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Comment by jfengel | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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