology which all-but-froze development for weeks. Like a long-deferred merge, the cost to pay for belatedly resolving a mess of licenses is daunting.

Only retroactively.

Of course, it would also create a demand for open-source game server libraries, which would surely appear after a while and make the whole process much easier.

So while I believe you about all those difficulties existing today, it's plausible that they would mostly fade away over time. I think temporary growing pains would be an acceptable price for the significant long-term public benefit.

Unreal is open access but not open source.

If the bill is properly worded open sourcing the code shouldn't imply that all 3rd party libraries also have to be open sourced.

> shouldn't imply that all 3rd party libraries also have to be open sourced.

That's a very reasonable way to address the issue of 3rd party licensed IP. I expect something like that will get incorporated into the legislation. In fact, I'm confident it will because well-funded lobbyists will ensure that common sense concern and its very reasonable solution are heard.

Then Electronic Arts and Microsoft will sell their existing server code to newly formed companies (which they happen to own). Then their captive game studios will start releasing new versions where the publicly released "server source code" is five pages of #IfDefs followed by a call to "Start_Totally_3rd_Party_GameServer" in the new library that's not required to be included in the mandated release.

For extra credit, the newly formed 3rd party entity will be incorporated and domiciled in Ireland, Malta or whatever country is currently most tax and currency exchange advantaged. Then the license fees their captive studios have to pay to use the 3rd party library get offshored and tax sheltered - while being large enough amounts to prove this definitely isn't a sham transaction!

To be clear, I don't approve of this myself. In fact, I hate it. But I worked at a high level in a top ten publicly traded tech giant long enough to see how the armies of soul-eating MBAs, lawyers, consultants and lobbyists can subvert anything. Fortunately, only half my soul was eaten and some of it has regrown.

It should if it wants to prevent malicious compliance by spinning out essentially the whole server into a "third party" library.

Nah, you just open source it in a broken state without anything that had separate licensing, so nobody is happy and the law is followed.

> so nobody is happy and the law is followed.

An outcome so common they invented a word for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malicious_compliance

This would be a way better outcome than the current default. I've even seen this suggested before [1].

If game-specific logic is not public, information needed for reverse engineering could be completely missing, but if game-specific logic is available plus the names of the missing libraries, reconstruction of the game should be possible eventually.

[1] https://drewdevault.com/blog/Open-sourcing-video-games/ (See "What if I don’t completely own my game?")

Yes, partial source is still very useful. I don't think the law should allow for it though as companies could intentionally put as much as possible into "proprietary" libraries that they conveniently only license for binary distribution from a totally unrelated company that for no reason at all is owned by the same stakeholders. Much better to just require everything to be there and then have the industry adapt.

This is already common with source releases for games and it is much much much better than no source release at all. A lot of the proprietary middle ware ends up being not that hard to replace after all.

To be fair, it was in a time and age where BOM was not that common. I am assuming nowadays, with BOMs being in place, the process should be much easier.

BOMs are used when they're legally required or if the company has a sufficiently mature cyber security stance, but those both tend to focus mostly on shipped client code versus server-onlt code. Usually you end up with a highly fragmented set out different "BOMs" that are only present as language-specific lock files for the proteins of code that support it.

Lots of games are written in C++ to this day for example so they can eek out every bit of possible performance no matter the trickery required. I would presume this extends to server side of MMOs etc too. C++ has no standard build system even, it's sort of settled on CMake mostly, which has minimal native (working) support for dependencies even, let alone lock files and/or BOMs.

> open source server code if you are going to cease support

> Legal had to verify that there was no licensed library code used and that we had clear, valid copyright to everything there.

I can tell you the other side of that equation. There's no poison pill -short of outright fraud- that will kill an acquisition of a software company, than open source code embedded deep in the product.

I've been in both sides of the table of M&A activity, and in the due dilligence, smart acquirers will always look at the code and libraries in use. If there's anything that even has the hint of open source, that is heavily scrutinized: what is open source by default can't be owned by anyone and if it cannot be owned, it doesn't have IP value.

Most deals that ran into this issue would stop dead in their tracks, and it would take a while to spin back up, that is if the deal went thru at all

I don't follow. What IP value is there in game server code? I would wager usually none. And I would imagine the amount of games made without open source software somewhere in the stack could be counted on one hand.

Open source is a pretty broad umbrella. I doubt a company would say Slay The Spire 2 was poisoned by Godot and that there's no IP value.

I think you miss how sophisticated some game server code is. Taking fighting games for example: they have entire processes to have both clients predict what the other client will do, and then have the server arbitrate the different client solutions into a "fair" result based on latency, player inputs, etc. There are problems that game servers solve that could have applications in other areas, and have a lot of value.

Sure, I didn't say server code wasn't important, but that doesn't make it an IP concern. Not in the way OP was suggesting.

Fighting games usually run peer to peer either with deterministic lockstep or rollback both of which are managed on the client. For actual gameplay at most there’d be a relay as a server. But almost certainly a bunch of ancillary services to support matchmaking and so on.

Hey I already liked the proposed law, you don't have to keep trying to sell it.

Better to just publish the protocols/APIs and let the community roll their own

Often, especially on competitive games, the server is basically a full client, but just without graphics. The server will often run physics simulations etc, so that it can validate that nobody is cheating.

Sure, in some cases you can roll your own server, but often it's impossible.

Impossible is too strong of a word.

If the market is big enough licensed libraries will just change their terms.

I’m curious if you think the law would cause companies to keep better track of these things as development happens. If there was tracking for all the shared libraries from the get go, I’m guessing it would have been an easier transition?

This difficulty has been greatly reduced by git. With git, you can have the complete provenance of every line of code.

Git has ended the accusations people have leveled at me for code theft. (I beat them all back because I had meticulous documentation and the accusers always had nothing. Git just made that easy.)

For my work, Git (and Github) have been a godsend.

AI today may be able to streamline that process.

Have it read and compare the code with what it knows about open source. Many AI engines can also google that and give a comprehensive list of similarities.

Reduces the list of things to check by maybe orders of magnitude and months to days.

> Legal had to verify that there was no licensed library code used

Your company did not tracked libraries licenses in the first place?

Consider that there might be a difference between knowing which licensed libraries you used and verifying that your usage of them fully complied with the current license terms when releasing the source code. For example, licensing a library for binary distribution might not cover releasing a copy of a header file, modified copy of something you got from support before a bug fix made it into a release, some random utilities used for preprocessing data, etc. even though for years your developers might not have made the distinction because it wasn’t open source when they were actively working on it.

Also, every company I've ever worked at, including ones producing regulated products like medical or home appliances, uses the beuracracy to take the stance of "Considered Risk". Rather than spending all the tone knowing for sure they comply, they make a "best effort" (the level of which varies a lot by company and industry) and bank on never getting closely questioned about the specifics. Releasing publicly is exactly that "closely questioned about the specifics" though.

This is a non problem. We use libraries with standard licenses and there is finite set of them - like 4. And I work on fairly large software.

If your company has issue achieving this, then it was simply not complying with those licenses.

You can go through all licenses just by checking their list in maven. None of that is hard or expensive.

We have considerably more than 4, some of which are custom works of companies which have been selling under their terms since the 80s. No, I don’t think it’s a huge problem but if you have a lawyer who doesn’t at least want to check, you need a better lawyer.

This is actually something that a law requiring source code releases would end up improving though as those companies would be forced to standardize their licenses or find themselves without customers.

Historically, the game industry often enough wasn't even able to track the final source code of their past releases.

That is already the case in enterprise projects for many years now.

Since around 2010, that in most projects I am involved, the CI/CD pipelines can only talk to internal repos with vetted dependencies.

You can still do whatever locally, however the build will break when using non authorised dependencies.

More likely, those commercially licensed libraries will wind up needing to adjust their terms to allow for this kind of release.

(Also, legal will basically never give an 'all clear'. That's not their job, their job is to inform you of the risks, and so it's extremely rare that they will not come up with some)

> That will certainly have an impact on development time frames and economics.

I don't think there would be much of an impact long term as third party frameworks would be forced to adapt their licensing or die. It's not like years old source code is really as valuable as some companies pretend.

A lot of the pain you experienced is mainly due to making the decision to open source after the code was already written rather than from the start - its really no different than any other late requirements change.

Guarantee X years of server time from launch. If you shut down early, pro rated refund and open source server code. After the launch window, close server with no penalty if desired, but just still open source code. Or keep server open if it's profitable. Or some other option.

The specifics can be hammered out, but something middle ground seems sensible.

Said this in another comment: In case a company or new management wants to renew an IP, maybe there should be a waiting period like 1-5 years before they are legally required to release/open-source the server code.

Or how about this: what if, in order to launch a new online-only game in the first place, companies have to submit a copy of the source code as it is on launch day, to the courts or wherever. Then the courts could release it if the game hasn't been active for N years...

Many developers with good will actually tried that and gave up due to lots of problems. This is not just bad ROI but also a legal minefield. Engineers usually cannot argue against this kind of risks. Enforcing this will unlikely work in higher courts. Though something like open sourcing protocols for server reimplementation may have some chances.

While I see problems in the law but the spirit is reasonable. We need to push toward this direction. At least there should be difficult economical trade-off for publishers when they decide to shut down the game. Nowadays, some random executive just takes look into some excel, see some games have declining revenue and decides to "simplify the business" without much thoughts. This has to stop.

Based on comments below the solution is to make the API public and publish the architecture design, along with the binaries.

This way the company can avoid spending too much money on open sourcing the code, and the community can just rewrite the server while keeping the original binaries running.

I think this is a more desirable solution for customers than a refund anyway--if I like a game, I don't want my $60 back in exchange for never being able to play it again. I just want to keep playing it.

Yes, the $60 is nothing compared to your time investment into a game you like.

This doesn't make sense. The developers should only be obligated to provide a dedicated server plus an in-game server browser that supports a standardized service discovery protocol. The players must figure out themselves how to run the software on their computer.

> open source server code

No, and requiring this will likely give the opposition counter points.

You don't need the source code at all. You only need the ability to run the server yourself.

When the 6 person startup I worked for shut down, the founders spent a few months of their own time to open source the product because people still liked it, they just didn't wanna pay for it.

So people were allowed to selfhost.

Of course this probably doesn't scale or work for every company but I thought it was nice to see.

Just make it a literal crime for corporations to interfere with community work on games they don't care about supporting. The problem will take care of itself. People are more than willing to put in the work themselves, it's just that hateful corporations will send them cease and desist letters if not actual lawsuits.

For a number of reasons (licensing issues, code being lost, etc.) this will only work if source code must be escrowed long before that time.

I happen to be shutting down an online game right now.

https://www.tyleo.com/blog/sunsetting-rec-room-how-to-give-a...

The sad truth is that these things have high operating costs, especially if they need moderation. I would guess this bill just makes it more risky to make the games in the first place. It’s already brutally hard to make money on games.

I feel like the effect of this might just be that shutting an online game makes it more likely to take a whole company down if you have to issue refunds. Alternatively, it might push multiplayer games towards other business models like ads, free-to-play, or subscription.

Sorry to hear about your situation. For the game you're shutting down online services for, forgive my nieve question but how much work is it to expose an environment variable called `GAME_SERVER_URL` and then document the API contract it expects on the other end?

Servers have a real cost, nobody is denying that, but I think the people who bought the game should have an option/alternative in case the servers are down.

We looked into it. Hackers got part of the way there so we decided not to make a change. They might be able to do it after the title is fully sunset and the team disbanded.

We basically have to get as much done on a 3/4 month timeline as possible and it isn’t a priority like saving content or refunding gift cards is. Shutting down is a lot of work.

Anything you can add to the knowledge pool is already going to be of immense help for your community reverse engineering in the future. Be it as simple as stuff like "Our in-game chat runs over IRC" for example - that already simplifies that entire part of figuring it out of machine code out once servers are gone. ANY knowledge you can share no matter how small it is always helps when all you have is a binary file and no server to respond to your requests.

Yeah, we published some protobuf schemas on GitHub so players can decode some of our binary protocols more easily.

Is the game p2p or dedicated infra? Best thing you can do is provide the infra files that you can. Doesn't even have to be turn key. Also for the coordinator API service, anything you can provide there as well. Couple those with a configurable base url and the hackers ought to get it the rest of the way

Dedicated but our multiplayer is a P2P-like API because our original game server provider was Photon.

> We looked into it. Hackers got part of the way there so we decided not to make a change. They might be able to do it after the title is fully sunset and the team disbanded.

This doesn't actually answer the question about how hard it would be. What's the specific level of effort required, and some amount of why so people can learn from your experience.

> We basically have to get as much done on a 3/4 month timeline as possible and it isn’t a priority like saving content or refunding gift cards is. Shutting down is a lot of work.

I'd rather have a working game then a refund of a gift card. Including if that means I have to stand up my own servers.

Priorities I guess

The answer is, "not trivial but easy enough that smart players can probably do it."

To each their own on what they want. We obviously can't give everyone everything. Players don't want the game to go away at all. We still talk to players every day and have confidence we are doing the right thing with our limited time.

At least part of the answer is this doesn't meet the requirement of the proposed law. You need to actually provide the functionality of the server-side, not just its API.

What are the insurmountable obstacles to releasing the server code for the community to run?

As I understand it, the obstacles are mostly legal. Our development team would love to just throw the code on GitHub.

Sounds like if it was mandatory to make a server release, legal would mostly shut up and it would be low cost. In other words, minimal change in risk.

The refund thing is just there to force action by putting a dollar value on inaction. Pretty much no company is expected to actually choose refunds.

> Alternatively, it might push multiplayer games towards free-to-play if in-app-purchases are excluded.

Good point, the law had better not exclude those.

This is one of the reason why that law will surely be challenged and very likely invalidated by SCOTUS. Trade secret protection is a very fundamental part and if this is forced to be broken by legally compelled speech, then it needs to have very creative interpretations over judicial precedents.

If this only applies to new sales then there is nothing that must be broken. The developers would need to choose technologies where license allows this. Those that don't wouldn't get new sales from game developers.

It's the same as GPL and similar licenses. If you don't want to publish your source that contains trade secrets then don't incorporate GPL licensed code.

There are also already various laws which compel certain types of speech. Consider things like nutrient labels or ingredient lists.

99% of the server code doesn't deserve trade secret protection, and fulfilling the goal of games continuing to work doesn't require releasing the other 1%. They can keep their matchmaking algorithm secret while releasing the code that lets people straightforwardly connect to each other. They can keep most of their code secret.

> 99% of the server code doesn't deserve trade secret protection,

Unfortunately, it is not you define whether it deserves. It's a court, ultimately SCOTUS.

As long as there is an option to give refunds then nothing is being compelled.

What a fucked situation where a company that fails who took money from people on the premise of a service existing no longer offers that service, says it's against the first amendment to enable people to continue having access to the product they paid for.

I'm curious how this would play out in the case that the company paid to license some software component that they can't open source.

Simple: that contract would be illegal. It's that simple. You can't put yourself into a position where you would be violating the law. The licensor would be on the hook for violating the law. This is "you can’t outsource compliance". Either your contract makes sure that you are compliant or a judge would make you both.

This case illustrates this point fully:

https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2019/08/settlemen...

That's not a worry. You can always refund.

Issues like that are part of why the law is only going to apply to new releases.

If you still choose to license something you can't release later, and it's critical to the game's operation, then that's a deliberate liability and you'll need to replace it.

That sounds like a bad incentive. Lots of games license software like Photon to run game servers. For many games, building something like that is a non-starter.

It's not like it specifically has to be open source. Photon can license their software in a way that allows for free servers that are still tied to the specific game. And then companies can buy that.

And it's not expensive for Photon to do that, so I don't see why they wouldn't add that feature for a modest price or even free. (And that's assuming the license doesn't already allow it.)

I’m not sure what you mean. Photon makes money running game servers as a service. It wouldn’t surprise me if their business wasn’t viable selling software alone.

As far as I can tell, you can have Photon run the servers or you can license them to run yourself. Though they clearly prefer the former.

Either way, there's not much revenue coming in to most games by the time the developer wants to abandon them, and Photon's not getting paid much either. There's a lot of ways to make this work out monetarily.

It’s not that simple. Many of the newer products are designed cloud-first.

I’d love to see you rise to the challenge. If you think there’s an opportunity to make money here, “lots of ways to make this work,” perhaps take it up yourself.

Cloud first is fine as long as there's a fallback. Photon has a fallback.

Can you name something that's stuck on the cloud on a technical level and also couldn't be substituted with a mild dev effort?

Right now I don't think it's a good money making opportunity. Becoming one would need Photon or some other significant service provider completely refusing to license their software in a way that's compatible with this law, and assurance that they'll continue to refuse while I build my entire product around supplementing/replacing them.

Sometimes, when a game developer shuts down, their computer equipment is liquidated with useful information still on it.

so a new law making it required would likely solve the legal issues, and gets the dev team (the only ones thinking about users or doing what's right) get what they wanted from the start?

I doubt it. I don't think another law _reduces_ legal issues. If anything it makes the situation more complicated. The plug is still getting pulled and I don't think this materially changes the outcome. If the company shuts down I'm not sure there is a legal obligation to release the code or refund. What entity would be responsible for that work?

Do you think any compagny would want to release some very sensitive / secret sauce code?

Tbh I think engineers gladly would. I think most folks want the content out. It’s the legal obligations that always get in the way.

I dunno, is it that special?

Take I’d for example. They released source code for genre defining extremely popular games and were fine.

And how often is code reused anyway? Every online game seem to either use mostly stock server code that comes with the engine or build anew every time.

Most sauce code is actually banal and boring no matter what the company executives tell themselves about their proprietary dung pile.

I doubt it's possible for legislation to mandate meaningful compliance regarding something as dynamic and rapidly evolving as online games. Despite good intentions, such legislation often results in unintended consequences including distorting the market, creating perverse incentives or even making the problem worse.

Serious problems are already apparent. Games offered “solely for the duration of [a] subscription." aren't regulated, which will greatly accelerate the death of perpetual licensing. A world where no games are available for outright purchase and offline use would be disastrous for players and historical preservation.

It would be better if they'd focus on narrower problems where they can make a positive difference. For example, mandating a freely distributable end-of-life patch to remove online activation from DRMed games. Creating a patch and uploading it once to the Internet Archive isn't a big enough burden to make companies modify their biz model or deploy armies of lawyers and MBAs to circumvent. When it comes to rapidly evolving technology, the best regulations are clearly defined, narrowly scoped and cheaper to comply with than avoid or game.

You know what? I'm tired of unintended consequences fear mongering. You know what else had a tons of unintended consequences? Mandating seat belts. This is the industry kicking and crying because they don't want to be told that they can't abuse the consumer blatantly. Joke Bloke would still be able to release their game without wondering if this kind of law exists because the law will never apply to them. These kind of laws are targeting a massive abuse by big companies with a bag of money to figure it out.

It seems like California is the furthest country in the EU.

I played games online over dial-up, a few asynchronously via email, in the 1990s. Until the modern era, if some sort of direct TCP/IP connection wasn't built in, then an add-on usually supplied everything needed for private multiplayer and map editing.

I don't think companies should be on the hook for maintaining moderation, hosting, and development at no cost in perpetuity, but addressing not providing any legal way to access or modify content from a onetime sale forces companies to pick a model so consumers can make informed purchases.

I've often wondered how the gaming industry has gotten away for so long muddying whether they're selling products or services.

Isn't this settled? Vernor vs Autodesk, they're services

"even making the problem worse."

Exactly.

> I doubt it's possible for legislation to mandate meaningful compliance regarding something as dynamic and rapidly evolving as online games. Despite good intentions, such legislation often results in unintended consequences including distorting the market, creating perverse incentives or even making the problem worse.

I believe it's possible to write laws that serve the people they're supposed to protect. It may take iteration, but you have to start somewhere.

I'm willing to tolerate the new problems that may arise from trying to solve an existing one. Presenting the unknowns as something to be avoided because it might be complicated and require additional effort to fix, is not a sane refutation.

"It may take iteration, but you have to start somewhere."

It's hitting the assembly floor. Whether this is good depends, imo, entirely on indie carveouts for revenue. I'm afraid of shortsighted legislation like certain sections of DMCA.

Talking about the problems now is important. "Add this or the harm is worth more than the benefit" isn't a blanket refutation, but it is a refutation of the existing bill

The DMCA does exactly what its proponents wanted. That is is a bad deal for society as a whole is another issue but this does not invalidate the entire concept of addressing injustices with new laws.

> I believe it's possible to write laws that serve the people they're supposed to protect.

I agree. In theory it should be possible to create a fully transparent legislative drafting process incorporating red-teaming, open comment periods and mandated iteration cycles where bugs and unintended consequences inconsistent with the original intent are required to be addressed years after a law is passed. I'd love to design such a process.

Unfortunately, that's not at all how legislation gets made. It's opaque and fully penetrated at every level by highly-organized, well-funded special interests working to subvert the process in overt and covert ways. There have been entire books written about the incredibly sophisticated and devious ways legislation gets nerfed, loop-holed and corrupted. I once had dinner with a long-time Washington lobbyist for a public interest group. He has decades of experience seeing how the sausage is really made in the backrooms. It was a very depressing dinner.

The one thing that doesn't happen in recent decades of U.S. law-making is any chance of revisiting and revising a law once it is passed and not working. The reality is the U.S. Constitution and law-making process was brilliantly conceived 250 years ago by smart people with the highest ideals for mankind. It's amazing that system survived for as long as it did. But it's now been corrupted by black hats at Ring 0. And you can't deploy patches to resecure a system once the patching process itself has been pwned.

The only legislation which still gets passed in any reasonably pure form are things which no well-funded political or corporate vested interests care to fight over. Games now represent more yearly revenue than movies and music combined and most of the money now rolls-up to giants like MSFT, EA, Sony, etc. The chances of any legislation passing with real teeth to meaningfully restrict online games are virtually nil. Although if legislators see it as a popular enough issue, we might see a law pass with much fanfare but it will have subtle nerfs and kill-switches built in ensuring it makes no real difference in practice.

If you're wondering why legislators propose such laws if they know they're doomed to ultimately make no difference, it's for two reasons: 1. To get some positive press just for proposing something they know will never be enacted in law, or 2. Proposing a law which very well-funded vested interests will mobilize to kill or nerf generates an extraordinary amount of cash "donations" to campaigns, political parties and PACs. I learned from the lobbyist I had dinner with that #2 is far more common than #1.

> Serious problems are already apparent. Games offered “solely for the duration of [a] subscription." aren't regulated, which will greatly accelerate the death of perpetual licensing. A world where no games are available for outright purchase and offline use would be disastrous for players and historical preservation.

Either it’ll go this way, or you’ll get the client for free and it’ll cost $(full game price) to create an online account. Free client means no refunds, thanks for playing!

No, without legal guarantees that perpetual licensing actually means perpetual availability there is actually no such thing. All this would change would force companies to accurately advertise the contract their are intending to honor, thus allowing more honest companies to compete.

This appears to treat subscription style games and free to play with in game purchases differently than other games.

I would assume if that law passed the simplest compliance would just be to charge subscriptions and stop selling games directly. It seems like doing that would comply with that law without requiring much to change?

AFAIK the issue is with one time purchase games, where is not clear if you will be able to play forever or whenever they want to pull the plug, if they change to subscription based model or free to play, then it will be clear for the players what they are paying for.

The distinction makes sense, but I wonder if the bill will inadvertently incentivize games to move to subscription based models, which would be ultimately be a worse experience for consumers.

Ultimately consumers can then make a better choice, to simply drop those subscription based games.

They could, but there is very little evidence to show that a dislike for subscription models outweighs people's desire to consume quality content.

Evidence is strong that people follow the content they want, and then secondarily choose the least friction delivery model.

I still support this law. If they move to subscriptions to “dodge” this law, that’s fine in a way. At least consumers won’t be under the false impression they own something in the rare case they’re paying a subscription to play a game.

It already is a subscription based model. The difference between they're lying by charging once and pretending like they don't know they're going to stop providing the minimum requirements to play the game.

You're describing the reality, and the difference after adding these additional rule, they'd have to be honest about what you're paying for and for how long you are allowed to use it.

Additional, if it is a subscription, it's more likely ongoing revenue could possibly fund providing the service indefinitely. Will that always happen, obviously not, but then game studios won't be as likely to do the same exact thing that catalysed the stop killing games project.

As others have echoed, I think a subscription model is FINE for a game IF you are upfront about that being the cost. I suspect many customers are frustrated when they purchase something and then it is simply not able to be used when the developer feels like it.

It would basically mandate subscription model for online games. Also wonder if it'd introduce legal risk for online mode in a game that also has local play, say Call of Duty or the newer Super Smash Bros, or if "ordinary use" is clearly not that.

No it would not basically mandate it. Providing server binaries for the community to run is not just an entirely reasonable thing to do, it used to be industry standard before companies learned they could maximized profits by keeping more control.

It won't. Most games bought on steam will never be played, not even once. Customers won't splurge on subscriptions they won't use.

> Most games bought on steam will never be played, not even once.

How did you gain access to my Steam library statistics?

https://www.pcgamesn.com/steam/pile-of-shame

Presumably companies could get around this with something like "your first 3 years are free, after that online play costs $X/month".

Upfront purchase for something that depends on online services to work raises some questions. The problem with the bill is they want either literally infinite support or an open source server in the end. It'd make sense if there were some time limit based on the price of the game, just to guard against scams like asking $50 for a game that's shut down a year later.

> The problem with the bill is they want either literally infinite support or an open source server in the end.

No the bill doesn't state that. From the bill text [1]

(2) Beginning on the date a digital game operator ceases to provide services necessary for the ordinary use of the digital game, the operator shall provide the purchaser with one or more of the following: (A) A version of the digital game that can be used by the purchaser independent of services controlled by the operator. (B) A patch or update to the purchaser’s version of the digital game that enables its continued use independent of services controlled by the operator. (C) A refund in an amount equal to the full purchase price paid for the digital game by the purchaser.

Just curious, how did you arrive at the infinite support or open source server interpretation?

[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...

Oh I didn't mean open source, it can be a binary (if applicable), but same problem, they'd need to provide a way to run the online servers locally. The third option is a refund, which isn't feasible.

Or patch out the online requirements. In many cases, the only real online requirement is a license key check. Also the refund is, afaict, intended to be essentially a last resort option to make the customer as whole as possible.

The refund alternative is also important to give the courts guidance for the monetary damages to consider if a company does not comply.

> I would assume if that law passed the simplest compliance would just be to charge subscriptions and stop selling games directly. It seems like doing that would comply with that law without requiring much to change?

That is indeed a valid way to comply with it. What that changes, at least, is that the consumer has the expectation that access ends with the end of the subscription, as opposed to where the expectation is for the access to never end.

Licenses to game software*. It's extremely rare to actually purchase something of value today. But yes, subscriptions are the norm.

Subscriptions in games would be the death of gaming imo.

mmorpgs seem to be healthy and now we even buy games full price then buy battle passes every 3 months to get shiny skins

"Subscriptions" are already what you have when companies are allowed to shut down games whenever they want more money from you.

Another way to phrase this would be that games that are already effectively a long term subscription with an unspecified period would need to be more clear about the deal they are offering. That's already a good outcome as it would improve the ability of actually perpetually available game purchases to compete.

The article is really vague and a bit misleading, but the bill text appears to be surprisingly readable, and honestly not much longer than the article.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...

The solution here is for publishers to give away the client, and simply charge a subscription.

Keypoint:

  > would require a digital game operator to communicate specified information to purchasers and prospective purchasers of a digital game 60 days before the operator ceases to provide services necessary for the ordinary use of the game, and, beginning on the date an operator ceases to provide services necessary for the ordinary use of the game, require the operator to provide the purchaser with an alternate version of, a patch or update to, or a refund for, the game,

"or a refund for the the game".

"Here's your $0 back, thanks for playing!"

That makes it a bit tricky for games like WoW that charge for expansions, as well as subscription. But I'm sure MS can figure something out.

the bill explicitly doesn't apply to games that are free or are on a subscription system. (I assume free-to-play with microtransactions would be covered by this bill though, unless those microtransactions are subscription-based or time-limited.)

I am indeed worried that this will push games to be subscription-based, so I would advocate making the bill apply even to subscription-based games. Though that would require some thought, of course, as it's not obvious how it should apply to such a game.

A subscription is at least more honest. When you pay for an online game you aren’t buying an item, you are paying for a service for a time period. With a subscription that time period is explicitly laid out.

Sunsetting subscription service is fine IMHO. The deal is clear when buying (you get X months of play). Just like Netflix vs buying DVD. Also the financial incentives align - as long as someone pays monthly, money comes in to keep the lights on the servers.

Micro transactions should be covered tho. If you buy an epic skin for your player in a F2P game and suddenly you no longer can use the skin - money back!

Vast majority of games don't rely on any server.

And those will be made subscription based anyway.

Never going to happen. For a while everyone was trying to make a wow killer to get in on the subscription revenue. They all failed. Turns out people dont like subscriptions all that much.

What's stopping them now and how would the proposed law change that?

What's your worry? Games where the publisher can shut them down whenever they want are already effectively a subscription with an unspecified period. Getting publishers to be up front about that would already be a positive outcome as more informed customers can make better purchasing decisions.

I'm on the treadmill so this may appear jumbled.

Bought PGA Tour 2k21 for $50. In October the servers shut down completely neutering the game. I think you're allowed to play a few courses still. But the career mode, which is why I originally bought the game, was completely turned off. Mind you that career mode had zero Internet needed features. It's like a sports franchise mode.

So good on this bill. 2K should rot for deprecating a game I bought for $50 only 5 years ago.

But you knew exactly what you were buying. It’s not hidden to you that an internet connection is required when you buy the game. Game developers are generally pretty terrible and do a lot of really shady things to extract value from their players. But that one isn’t one. The terms are clearly stated before your purchase

I’d debate that there are “clearly stated terms” when the result is completely unpredictable, will it work for 10 years or 3 hours? Reading the terms you have no idea.

The original sin is selling a product that has an ongoing cost for a fixed price without creating an ongoing trust to pay those costs. Imagine I had a gas station that sold all you can use gasoline for a car for 4k. Then I sell a bunch of memberships and pay myself then go bankrupt. That’s straight up fraud.

I'll just play Civ 4 Beyond the Sword forever. Or whatever is available on the Internet archive.

Which is the sensible thing to do. There are a lot of local games available, if people don’t like online requirements just look at the rest of the massive catalog of games available

But for players to make such a decision in an informed manner they need to actually know the deal they are getting into with modern games and contrary to your original assertion it is far from clear now.

> Reading the terms you have no idea.

If a game says clearly a constant internet connection is required, I don’t see how you would expect it to work when their servers are down. It would indeed be nicer if they would provide a local experience, but is it really something that should be enforced through regulations? That feels very wrong to me. I personally dislike EA business model and wouldn’t engage with it, I think it’s a pretty shitty corporation. But when buying diablo games where a connection is required, even if I always only play them solo, at no point do I have expectations I will be able to continue playing if servers are shut down. The deal is clear from the get go, I can decide to engage or not. There a lots of other games to play if I care more about local experience.

The arguments to “stop killing games” feel very entitled to me and the slogans disingenuous

You could frame the regulation in a variety of ways:

1. Require a clear labeling of sunset date.

2. Require an independent trust created from a portion of the initial payment to fund ongoing operation.

3. Ban fixed payments for things with ongoing known operating costs.

4. Provide local mechanisms to continue to run the game.

The original sin is a fixed price for an ongoing expense as a business model.

If the TOS said the game would be destroyed in 5 years I would not have made the purchase. You're making my point. Why didn't the TOS tell me the plan?

Because that’s not at all what terms of services are about, there is no expectation of providing a public roadmap

> I think you're allowed to play a few courses still. But the career mode, which is why I originally bought the game, was completely turned off. Mind you that career mode had zero Internet needed features.

I suspect this is the same as IO Interactive's "Hitman: World of Assassination".

99% of the game is single player. The game allows you to unlock additional things in the game (different starting locations in a level, more equipment).

But, if you play the game offline, all of that progression is completely blocked off.

I guess what happened is the progression ties to the saving, which is heavily coupled to online syncing. And so the logic is like `if (offline) { useSafeMode() }`. But it's so lame.

In some cases the online dependence is purely business decision to be able to sell you "micro" transactions.

Can any smart hackers crack this so I can play career mode again lol? Please?

I think the Peacock servers are what you're looking for. https://thepeacockproject.org/

I think it's the right moment to acknowledge that Epic Games handled discontinuation of Unreal series well and responsibly [0] and how standalone servers were good for community.

* When GameSpy announced shutdown, patches were released to use Epic released the "post-GameSpy" patch, replacing the GameSpy servers with Epic's master servers for Unreal Tournament 3 [1] * Older Unreal series games later were transferred for maintenance to OldUnreal [2], and also made free.

At the same time, they are not open source, nor source available. So, there is an entity, that owns the code and maintains it, without the hassle of opensourcing it.

This is because the series have a strong community, which was in large part formed because the standalone servers, prior to algorithmic matchmaking, allowed people to gather there and learn to be social to each other and learn gaming etiquette. You had to play strategies for repeated games and be civil to others. Modern matchmaking strips us of that - you play with others once and go separate ways, so you don't have to deal with consequences and can use one-time game strategies, which leads to poor behavior and less enjoyment. Yes, you had players of drastically different skill levels on the same servers, and that was a good thing. Skilled players could teach newbies, newbies could learn the gaming etiquette and see what's possible, instead of boiling in the same pot with others playing completely different games than on the other skill levels. You had the core game and the social game on top of it, now we are all alone in our rooms interacting with strangers we will never see or play again with nor against.

Maybe Epic is not the best or the most loved company (compared to Valve) but I respect, that they understood that "this cow has gave us enough milk already", and could part ways with it, leaving existing community satisfied.

[0]: https://www.epicgames.com/unrealtournament

[1]: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/13210/view/291772582...

[2]: https://oldunreal.com/

This happened to me back in 2024 when Supercell abruptly shut down the game “Clash Mini”. Lost $100+ in in-game purchases.

They did offer to transfer things to other Supercell games, but that had no value to me as I didn’t play those.

I complained to the App Store, but Apple refused to refund purchases made more than 60 days ago (IIRC).

I know things don’t necessarily last forever, especially digital assets, but to spend a lot of money on something only to have it shut down and made unusable within months really stings.

>Lost $100+ in in-game purchases.

You lost the money the moment you made in-game purchases.

Frankly if they kept the game up it might be $1,000 by now.

Do they need to put some funds in escrow? Or will they just shut down the entire company and let the players sue for it. (I know that big publishers won't do that, but I'm sure the lawyers could create shell corporations to solve that problem.)

Or they could just demonstrate that they have an offline play capability right from the moment they sell it.

It doesn't really matter how they comply, so long as the punishment for bon-compliance is serious enough to motivate a good-faith attempt. I'm wary of jumping right into encoding specifics into legislation. That said, I'll be surprised if this actually has the necessary teeth.

Bankruptcy is a universal get-out-of-punishment free card. At least, if you're a corporation large enough and foresighted enough to shove your liabilities off onto a fictional subsidiary before starting.

If the bankruptcy process already involves identifying and administering the company's assets, I feel releasing the server software (as-is) to owners of the game could be part of that.

I don't think most game owners could take the server side software and assemble it into working servers their game could contact and use. This isn't realistic and needs something to change at the fundamental server design side and the game development side. A silly answer is regulations about how you can and can't make a game. Another silly answer is a cottage industry doing game server hosting that's required to be third party by law. I don't have any good, realistic ideas that aren't just trying to force game developers to build games differently (or build different games). Maybe that's the cost here but is that better than just letting angry customers influence the market?

And yet kids take Java server components and mod components and assemble them into Minecraft servers for their friends, and there’s a whole industry around providing pre-configured servers for games like Minecraft, project zomboid, rust, etc. and those services have been around for decades. So I don’t know what the issue is.

It doesn't matter if they personally could do it. As long as they have the ability to contract someone who can do it to do it.

We don't need most game owners to be able to do that, only one of them who can then instruct the others.

Presuming that the code is the company's asset, and doesn't use third-party licensed assets. Otherwise you'll be in line for a refund with all of the other company's creditors. Or you get part of the code that you can't use.

Step 1: Open LLC dedicated to this specific video game title.

The entertainment industry has a long history of making successful movies appear unprofitable on paper to avoid paying royalties.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

My favorite example of this is when Warner Brothers said that Malibu’s Most Wanted wasn’t profitable because they spent so much money marketing Harry Potter that year.

That’s not how things work as far par as participating on the back end of a specific project (which is contractual, not entity based). Thats a profit /loss sharing entity setup for legal accounting reasons (the entity files taxes). Generally not even required since the studio does this at their corp level. Even LLCs will pass these through. This would likely be do some partner/investor.

The contracts that celebrities get on adjusted gross (adjusted is doing 100x the work of the word gross in this context) have no specific entity revenue in mind. If costs show up later after some cash has been distributed, people absolutely freak out to give money back, so you need an arrangement that works such that that doesn’t happen.

Plenty of agents over the years sold celebrities the idea of gross on first dollar and couldn’t be bothered to read the proposed contract which led to many publicized lawsuits.

The massive battle Peter Jackson had with the studio after none of the LoTR movies made a "profit" was very telling.

Oh, and it's even an example in that Wiki article you linked lol

From the movie "Bowfinger" [0]

  Dave: But movies cost millions of dollars to make.
  Robert K. Bowfinger: That's after gross net deduction profit percentage deferment ten percent of the nut. Cash, every movie cost $2,184.

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0131325/?ref_=nm_flmg_job_1_acc...

Just make the punishment the seizure and full release of the game assets (all source code, version control history, tooling, and release of copyright/trademarks).

It's always going to be a wild goose chase trying to take money when there isn't any (actually or by design), just take the product and let the public update it as a last resort.

Why not? They'll spin a new LLC for every title and leave it empty shell, without capital to be recovered by the users should they sue.

One good option could be to make the distributor (like Steam or Play Store) liable as well. They would then have an interest on making sure that publisher/developer holds up on their side of the deal.

For example they could require that they provided with those EOL patches/sources when game is released, require liability insurance in case of bankruptcy etc.

That's an interesting point. Steam likes to pretend they are only facilitating the transaction and the developer/publisher is the real seller when it suits them but I bet that isn't how most players experience the deal.

I would expect that this leads to cases where the game is handed over to a shell company that goes bankrupt. The shell does not have the rights to all parts of the code and can thus release only part of it in a state that is useless. Some parts might have a weird license attached and so on.

Escrow or demonstration upfront will raise the bar before releasing new games in California.

If the law requires the shell company to release the source code then they have to release it. The parent can then go and sue the shell company all they want for releasing things without license but that no longer involves the public.

Not a bad idea, but why does this only apply to games?

I prime example of other software this would have benefited is AutoCAD.

People who refused the conversion to a subscription, and maintained their "lifetime" licenses, where shut down after a couple of years.

Agreed! Far too many companies selling software as lifetime license and their renegade on that deal. A refund should be allowed. Or simply make the software offline without drm

To be fair, B2B sales have typically existed in a different world, even for physical goods. Take the Sale of Goods Act in the UK, offering consumer protections. A business simply can’t take advantage of many of its protections as it’s aimed specifically at B2C sales.

How were they shut down? Like as in the old software refuses to start or they cant renew maintenance / no security updates?

Adobe turned the license servers off that the installers used to verify your CS6 installer key. No check pass, no install. Of course, you can just use an LLM to build a patch, or pirate a copy, but it's the principle I suppose.

CS6 verifies keys locally if it can't reach adobe's servers. Are they specifically blocking that?

Blocking CS6 from accessing the internet in your firewall and using a key somoene posted online was a common practice back in the day.

It would be fair in general to disallow charging a one-time fee for something that's shut down soon later. I don't expect perpetual support, but there should be some target based on the price that any well-intended software maker will exceed.

Also if you advertise "lifetime license," that should mean lifetime.

I agree, and the user's of AutoCAD that I know, weren't; asking for any "support", they just wanted the software to keep working...

Because going up against all types of big software publishers at once would invite MUCH more lobbying which would make any progress likely impossible. Better to start in one area, gaming in this case, to get a precedent out there, which then makes the fight against general software publishers easier.

I thought they just wanted to thwart DRM; people still pirate AutoCAD 2018.

It only applies to games because the people behind it (Ross Scot) chose to limit their efforts that way. If you want to campaign for an even larger scope feel free to put in the effort.

Most "gamers" don't want to pay $5 for a game you spent 10,000 hours slaving to make. They will complain the game was too short when Steam shows they spent 10+ hours playing it.

Now they want more.

The same is true for TV, movies, books. It's an insanely competitive market for people's time and attention. There are more games on Steam with 10,000 hours of dev time put into them than you can play in a lifetime. Standards for what's worth your limited time and money are therefore extremely high.

If you're passionate about making games chances are you're not going to succeed financially. Set your sights on personal success in the artistic sense. Can you communicate what you wanted, can you enrich some people's lives a bit with your work? It doesn't pay the bills, and that's not really fair, but it's also not unique. Lots of valuable labor receives no reward.

None of this is really relevant to the law in question though, which is itself pretty basic consumer protection against a company yanking back something it sold.

Minecraft, GTA are still some of the largest media franchises of any kind in the world. By players and by expense. They'll continue to make it worth it.

I'm old enough to remember a time when you bought a copy of a game and played it locally. Most games were around $60 and we paid it. It is only more recently that someone decided that viewing ads was a better way to pay for games - you got what you wanted and no one values games anymore.

Even back in the day, if I paid 60 bucks and spent less then 40 hours solving the game I was disappointed and felt like I paid too much. I invested in the hardware and software and I expect something out it.

Happy to pay for your game but don't hobble it or subject me to ads.

They still sell plenty of games as a one-time $60 purchase. Though instead of owning a physical copy, you might only have a key to some DRM system.

If you paid $60 bucks for a sega genesis game in 1990 you were paying about $156 adjusting for inflation. Different figures for different values of "back in the day" obviously.

I valued the games and the time I spent playing them. Tons of people on handheld devices, that have little money for games, is a whole different world. Seems like gaming is a tough business, I have to wonder how this applies though: https://bothsidesofthetable.com/most-startups-should-be-deer...

The developer back then also had a much smaller potential audience. It's only natural that as an industry becomes more mainstream the economies of scale drive the price down.

There are a half dozen games in my catalog that I've played for 10,000 hours for free.

Sure, I'll spend $5 on a game I play for 10 hours, but it's still a bad value for me comparatively. When I do it, it's usually because I like what the developer did and want them to get some financial support. This is also why there are hundreds of unplayed games in my Steam account. It's then also a charity, not a business.

Your $5 game is competing with every game I have available to me and the market is _saturated_. A lot of game development is just bad investment. Like Ubisoft spending $500 million to develop Beyond Good and Evil 2. If that ever even releases, but why would you spend half a billion dollars following up a flop. A beloved flop but a flop.

Consumers of creative works generally are paying for the result, not the process.

I don't see a problem? As a hacker and HN poster, I believe the free market will determine the value of a game. If it's not economically feasible anymore to make games for under $5, the market will adjust.

Price alone is a useless metric. Digital goods have no marginal cost.

There is no reason to reply like this unless you are some kind of scammer with no ethics. I hope this bill bankrupts your business model.

So? Worth of something to your customers is not the same as the effort you put into it. Plenty of alternative entertainment sources you're competing with that are much more affordable than 50 cents per hour.

Note, this law would affect less than 1% of all games _released_. Just that those happens to be the games that a sizeable part of the population plays. And even then, you spend more tying your game to a online service than not doing so in the first place.

My principles on this are:

1. If a game no longer works then the publisher loses copyright protections. This would often apply to online-only games. There are other games that are a mix of online and offline play that should be treated slightly differently;

2. If the hardware to run a game is no longer sold (eg legacy consoles), then there should be copyright protections for anyone making emulators to make the game work;

3. After a certain period of the underlying hardware and game not being sold, the game itself loses copyright protections. Say... 5 years? Maybe even less;

4. Loss of any online services sold with a game should mean that there is no copyright claim against third-parties making their own servers.

Making a game server isn't necessarily that hard. Forcing companies to open source their servers is problematic and may not even be possible if, say, the studio shuts down. Gamers are a resourceful lot however. I mean, just look at emulators. They can make their own servers if they need them. Just make the law indemnify them against copyright claims if the studio/publisher has switched off those online services and the problem will largely take care of itself.

The rest is just treating games like orphan works. There was a time when identifying a copyright holder was hard and extending copyright had to be actively done or it just expired. If they abandon a game this way, they should effectively just lose copyright (IMHO).

I expect this to be somewhat of a forcing function. If a studio really wants to maintain copyright to a game they no longer sell for a console that nobody makes anymore, then porting it to Steam and continuing to sell it is their path to maintaining copyright. And that should make it playable still.

This bill would likely cause game studios to release games exclusively via subscription plans as an unintended consequence.

It's so blatant that it's hard to call it unintended.

Nah, nobody will buy games with subscription plans.

No, it would at worst get companies how are currently selling a subscription of unspecified length as a "purchase" to be more honest.

All this will do is move all games to a subscription model with an N-day subscription waver packed in the box.

If the government funds it I'd love to do maintenance on baldur's gate v1 for the rest of my life.

Between GemRB [0], ports to the BG2 engine (Tutu, BGT) as well as older community patches for BG1 itself, that game is already well maintained. It also doesn't have publisher operated server component though.

[0] https://gemrb.org/

This makes the Minecraft model look all that much better than it already was, users pay for an account, the servers are self hosted by the community, as far as I can tell on the surface level Minecraft would already comply with this legislation.

Not quite, afaict. When the auth servers are shut down, you wouldnt be able to play it anymore, even in single player.

Does Minecraft's offline mode not work indefinitely? I'm not familiar with the official launcher but this article [1] doesn't say anything about needing to reconnect occasionally.

[1] https://www.practical-tips.com/games/play-minecraft-offline-...

> First, you need to make sure Minecraft is installed on your device. Once this is complete, log in to the launcher while you are still online. This will save your login details for offline access.

It still requires an initial authentication.

A connection to Microsoft's servers will also be required to download the game in the first place, so I'm not sure this is really a problem (for compliance with the bill). I think the official launcher won't even let you download the game without authenticating first, but I'm not sure.

I imagine people will immediately patch out the auth requirement once the auth servers go away for good.

In addition to the sibling comment, even Minecraft server has an "online-mode" setting, and if it's set to false, it doesn't authenticate players. Whenever my family has played on LAN, we've never used any auth servers (which is clear because we don't give Minecraft any credentials). The setting only applies to LAN players, but that should be easy enough to work around with a VPN or something.

Doesnt the client need an initial authentication to microsoft servers?

You need to authenticate to download the game, but then you can play it as much as you want even offline. This is true for Prism Launcher, anyway. I haven't used the official launcher in years.

the auth servers aren’t a meaningful blocker in terms of technical debt imo

This what California's political machinery is focused on? Rather than the colossal waste that is the high speed rail project, or rampant corrupt use of State and local funds for social welfare projects?

Laws like this superficially seem good because it's not nice when online games shut down without a patch but they have the harmful effect of eliminating the long tail of — you could say — low quality offerings, that don't offer these features

It's better to have more offerings on the market, even low quality ones, than fewer. Limiting the low quality offerings does not result in high quality ones naturally emerging to substitute them. It just leads to fewer offerings.

There are two things I think that low quality offerings are good at doing. First, they're good at experimenting with new features. If it's very cheap to try a new feature, because the cost of deploying a new game is quite low and you're basically pumping out a bunch of marginally valuable games, then new features get iterated on more quickly. That eventually flows back up to the better quality games. The second benefit is that it meets some niche needs, where a certain player wants something that's very unusual or otherwise non-existent on the market. And this 5x9 half-baked game provides it. Again, it's very few people who want this feature, but there are a huge number of features like that. It's a very long tail.

I moderate an online community and we introduced democratic rulemaking and people kept proposing and then voting in rules to restrict this or that kind of post because it was low quality or distracted people or whatever and eventually the forum became so much less usable because of the cumulative effect of all these small restrictions. That effect of making the forum less usable was most pronounced on newcomers, who didn't know all the rules and basically couldn't break in because of the barrier to understanding how to generate content that complied with the morass of restrictions.

California is really trying to become Europe with regulation as their primary GDP.

IKR how dare they care about the rights of their citizens. Outrageous!

> the act would not apply to completely free games and games offered “solely for the duration of [a] subscription. Any other game offered for sale in California on or

Well, I predict we'll start seeing more games offered "solely for the duration of a subscription". And also games spun out into their own subsidiary that will just go bankrupt and not comply.

Subsidiary is what I was thinking too. Imagine you were just some indie dev freelancing and all of a sudden you have a big shutdown bill.

You wouldn’t get one if you followed the law and released the server.

the idea of a "shutdown bill" is absurd and irrelevant to the law being discussed unless you are a scammer being forced to refund people.

I’m not sure what you mean. If you shut down a game and a law demands extra work to stand up a F2P server, who pays for that work? That’s the “shutdown bill” I’m talking about.

Yes, the law encourages you to act responsibly from the start.

This is like a chemical plant complaining that they have to pay for cleanup when they shut down because they didn't follow proper procedures to prevent environmental harm while operating.

So an indie dev just trying to make a multiplayer game with no budget and no graceful shutdown plan may be acting irresponsibly?

Is the world really better if those people face additional burden? Does it create a fairer system that helps indies succeed? Does it encourage creativity?

If it's a subsidiary - they can't capitalize on the big name in marketing. If it's a subscription - they don't get the "buy now, play never" customers from Steam. I think it will be a win regardless.

I don't see any world in which these "stop killing games" laws result in anything close to what the proponents are asking for, for multiple reasons, one of the biggest being that the proponents don't have a clear, coherent, cohesive vision that takes into account all of the side-effects, and everyone you talk to in this space has a slightly different idea of what they want, and even the main proponent, Ross Scott, has a vague vision that changes from month to month, and shifts in mututally-exclusive ways depending on what objection is currently being responded to. I think what will happen is we'll get (A) a law that doesn't work due to some glaring loophole (such as being able to skirt the law by simply giving the community the server binary with no documentation) or (B) a law that DOES work but is so impossible to ahere to that companies simply accept that they'll be sued and bake it into the price of the game.

I agree with most of this, but "server binary with no documentation" is an extremely good outcome compared to the status quo.

People can reverse-engineer a server binary, but reverse-engineering a server that is no longer running is not guaranteed to be possible.

There are worse potential loopholes you didn't mention though.

Ross has had a consistent vision for years and i'm not sure where this delusion otherwise is coming from. At this point i'm wondering if people like you are just astroturf bots funded by the ESA.

Assuming people who bring new ideas to the table are bots or part of an evil conspiracy is a great way to irrelevancy. That said, I'm curious if wouldn't mind watching some interviews with him and try to suss out exactly what he thinks companies should do, and what companies should be affected. There's a lot of (and this is what it sounds like to me) "maybe publish an API spec, maybe share the binary, maybe publish full source code, I dunno!"

One thing i think is missing from this discussion is that the problem is larger than just games, and I wish legislation was wider. It's good that games are used as an example and flag bearer due to wide appeal, but what about other software that requires online services, like the old programs that talk to activation servers?

those movements can use gaming as a precedent to push foe their own legislation, at least.

Definitely, it's not a waste of time.

I believe Ross Scott from Stop Killing Games have talked about this in one of his videos. Essentially, if they try to fight for online-required software or against subscription model in general - all software companies will fight against it. That's just too ambitious and has way less chances to succeed.

I appreciate the sentiment, but this law looks counter-productive if I'm reading it right. This is OBVIOUSLY going to push companies to make games into a subscription service to bypass the law even if they wouldn't have normally:

> (b) This section does not apply to any of the following:

> (1) Any subscription-based service that advertises or offers for sale access to any digital game solely for the duration of the subscription.

This exemption NEEDS to be removed. If a game's official servers are taken down, the community needs to be given the ability to keep running it themselves. Full stop. No exceptions.

Games that the the company is allowed to kill whenever they want already are a subscription. Forcing companies to be upfront about that when they are not willing to provide the claimed deal is not counter-productive.

So what's preventing companies from giving games for free and requiring a subscription or one time membership fee for online play? They'd only be required to refund the full price of the game: $0.

That’s an honest business model, absent in game purchases or user generated content.

Everyone wants a forever game. This is the 21st century equivalent of the 19th century gushers. The massive wave of dead game we see is the equivalent of P&A (Plug and Abandonment) practices of early drillers.

Don't expect the community to pick up the tab on your losses. If your game dies, give it a proper burial, don't just let it's carcass rot in the cultural stream.

I love California for these laws because even though their jurisdiction is technically limited, it makes no sense for the companies to not make the changes available nation wide.

its such a bummer that because of laws like this, less games will be made. Most games dont ever make money and dont succeed.

The alternative to companies shutting games down without supporting them is not them supporting them, it is them not making them in the first place or making them very expensive (price, ads, pay to play, etc.).

The customer now has to pay a tax becasue of the cost this puts on game makers. This is not good :(

this is absurd and untrue. this is like being told you have to pour a concrete pillar 2 meters to the left of where you were planning so that you're not destroying some vital infrastructure, then bemoaning the loss of the concrete pillar industry.

Stop building games to self destruct. Once you fix your bad practices (which, you should not have been doing to begin with, pay for them once with some retooling and moving forward you don't need to pay more, then get some ethics and you will incur fewer costs like this going forward) there is no ongoing cost here.

I am not arguing its RIGHT to stop supporting games. It's just a sad situation where people frame these things as moral/ethical debates when they have real world costs to players who get less games and game makers who will go out of business and the big business that people want to hurt will be just fine.

I think your analogy is a great one. I had a plan to pour a pillar that wouldn't exist without me somewhere (lets say this is online matchmaking), and you come and tell me I cant do my plan anymore, or if I do, I have to pour a second/different one (self hosted servers or p2p) or give away the pillar I make for free.

Games take money to maintain, if you make a law that forces people to maintain them for longer (or forever), that increases the costs. Higher costs -> less games. Most game makers are not Electronic Arts or Rockstar. Those companies will be 100% fine and will pass any costs onto you.

It just seems crazy that a company should be forced to give a refund to all players or spend 1000s of person-hours implementing outdated multiplayer features becasue only 50 people are playing their game once a month.

I won't enjoy it, and things aren't perfect as they are, but I will think back to this thread when the articles of layoffs, price hikes, ads, dark patterns, and "lack of quality games" become more and more prevalent because this law will have directly influenced it.

Theres no free lunch.

This law doesn't even affect most games at all, only those with a live service component - and for those what the proposed law asks is far from unreasonable.

If a game can't exist without scamming the players then perhaps it shouldn't exist so that more honest developers can get those players.

I'd rather have legislation to give immunity from infringement to hackers who are either reverse engineering or cloning the game that has been shut down instead.

I have good news for you: everything is legal if you don't get caught.

In the case of companies or individuals that have no money, employees or assets left, how can they possibly issue refunds? It seems bill is eliminating/forcing out the little guy in favor of the more established, wealthier competitors. California laws and their legislators keep on getting stricter and weirder.

Thank you for letting me in! Sol Roth PS: Hope you like the décor. I’m redecorating your thoughts permanently.

Found this quote from the game industry interesting and depressing:

> Consumers receive a license to access and use a game, not an unrestricted ownership interest in the underlying work

Could the game industry just side step this legislation by moving games entirely to a subscription model, with no upfront purchase? When they stop offering the subscription, you lose access to the game. Similar to how various online SaaS businesses work.

> Could the game industry just side step this legislation by moving games entirely to a subscription model, with no upfront purchase? When they stop offering the subscription, you lose access to the game. Similar to how various online SaaS businesses work.

Yes. With a subscription there is already an expectation that you will lose access when you stop paying. But I doubt they'd get much buy-in from gamers for that on most games.

Yes. However gamers are not businesses who operate on cost minimization (especially employee cost minimization) that made SaaS possible. The existing purely subscription games do not have the same amount of customers/players as the ones do not admit that.

So openly admitting that your game is a subscription will be quite bad marketing for your company.

That's a lie. Consumers buy a copy of the product. There's a bunch of legal fundamentals that make it so. Contracts that give one side a complete control of someone else are rarely (if ever) legal. If it were, then people could be pressured to give away their fundamental rights, one of which is the right to property.

They can try but there is a reason why they are selling what is effectively already a subscription for an unspecified length as a purchase - because the market mostly does not want subscriptions.

Look, patches would be nice. I don't want a refund, I want to continue playing the game.

What I'd prefer is modders not getting sued when they try to implement the online aspect for free, heck or paid at that stage.

If the game is popular enough, the community tends to take care of it. Maybe some legal form of officially abandoning the game?

Having the refund there is important as an anchor for determining the damages if a company refuses to comply. It's not a sustainable option for companies to rely on and that's by design.

> As currently amended, the act would not apply to completely free games and games offered “solely for the duration of [a] subscription. Any other game offered for sale in California on or after January 1, 2027, would be subject to the law if it passes.

So they just make their game free two months before they want to close?

Law systems contain open-ended clauses and lawsuits analyze the intent. If you make your game free, just 2 months prior or even after selling it, just telling that you made it "free" will harm you more in the lawsuits due to obvious malicious intent.

> So they just make their game free two months before they want to close?

Which, afaict, wouldn't change anything in terms of liabilities, because of the people that paid for the game before it went free.

The classic 'it's sold as pro-consumer legislation therefore it must be good' we in Europe are very, very used to.

Commiserations, California (and likely the rest of the US) - all your games will now be subscriptions.

To me it seems a bit childish to demand that some business must provide me with exactly what I want forever because at one point I paid for their service.

Seems to me like this will incentivize upgrades in a game being very limited time, tied to an event or season (though many games already do this)

> The ESA also said the bill would impose unreasonable expectations on publishers regarding licensing rights for music or IP rights, which are often negotiated on a time-limited basis. “A legal requirement to keep games playable indefinitely could place publishers in an impossible position—forcing them to renegotiate licenses indefinitely or alter games in ways that may not be legally or technically feasible,” they wrote.

Wah wah munchie wah.

This would kick in next year. You have time to make contingency plans including a kill switch to put in shitty royalty free music if you need to.

> “Consumers receive a license to access and use a game, not an unrestricted ownership interest in the underlying work,” the ESA wrote. The eventual shutdown of outdated or obsolete games is “a natural feature of modern software,” the group added, especially when that software requires online infrastructure maintenance.

Go fuck yourselves.

They shouldn't get to replace the music without a partial refund either IMO as that can be a significant part of the purchase decision. Just negotiate music licensing based on copies sold, and ideally the same for other content - then everyone is happy except for the rent seeking publisher who can't just count pure profit after the nth sale for something they didn't even create themselves.

Wish they'd extend it to all apps, I'm over paying money to developers who cut and run while using it as a way to land jobs at Microsoft and AWS

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46768909

JuiceSSH have since shut their site down after that last round of attention so I guess they really have no intention of open sourcing or refunding.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260116112028/https://juicessh....

Going for all apps at once is, IMO, an impossible ask. So the better option is to tackle one area first to set a precedent then that can be used to make the fight in other areas easier.

I guess they will organize these games as separate companies now and let them go bankrupt instead?

If this law comes, why would games not just go full-subscription and circumvent this?

The games affected by this are already effectively a limited time subscription but just don't tell the players beforehand.

Looks like it will just push game publishers to a subscription model.

This is the main reason I never bother playing new MMOs or online-only games, after a few that I liked shut down after barely 1 year.

Hellgate London, Paragon...

The law should go further: If an IP isn't revived within N (say 5) years, release the source code for the servers.

Games?! can we also include infrastructure-critical software

This is some remnant of the stop killing games initiative no doubt. Bad for the industry as a whole, and piratesoftware didn’t deserve to be dragged for being against it, in spite of his other flaws.

He was dragged for persistently lying about it, doing everything in his power to shut down discussion of it, and being absurdly hostile on a personal level to the founder of the initiative unprovoked. Not for being against it.

Can't say I support this. Legislative bodies should be dealing with actual problems in the world that meaningfully make the lives of regular people worse, not gamer entitlement.

Not being able to use a product that was purchased is an “actual problem” that “makes the lives of regular people worse.” This is going to blow your mind, but this kind of stuff is EXACTLY what people elect governments to do.

You were able to use it. Nothing lasts forever. People need help with a world that is hell, not video game related problems.

I don’t know where you’re from but in the UK, consumer protection law sets requirements that your goods last a reasonable length of time. Under your logic, a TV manufacturer could have their TV self destruct after 3 months and you’d be fine with it? Governments should do nothing because “it’s just TV, you can get another.”

If my TV costed $50 and I got 3 months out of it, I'd be like, "yeah, that's about right". We don't expect investments that low to last a generation. Just because you bought a game 5 years after release and then it shutdown 3 months later, doesn't mean it's a scam anymore than coming across an old DVD years after creation and finding that it either doesn't play media or plays it distorted.

When the game was released is irrelevant. I assure you that you’d be pretty pissed if you paid £50 for a TV and it stopped working after only three months. You can claim otherwise but I’ll call you a lying bullshitter.

> coming across an old DVD years after creation

This isn’t remotely the same thing so I don’t know why you brought it up

The law is exactly the place to deal with entitlements.

Dumb. Just make it legal to reverse engineer the software, the community will take care of the rest, in a way the community actually wants, instead of getting just the bare minimum compliance from the original company, if they even still exist.

We can do both! This seems more viable for the moment, unfortunately. Challenging copyright gets much more pushback than even pro-consumer obligations like these.

You want the "community" to reverse engineer the game server, where all the game logic lives, from the game client? This is the state of many online only games.

Of course it should be legal to reverse engineer software you own, but you have to actually have access to the software to reverse engineer it.

People did it for World of Warcraft, and continue to do so with each expansion.

I can host and play a WotLK server locally, offline on my desktop with AI player bots with minimal issues thanks to the work of the community

WoW is slightly more popular than the average abandoned game. These kind of reverse engineering efforts (re-implementation really without access to the original server) are possible but require huge efforts and thus rarely happen.

I tend to agree with you that allowing the community to keep games running would be a more desirable outcome, but I don't believe California could make such a law. As I understand it, reverse engineering is already illegal federally because of things like the DMCA. California can't just make the DMCA not apply in this case because its not a California law. However they can pass consumer protection laws making there be consequences for abandoning a game when the consumers are in California. Given the alternative is probably do nothing this does seem good.

I don't know about California, but AFAIK reverse engineering is legal, but breaking DRM protection isn't, so what companies did was to put DRM in their software, hence the reverse engineering became illegal.

yep, that is what I meant by the DMCA, but I should probably have been more clear.

I mean, if government overreach (IP, DMCA 1201) is preventing us from using the things we pay money for in any way we might, might as well add more government overreach on top to claw some rights back?

California seems to be a leading grounds for online law as well for the technology itself.

Lots of clearly needed specific laws. Europe is fine too, but they err on the side of caution and smother actual innovation.

Which is interesting because the Silicon Valley companies themselves incorporate in DW anyways, so it seems to be a separate consumer led legal trend.

California being 4th largest economy gives it some market power, just some though. Companies still make special considerations only for California - including total exclusion - as opposed to just implementing the good idea across the nation or world.

Feels like malicious compliance, but I’m used to it now, I’ve done the same in other industries like raising or issuing capital, so I cant be mad about consumer protection style patchworks then

"Think of the consumer!". Blatant government overreach is so hot right now.

The "final boss" of bad legislation. Often, Government intrusion into the markets is worth the side effects.

But in this case, even the best-case outcome is extremely dumb. Companies are forced to expend resources just so a few niche hobbyists are not inconvenienced. And there will be side effects, ultimately including geo-fencing of games to exclude California. It's a big market, but you can't make up for a net loss with volume.

it seems like it would be good programming to parameterize the details of how to connect to a server, so really all the game developer would need to do is document the requirements for the server/make the server software.

..things they'd be doing anyway as they developed the game??

> Companies are forced to expend resources just so a few niche hobbyists are not inconvenienced.

Yeah those poor companies. They should just be allowed to take our money and then stop providing a service we paid for. Won't someone please think of the corporations????

What kind of weird argument is this? If I pay for a game then I, you know, want to be able to play the game. You know what I don't care about? Whether or not it's profitable for Ubisoft to keep a cheap signing server online.

I take your point and also don't give a damn about corporate profits but it is a little bit "talking past" the parent. To me the important part of parents point was the next step: therefore the companies will just avoid selling to California which is an unintended consequence.

I think this can be argued with directly on its merits - 1. maybe, 2. also that's probably fine, 3. also that's not what happened with car emission standards, etc.

Forego the 4th largest economy on the planet? Hardly.

(Only US, China and Germany are bigger)

Yeah I have no sympathy for companies, but unfortunately companies just pass their costs along to the consumer, and I do have sympathy for those.

So what's your argument, to never have any consumer protection laws?

Even if companies pass on the cost, companies that make better decisions like not adding arbitrary online requirements in the first place, will be at an advantage with a change like this.

Perhaps my argument is that black & white are useless colors and we should use all the colors in-between, and people who only know black & white need to get out of the way before they ruin the painting.

What if an Indie developer wants to make a game, where the primary mechanics and state live in a "service" they control? Why should they be burdened with this stuff if they move on, if indeed they sold a "service" and not a piece of software?

My view has nothing to do with Corporations... I just really don't understand what players feel they are entitled to here. If you want "software" then buy that, and don't use the Service games.

Unpopular view I suppose. Maybe it would mean more games you could actually own, but I think it would just have bad effects.

It's not difficult not to lie to your customers. If you are actually selling a subscription then don't claim the customer is buying the game, and this law won't apply to you.

Fair enough, if you're certain the final bill will only penalize "false advertising" like this. I see how the article supports this view and maybe I did read too much into it. My concern would be if games "sold as a subscription" did end up covered by it.

So game should be playable forever then? You bought an online game 20 years ago, it should still work today.

For 20 years you need to support, patch, keep people and infrastructure.

Why the tech industry does not do it? I still want to use windows XP. Why my Nexus 5 does not work anymore ect..

> So game should be playable forever then? You bought an online game 20 years ago, it should still work today.

yes

> For 20 years you need to support, patch, keep people and infrastructure.

No, you should just not make it impossible for people to do so. (via stuff like online activation and such). Most 20 year old games you can still run via a VM or something like that. If it requires online activation and the server for that are shut down, you can't.

> Why the tech industry does not do it? I still want to use windows XP. Why my Nexus 5 does not work anymore ect..

You can still use windows xp and a nexus 5.

Allow community servers then. Then the company doesn't have to pay anything to maintain it. They don't even need to release the source; just release a proprietary binary and then people can happily keep playing and not feel ripped off.

This has been happening unofficially for decades, on a volunteer basis.

I play games that are 20+ years old all the time. I play Quake and Doom online pretty frequently.

You can still use Windows XP if you really want. You're not artificially locked out of it. You can also use your Nexus 5 if you want. I had one plugged in

This is the road of stupid that stop killing games has paved.

why do you have to be negative?

currently there's a huge risk Marathon might get shut down like high guard or concord because of player numbers. If they shut it down, nobody could play it anymore.

If there's a system in place for us to be able to host our own servers, or... I don't know? OWN the game we bought and play it because we OWN it because we PAID for it. Then yeah, that's good and it's a good movement and I fully support it.

I genuinely don't understand the other side of this argument because it just feels like no for the sake of no.

The main no argument is that it makes risky games riskier for the developer, publisher and IP holder. Games like Marathon never get approved.

what's the risk? "Oh no we might have to provide the product we sold!" Lmao. That's the right kind of risk to force on sellers in a market. Sellers risk getting penalized for not providing what they have paid for. Great. Fanastic. Sounds healthy for any market and may even increase average customer confidence enough for a surge in sales, one that can't be created by one company alone.

Yes, that’s the risk in the argument.

Are you by chance the first second-generation Blizzard employee?

So now it becomes way more expensive for small studios to come out with games that have online features. This is a huge win for big studios who will suck up all that market share.

Handing over a standalone server to the public is a massive engineering, financial, and legal headache. Modern multiplayer games rarely run on a single isolated program. They rely on a huge network of interconnected cloud microservices.

A single match might require separate proprietary systems for matchmaking, player inventories, anti cheat, metrics tracking, and database management. Many of those come with licenses that don't allow you to just give away the code for free.

Disentangling the actual game logic from these third party platforms like AWS or Epic Online Services requires months of rewriting code. At that point you're basically re-inventing the wheel on so many technologies that your costs go up exponentially.

Games are rarely built entirely from scratch by a single company and are usually packed with licensed third party software like proprietary network code, commercial physics engines, or specific anti cheat software. Because the studio doesn't own the rights to distribute these proprietary tools to the public for free then releasing a standalone server forces them to spend extensive legal and development hours stripping out the restricted code and replacing it with open source alternatives.

Releasing server code also exposes the inner workings of the company's technology. If a studio uses the same proprietary engine or backend framework for their active money making games then releasing the server code for a dead game essentially hands hackers and competitors a roadmap to exploit their current profitable titles.

Does it though? Just release the a standalone server once the game is done making money.

Updated my original post to explain why this wouldn't work.

Somehow I highly doubt that a small game company is going to run a "huge network of interconnected cloud services". I've also yet to find a small game company running their own big online multiplayer game.

And most of the indie publishers usually comply with the law by not fucking over their customers by providing independent server executables or not releasing a server-tied game. AAA studios are the biggest offenders and they deserve to be fucked.

Your argument still doesn't hold, sorry. The law won't apply retroactively so the existing games can be killed. However, if the law passes, the EOL plan just becomes another product requirement you have to plan for. So you won't "rewrite" the server code, you write it to comply in the first place.

This was also the excuse people gave for GDPR and California's privacy law and everybody got forced into complying after the date of validity. Simply having an "excuse" of money loss due to engineering your game user-hostile in the first place (especially after the law became valid) isn't a good argument. It will have some preparation time and if you didn't plan for it, it is your fault.

How many small studio games have online multiplayer? Like really?

it'll be a lot less with this law

Ok, and why you think that would be? Because games were like this before. Small and big. There are even modern games that are like this.

What does an indie game that's starting to get a little bit of funding from sales do? You know, the way they take off and quit their jobs, deliver excellence, etc.

Do they now have to throw that money into an endowment in case their game starts failing and they can't afford servers? (enough to cover the time to patch in a local update).

Take all the games that started being able to make multiplayer with the steam SDKs. If steam changes their P2P relay (which they've done), what obligations does an indie dev with a defunct game have? Also extend this argument to all the amazing middleware that's helped indies do multiplayer well; are they just back to open source first principles? (side note: Godot stuff is quite nice now, but a law limiting it to that is pretty harsh; I'd much rather have people be able to license their middleware).

Your "games were like this before" comes off ignorant like a "we've always used rocks to make fire" type argument; you can of course ship games without any third party abstractions, with dedicated client server architectures, but I'd rather not have the option to not do so structurally financially kneecapped. Shipping a multiplayer game has gotten WAY easier over the past 10 years

Of course there ARE modern games like this, but not all modern games are like this. Just because it's possible doesn't mean it's easy. There are tradeoffs that I feel aren't being considered.

his bill would create an incentive that I just don't think the juice is worth the squeeze.

-----------------------------------

Take among us; what does it do for matchmaking architecture?

If this bill had a carveout for games with under some ~$200k+ of sales, it wouldn't be a problem, but I'm worried about structurally affecting the multiplayer landscape for indie devs. I want them to be able to patch in their multiplayer after they get some sales without having to immediately make some contingency plan, since the time when you're considering this seems to be when indies are pretty vulnerable.

Dude, your entire argument is welfare for the software makers, not fair business practices. You want developers to continue externalizing the cost of architecting their game in such a way that hosting is expensive for them. Consumers do not care about that and also shouldn't. This law actually would prevent you from doing such boneheaded financial decision. The consumer shouldn't be holding the bag because you thought you needed to design a web of microservices for what is just minecraft. Nobody is stopping you from making a multiplayer game. The law is stopping you from making one that no one can afford to keep running.

> Releasing server code also exposes the inner workings of the company's technology.

And yet releasing standalone servers back in the 00s was the norm, rather than the exception. I don't buy the argument.

What you're noticing - that companies suddenly started closed-sourcing their server code, isn't just something that happened for no reason. Internet connections got fast, and it enabled more complex games like MMORPGs and MOBAs which are an order of magnitude more complex than the shooter games you're probably thinking of (Quake III?)

A LOT of architectural thinking goes into scaling MMORPGs, and it starts at the data model. I've watched quite a few interviews with WoW devs, and the data model for their system is counter-intuitive. That constitutes a trade secret in my mind.

And that's something that companies that produce MMORPGs/MOBAs/etc. can conclusively demonstrate in court.

That said, it's possible that companies could release a "nerfed" version of their server code with trade secrets removed for the community to run once the official game servers are taken down. It isn't clear if that'll be in scope of the law, or if that's even what proponents of Stop Killing Games would be okay with. We'll have to see.

This whole thing doesn't apply to MMORPGs to begin with because they're all already subscription based. If I understand the main grievance correctly, the problem is giving the consumers the wrong impression they're making a normal one-time-payment PURCHASE and then rendering the item they purchased unusable later.

MMORPGs aren't all subscription based anymore.

Guild Wars 2 Amazon New World Black desert elder scrolls online

That's the complaint, but the bill is much wider and does seem to impact MMORPGs.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive was a game running all of these things (matchmaking, skins, anticheat ...). After Counter-Strike 2 was released, the servers for CS:GO were shut down. Yet, the game remains mostly playable. Sure, the skins no longer work and there's no official matchmaking, but third parties have stepped up. That's because Valve released (and have always released) server software.

I find this argument quite bad. It was done in the past and it's still being done today. There's nothing preventing any company from doing it except for a combination of laziness and greed.

CS:GO's server architecture makes perfect sense for a game that would be easy to release server software.

What do you do for, say, a failing MMO built on a proprietary game engine you're trying to make a sequel for?

This is such an overstated issue. There's not really that many MMOs. It's hard to say, but I would estimate that there are ~600-1000 MMOs total. Many of them are quite simple (like Club Penguin, MapleStory, ...) or already have third party servers running (WoW, City Of Heroes, ...).

Also, your example doesn't really make sense. First, no one is arguing that companies should right now go revive all past MMOs. This is something that would affect future products.

Additionally, why are you making a sequel to a product that already failed?

Take Maplestory (successful). Assume Maplestory 2 reused networking from Maplestory 1.

Maplestory 2 fails; they now have to release server software that could compromise Maplestory 1?

Yeah I remember this argument from decades ago where people claimed that WoW required specialized hardware to run that would be far out of reach of community server operators. What a bunch of bs that turned out to be.

> Sure, the skins no longer work

Hey, that actually sounds like a positive. Might have to try the game again.

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