The California state assembly has passed the 'Protect Our Games Act' | Hacker News Reader

The California state assembly has passed the 'Protect Our Games Act'

invenglobal.com

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I'm always shocked by how irrationally anti-regulation this site is. I have yet to see any explanation why this regulation would be, in practice, cost/legally prohibitive in any way. This seems like a consumer protections slam dunk.

Yes, you would have to make sure your server application adheres to software licenses before release, just like you do with the client application, or any other piece of software a company may use or release. What popular libraries are we concerned about no longer being usable because of this? Remember, this is server architecture. Networking libraries? ENet is distributable, so is Valve's GameNetworkingSockets.

Yes, it'd ask developers to write their servers with this possible/inevitable transition in mind. Developers will plan ahead for that, and I have a very hard time imagining the server architecture would change much at all. A dedicated company-owned server is just a beefier home computer with load balancers and matchmaking. Drop those two, slap a server list on the client, and you're golden.

This is great news!

Its because people are brainwashed by techno capitalists propganada and think they're going be in the "startup" founder position one day and thus defend the people currently in those positions no matter what, thinking their protecting their own interests (and its almost always the opposite).

There's nothing wrong with having an ambitious attitude, but why not be ambitious seek to build a better tech-biz ecosystem that is actually pro consumer and pro human..

People seem to think there's only one way, and that way is letting capital owners behave however they want incase they're also in that position one day.

>think they're going be in the "startup" founder position

Can't wait for the posts 10 years from now asking what happened to indie devs.

This bill alone won't do it, but as you pass regulations it gets harder and harder for a regular person to participate.

The worst rendition I've seen of this bill for Europe requires basically a development bond/retainer to 'ensure' there's dev time available to develop offline features. I.e, extra costs for devs who already by the numbers lose money releasing a game.

This is absolute fearmongering. Indie devs aren’t the ones releasing this always-online quadruple A garbage in the first place. They will be affected the least, since their games already would work just fine if the company ever goes belly up.

It’s not irrational, the comments literally explain in great detail the downsides of the regulation.

For example one commenter in this thread said:

>See also car fuel economy standards that push car makers into killing the wagon market segment in favor of SUVs.

This is an objectively true and prove-able statement. What is irrational about that?

WRT regulation the only thing that matters is the incentives that it creates.

>If this is how the bill ends up being enacted, it will only push more big game developers into making their titles subscription only.

This is a valid concern and a real incentive if that’s how the law works. What is irrational about this argument?

Bad regulation should't be reperesentaive or regulation as a whole. If you don't get it right the first time, you're allowed to try again, and that's what should be done with regulations providing bad incentives.

Gaming has already gone though a period of pushing subscription games, and most died, since people generally didn't want to pay a fee per game they played. That only left the big players in that space, while everybkdy else went back to releasing games the normal way. I fail to see why things would go a different way this time around.

The legal system is kind of like an evolutionary process. We try things, see if they work, and adjust over time. So far I think this has indeed led to a better legal system, but I can see why the set backs and injustices of the world make that difficult to assess.

Regulation also creates jobs, even bad regulation, so there's almost a Keynesian argument to be had about its relationship to our economic system.

Bad regulation is representative of regulation as a whole, because most of it is bad, or at least ineffectual, particularly in California.

Blanket dismissal of regulations is about as silly as a blanket dismissal of laws. Some laws are "bad", some are "good", but the point is who do they hurt, and who do they serve? Regulations are tools, like laws, and can be written to serve the needs of the people, for good things.

I'm not even saying this should be dismissed with a blanket dismissal.

First example is a reminder that regulation can be bad.

Second is an actual concern about this specific regulation. This is a concrete concern about the incentives it creates. There wasn't a single response to this comment about exactly WHY questioning effectiveness of it is irrational.

I think a study of regulatory capture would definitely support your views

> Second is an actual concern about this specific regulation. This is a concrete concern about the incentives it creates.

Like I said in my OP comment, the problem with saying "this regulation will push devs to subscription-based game models" is that it does not explain why that would happen. It just assumes it would.

This argument to me is like saying "forcing people to wear seatbelts will push them to take the bus instead". Why would this be such a problem that people ditch their whole mode of transit? I see it that way because I can't think of a single case where designing your game server architecture with decommissioning and redistributing to your users in mind would be difficult or costly at all, and I have seen no convincing explanations

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

The "in favor of SUVs" part only exists because light trucks were specifically exempted from regulations to pander to specific subsets of voters.

It's not voting policy, it's protectionism.

It's all about limiting foreign build vehicle encroachment on US market.

>See also car fuel economy standards that push car makers into killing the wagon market segment in favor of SUVs.

All this says is that it's possible for regulations to have negative, unintended consequences. It's about as relevant as reminding your friends that some restaurants are not very good when you're picking a place to eat. It's not relevant when we're talking about something specific and the field of things is varied.

> WRT regulation the only thing that matters is the incentives that it creates.

Sure. What are the negative incentives?

>If this is how the bill ends up being enacted, it will only push more big game developers into making their titles subscription only.

Why? What is the incentive away from one-time purchases? Is it cost? Where is that cost coming from?

> It's about as relevant as reminding your friends that some restaurants are not very good when you're picking a place to eat

Interestingly, restaurant food is typically less healthy, more expensive and less tasty than what you can make at home. Eating out should be the exception, not the rule, which plays directly plays into the anti regulation argument.

That is very far from the point, not only because what I meant was that some restaurants are not as good compared to others, but also because the connection between eating out vs eating at home and regulations is basically non-existent? I don't really understand what you're saying.

The point is saying "some regulations have downsides" is meaningless in conversation about a particular regulation, just like saying "some restaurants don't serve very tasty food" is meaningless in a conversation about "should we try that new Thai place on 3rd street?"

I suspect that's because you wrongly assume the other side is saying "some regulations have downsides". It's more likely they're saying "all regulations have unintended consequences" and thus deserve extra scrutiny when considering them.

If that is the case, then the analogy is fitting again; even "good" restaurants are often a poor substitute for eating at home, and so shouldn't be a first line of consideration.

Agreed that's what they were likely trying to do with that comment, and I'd argue the problem with it is that it fear-mongers about regulations while failing to actually scrutinize what the negative effects are.

Also, we should really drop this restaurant analogy, it's ill-fitting and clearly distracting from the main point.

In what way is "see also" objectively true?

I mean in a literal sense I guess it's true but only in a way that has zero connection to the post. They might as well have told me a fun fact about crickets. If it's supposed to argue against this regulation then their actual point stops being objectively true and it probably is irrational to bring up those car standards without way more justification.

I would describe them as pessimistic rather than irrational. They just believe that instead of going with an option like you proposed, companies will push toward unregulated options.

Since I don't know their backgrounds and don't have any background working with video game company executives it's hard to tell which options are more likely.

There's so many renditions of these style bills that it's hard to keep track what's in this specific one.

From what I can tell this one doesn't include provisions to protect indie shops/solo devs. The entire time spent developing a game is a net loss until release (and probability wise, probably still a loss then). So this is adding more upfront cost to devs.

The bill text I found is also one of the more generic versions I've seen. Specifically this line

>the ordinary use of the game

This is quite broad. I've seen some supporters of this style bill push for 'offline play' being a requirement. For instance, an mmo raid may require 20 players. If after the death of the game getting 20 players is impossible, I have seen people push for ai (just the game version) so it would be possible, or a patch to make the content possible for 1. Each of which are development time that serves no benefit to making money.

There's also the likelihood of the server architecture requiring many moving pieces. Think if fortnite died tomorrow how many different servers it would take to host. Could an argument be made that an end user couldn't be expected to launch a dozen aws services? More dev time, more costs.

Now the day 1 proponents would probably focus on the obvious provide the server exe cases, but these are concerns down the line.

Also at least this one doesn't do the 'development bond' idea I've seen to protect against the entity going bankrupt, essentially requiring every dev to pay for some sort of insurance before releasing the game (more costs for indie devs).

It adds costs if you built it that way. I don't think many games are built that way. Developers need to be able to test their games in isolation, and it takes effort to remove that scaffolding from release versions (so people can't use it and bypass your monetization).

The real reasons to not just toss your backend over to the community and make it their problem are business reasons like 'it will dilute our brand' or 'it is a violation of licensed IP'. Or embarrassing reasons like 'we have lost the source code' or 'we can no longer build new executables'.

> I've seen some supporters of this style bill push for 'offline play' being a requirement.

That seems a bit silly to my eyes, self-hosting a server seems sufficient. But not included in this bill, so not an issue here

> Think if fortnite died tomorrow how many different servers it would take to host. Could an argument be made that an end user couldn't be expected to launch a dozen aws services? More dev time, more costs.

In this specific case, it's not so hard to imagine a single home computer handling the traffic of 100 connected users for a game of battle royale, the server compute for those kinds (baked-in world, low physics) games can be cheaper than running an instance of the game. Just some physics calculations, networking, and game state.

The main point would be if you start development from the premise that your server executable will be released to the users, the architecture/performance considerations are not that different at all.

>The main point would be if you start development from the premise that your server executable will be released to the users, the architecture/performance considerations are not that different at all.

Except devs aren't, and shouldn't, be developing under that assumption, they should be developing under the assumption their game will be successful. You don't want to be giving your pitch to investors and have to go "we aren't using AWS services because when we fail we'll provide the exes to the users".

And if you think they need to change, your just admitting this will cost devs more (and when it costs devs more, it raises the barrier of entry, in an industry where failure is already the norm).

The most obvious example is pretty much any form of inviting a player/having idenities. The storage of users and inviting them is what brings in the scaling complexities in your average online game, and that's when you'd use a service harder to have a self hosting equivalent of.

> The most obvious example is pretty much any form of inviting a player/having idenities. The storage of users and inviting them is what brings in the scaling complexities in your average online game, and that's when you'd use a service harder to have a self hosting equivalent of.

A bill like this isn't asking for a 1-to-1 level of service once the company servers are turned off, it's a minimal product to make multiplayer play at all possible. The assumption is that, like with most fanbases for a product, you'll have to form a community of people to engage with it on your own.

The solution is to do what so many older games like Quake or Minecraft or TF2 have done since day 1: Release the server executable, and allow direct LAN connections (and disable login requirements).

> There's also the likelihood of the server architecture requiring many moving pieces. Think if fortnite died tomorrow how many different servers it would take to host. Could an argument be made that an end user couldn't be expected to launch a dozen aws services? More dev time, more costs.

There are already several Fortnite servers available for self-hosting. Fans have created these on their own without access to the official code, and they run on a standard PC or a custom-built server using off-the-shelf hardware. One example of this is Project Reboot, which is publicly available on GitHub. People use it to play older Fortnite seasons or to play the game with friends on unsupported platforms like Linux.

What is irrational in pointing out that this particular law, as it is written, gives the game developers a perverse incentive to further embrace more exploitive revenue models such as free to play and subscription based services? The technical implementation is irrelevant. It is the business side of things that you should actually worry about.

If anything, some people seem to have this weird faith in regulation that makes them think if some politician is promising to fix something via legislation, then it will get fixed, regardless of how the law is actually written or how it will work out in practice. California in particular is full of regulations that feel good but are either ineffective or has unintended consequences. See prop 65 which litters the state with vaguely worded warning messages that provide next to zero useful information, or prop 13 which massively disincentivizes home building and effectively makes new homeowners subsidize the property taxes of those who bought before them.

You can be supportive of regulations. I am supportive of many regulations. But I don't just support a regulation because it is great news that makes me feel warm and fluffy. I want well thought out regulations that don't neuter themselves with exemptions and don't easily lead to undesirable consequences. If this makes me an irrational anti regulation crusader, then off to Antioch, CA I shall go.

> gives the game developers a perverse incentive to further embrace more exploitive revenue models such as free to play and subscription based services?

This is what I fail to see an explanation of anywhere in these comments. WHY would this law make a subscriber-based revenue model so much more enticing? WHY would this law make single-purchase games with multiplayer servers suddenly so non-viable from a business perspective?

The latent assumption I keep seeing is that the mere existence of a regulation in an area will drive people away from that model, but that's simply not how businesses operate. It's a cost/benefit analysis. So what is the cost?

Yep, this is the "higher taxes will drive new yorkers to florida!" fear-mongering (sometime, sadly, even by people who don't actually know better but automatically shill for companies).

There are so many games (like Hitman: WoA, which I love btw) that "require" online access in order to provide the same functions that previous games by the same devs provided fully offline (e.g. keeping track of your weapon unlocks).

This is just clawing back some of the consumer protections that the "we're not selling you a product, we're selling you a temporary and arbitrary license that we reserve all rights over" BS snuck around.

Your example about New York and Florida is a terrible one because it’s true statement. Why would you use that example? Are you saying it’s not true (demonstrably true with residential data)? Or are you saying it’s happening but not to the extent that the fear-mongerers express it?

You're wrong. There is no wealth-tax based mass migration of the wealthy from NYC to Florida.

1) https://fiscalpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/20251009...

> As we get more data on the post-pandemic period, we increase our knowledge of the major upheavals that took place in New York between 2020 and 2022. Despite the state suffering a deep recession and massive out-migration during the pandemic, data show that New York’s tax base remains resilient. When taxes on millionaire earners were raised in 2021, tax revenue to the state increased by an estimated $3.6 billion and there was no detectable increase in high earner out-migration.

In both cases, it’s true. Higher taxes will drive some New Yorkers to Florida! That’s why the state government has to research the impact of a tax increase and set the brackets at a point where the amount they bring in, after subtracting lost revenue from people who move away, is maximized. A sensible tax increase won’t drive many New Yorkers to Florida, and it’ll make up for the few who do leave.

In this case, studios will need to do the same calculation with the cost to package and release server software / the income they’ll lose from going to a subscription model.

'Some' is a meaningless non-metric. Some people do anything.

Actual studies [1] show that the rich are not moving in response to wealth taxes, and in fact when they do move, it's almost never due to taxes.

> As we get more data on the post-pandemic period, we increase our knowledge of the major upheavals that took place in New York between 2020 and 2022. Despite the state suffering a deep recession and massive out-migration during the pandemic, data show that New York’s tax base remains resilient. When taxes on millionaire earners were raised in 2021, tax revenue to the state increased by an estimated $3.6 billion and there was no detectable increase in high earner out-migration.

1: https://fiscalpolicy.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/20251009...

I’m not sure why you’re trying to argue against the idea that people tend to gravitate toward the cheapest option.

Because they don't?

Do you eat at the cheapest restaurant every day? Do you think that every Michelin Star restaurant immediately fails and shutters? Do you think everyone buys the $80 prepaid flip phones, and no one actually buys the $700+ iPhones?

Most people don't gravitate towards the cheapest option (in fact, many people find the cheapest option automatically suspect and won't buy it), but rather want a balance of affordable and desirable. No one living in NYC is doing it because they're gravitating towards the cheapest option in the first place, they're there because it has a high level of desirability comparative to its cost, even as expensive as it is.

Because the law specifically exempts subscription-based revenue models, so they become more attractive than they currently are by definition.

> so they become more attractive than they currently are by definition.

Please reread my comment. You're doing the exact same thing. You're saying this like it's a given, but it is not. WHY would it be more attractive?

Because doing so gets them out of obligations to release tools that may be difficult-to-impossible to release to comply with the law.

Sure, but it's not actually easy to just change your pricing model. Most gamers do not want to pay subscriptions even though they would pay for DLC and battlepasses. Free-to-play needs microtransactions that people actually buy so they tend to be pay-to-win or convenience items (inventory/bank space) that punish free players.

Why would releasing your server executable as a standalone be difficult to impossible to comply with the law? Many games already do this

Because the alternative now costs more.

That is just a basic function of human decision-making. If there are two options, and one becomes more expensive, it will become more common to pick the other. It very slightly tips the balance toward the option that hasn’t become more expensive.

Please reread my initial comment. That's the assumption everyone is making, but WHY would it actually cost so much more? What's so much more expensive? Some games already do this, why would it be so much more expensive for others?

I can only reread your initial comment so many times. You’re still incorrect.

Yes, a small subset of games have downloadable server software; the ones that do are able to do so because it’s self-contained and unencumbered by proprietary components that can’t be redistributed.

Most games don’t, and they won’t be able to.

Licensing restrictions aside, how are you supposed to package a modern microservice-based network of servers into a single package that can be run on consumer hardware? And abstract over the specifics of the cloud environment you targeted so it can be run elsewhere? It’s pretty much a nonstarter.

Consider the infrastructure you're talking about. What parts of the game service would need to be implemented with micro services and/or calls to a cloud computing and storage? It would be matchmaking, storefronts, news updates, etc.

Running a single dedicated server on a home computer to play with whatever community you've curated requires none of these. Any sane game server architecture would already be essentially a single executable since you want performance and synchronicity within a single "match" or "world".

You say most games won't be able to release server software. Can you provide an example of a game which could not possibly be disentangled from its cloud architecture? I'm having trouble thinking of any

Subscription models and micro-transactions are already infinitely attractive for those who are solely out for profit and rent-seeking, so it changes nothing material there. It doesn't make subscription models more attractive to gamers either. But it makes non-subscription games vastly more attractive:

Previously, non-subscription games were a gamble, even if the company had the best track record in the world, even if you know the whole team personally. They still could get bought or something like that, and then all of that is moot.

Now, you can be somewhat sure that the multiplayer game you buy today will be playable for as long as there are people who want to play it enough to put in the time and resources to host the infrastructure for it.

So yeah, this just seems like F.U.D. to me.

I'd like to see current regulations enforced for everyone before adding more. "Great news guys, millionaires can now sue billionaires for breaking their kid's toy," is all this ammounts to. They dont have enough bodies (physical or virtual) to uphold what's currently in place. Nor, do governing bodies care.

- It causes cancer? Make sure you add a warning label.

- they lost PII? Make sure we collect the fine. What's that; they can't afford it? Don't waste the resources, then. There's other opportunities out there.

Here’s a few, as someone who has worked in games for 12 years.

Most games have code and design decisions that hark back 25+ years. Every single unreal engine game for example is based code written in the mid 2000s and some parts of the engine really feel like it. Online components are developed the same way. If you made a multiplayer game 10 years ago and it was successful, your next game is going to be built on top of that. I’ve seen places that use stored procedures in Oracle DB for gameplay logic, others that rely on any number of SQL server specific tricks. Closed source dotnet frameworks, proprietary AWS services, if you can think of it there’s probably a game shipped on it. You’re also making the assumption that the server is a neatly coupled thing.

Am I responsible for providing a fallback to EOS, or Steam, or playfab in case their services are decommissioned?

What about the licenses for the code that affects other areas - we have a GPL’ed library here that we can use but now all of a sudden the vitality of the license means we have to replace it?

Who defines “ordinary use of the game”?. If the game has a multiplayer component, to some large number of users that can construe “ordinary use”. call of Duty is the best example of this (although COD is probably one of the games with the best track record here).

This is going to result in games moving more towards the Hollywood studio model - start up a company, launch a game and wind down the company for the next project. People who rely on that already unstable industry will be given even less stability due to this.

> I have a hard time imagining the server architecture would change much

That’s great - I’m sure if it’s that little work you’re willing to do it for all of those games companies.

> A dedicated company-owned server is just a beefier home computer with load balancers and matchmaking. Drop those two, slap a server list on the client, and you're golden

Game backends are just like Other backends. Some use event queues, microservices, third party APIs, licensed components. This adds a burden that no other software is expected to carry - it’s perfectly fine for Google to drop support for their devices but a 25 person company needs to go back and fix all their old games if they want to keep selling them?

> we have a GPL’ed library here that we can use but now all of a sudden the vitality of the license means we have to replace it?

The "we're not distributing it" loophole is why the AGPL exists. So yeah, even though you can technically not violate the gpl by not distributing the server, don't do that, it's scummy. Better to just not use gpl code at all.

Respectfully disagree. The AGPL exists for that use case, and the difference is exactly that you need to distribute the changes.

If you license something under GPL, that necessarily means you’re okay with people making local changes and not sharing them. If you aren’t okay with that, then don’t use the GPL.

For me, that means I use a mix of AGPL and MIT depending on project.

> If you license something under GPL, that necessarily means you’re okay with people making local changes and not sharing them. If you aren’t okay with that, then don’t use the GPL.

GPL has always meant you're okay with someone making local changes for their own internal use.

When it comes to servers, someone making a project this decade that uses GPL might be signalling they're okay with server code staying closed source. Or it might be other reasons, like the uncertainty over what code is covered by AGPL. And if a project is older, there's an increasing chance they didn't expect the current ecosystem and hate that the code is being used this way.

All of this is valid and none of it is a good reason to oppose legislation to keep games from being destroyed.

35 years ago, in 1991, the vast majority of games were programmed in assembly, directly fiddling with the hardware registers. If you wanted to port your game to a new system, you were basically making a new game. There were some exceptions where systems shared enough internal components to make code reuse viable; these almost universally resulted in worse experiences for the players. Think like ZX Spectrum ports to Amstrad or MSX; or Atari ST ports to Amiga.

If someone in that development context suggested writing all games in a high-level portable language, using common development frameworks licensed by multiple companies, and calling exclusively into standards-defined graphics and audio APIs, they'd be laughed out of the room. And yet, within a decade, basically all games were written in C/C++, using third-party engine code like RenderWare, which had abstracted versions of all the major rendering APIs developers needed to touch. Game porting went from "rewrite your game for each console" to "replace these SDK functions here, make sure it builds, and add another entry onto the QA matrix". And as a result, near-identical multi-platform releases became the norm rather than the exception.

The vibes I'm getting from your post are the same as how a game developer might react to someone in 1991 demanding all games sim-ship on every economically viable platform[0]. It's easy to get lost in the chaos of existing development and assume that because we currently build game servers like shit today, that they have to be built like shit.

The reality is that the state of affairs being mandated by the law is what game developers originally shipped. The original Unreal's multiplayer architecture included dedicated server binaries that shipped with the game itself and could be run by any interested party who wanted to play with people. This is a server architecture that is proven and works; everything from Quake to Team Fortress to Minecraft shipped server binaries you can just run. Likewise, on console, multiplayer services were hosted on one of the consoles playing the game, which, while not providing the best experience, made third-party revivals of those services fairly straightforward.

It is specifically MMOs and "live service" games that moved away from these proven server architectures to the cowboy-coded spaghetti code messes that you are referencing. The California law referenced here is specifically a forcing function for good development practice. All the gameplay-critical server-server components of a particular game should be able to fit in a single binary you can just ship to anyone who should have access to them.

You posed some more specific questions about how a game should fall back. I am not a lawyer and I am not involved with California's law, but I suspect a fallback to the online services of the platform the user bought the game from would be "good enough". Adding that fallback to your QA matrix during major development would probably be the most effective way to make sure it actually works. The ability to point the game binary at a specific IP would be preferred, especially on PC, but I doubt you'll get Nintendo to cert that.

As for Google, I actually do think the current state of affairs regarding software support for smartphones is unsustainable and stupid. It's only even a thing because of toxic max-security[1] in the smartphone market. On PC, we can just install whatever OS we want; it's specifically the tying between OS vendor and phone hardware that we are at the mercy of the vendor's release schedule.

[0] At the time that would include SNES, Mega Drive, IBM PC-compatibles, Macs, Amigas, Atari STs, X68000, PC-98...

[1] https://tom7.org/httpv/httpv.pdf

One of my first lessons in open source was just because I could imagine an architecture where a feature was easy did not mean that the software had an architecture where said feature was easy. And I don't see any reason to doubt GP's assertion that existing server architectures are not in a position to comply with the law.

The problem in this instance is not that the legislation effectively mandates that companies move away from particular server architectures (I mean, there's room to debate the wisdom of that, but it is a pretty explicit goal of many proponents of this law). But if you want to seriously push companies to do that move, you also have to recognize the ways to actually entice them to do that. And you know what is a very good way to ensure noncompliance with your regulation? Tell companies they have 6 months to make core architectural rewrites of not only to-be-released games, but games that they are currently selling and expect to continue selling. That kind of timeframe is just not possible.

> Am I responsible for providing a fallback to EOS, or Steam, or playfab in case their services are decommissioned?

In this case, the company offering this service should be responsible for making it possible to host the service independently before discontinuing it. However, games that use such standardized services are actually less problematic in practice. For Steam, for example, there is the Goldberg Steam Emulator, which emulates Steam’s online features. Games that do not have additional DRM or any extra features but simply use the standard Steamworks SDK for multiplayer can be played entirely without the Steam client or server using this emulator. Even for services that had already been shut down, like Gamespy back then, Openspy quickly emerged as an alternative. Not all games worked right away, but the community fixed most of the issues very quickly. So, in the end, the games that use some kind of custom solution built by the developer themselves are much more important.

> In this case, the company offering this service should be responsible for making it possible to host the service independently before discontinuing it

So AWS are now contractually required to offer all of their managed services to be self hostable or they can’t be used in games?

> For Steam, for example, there is the Goldberg Steam Emulator

So open source reverse engineered solutions are ok? Why aren’t they acceptable for games instead of the underlying platform? Why is it ok for a game that uses steam for online services but not epic (as there’s presumably no equivalent emulator), or an in house tech?

> Games that do not have additional DRM or any extra features but simply use the standard Steamworks SDK for multiplayer can be played entirely without the Steam client or server using this emulator

And those games are unaffected by anything that will come from this law.

The law isn't requiring that all online features of the game be available. Just a minimal viable product to play the base game online. No storefronts, no news prompts, no matchmaking servers, just server lists. You don't need AWS for that.

> I'm always shocked by how irrationally anti-regulation this site is.

If you wanted to trigger a HN rant, topics should always include regulation, particularly in regard to nuclear power, guns, freedom of speech or taxation.

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 micro services.

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 proprietary third party 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.

i mean its perfectly valid to create a new exception to copyright laws. in fact it might already exist because if you are legally required to release something that beats all the contracts you signed in any reasonable jurisdiction. weaker ip means giving a head start to new devs and bankrupting commercial engine vendors. and im all for making epic and unity go out of business

> 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.

None of those things are required to be supported by this law. It's the minimum viable product to enable multiplayer play.

- Ditch the matchmaking, players can build their own communities and use server lists for discovery - Ditch the anti-cheat if you can't distribute it, it's not necessary for online play - Ditch the metrics, of course - Let the player download their inventory save file or something, idc

Companies tend to comply with laws in the dumbest possible way just to be jackasses. If you want a company to release the server, write a law that says that. Otherwise, companies will find a way to comply with the law in the worst way possible. An easy one here is to make the game subscription based, but only for californians. When you go to shut down the server, just don't renew the subscriptions. And if anyone complains? "Nothing we can do, california made us do it!" (nevermind that an alternative form of compliance existed)

> The bill applies to digitally sold games. However, it excludes games provided via subscription services, free-to-play games, and games that are inherently playable offline indefinitely. It also prohibits the continued sale or distribution of games that have become unusable due to service termination.

I believe this is the key paragraph. I wonder if this will be an incentive towards making more games qualify for those exceptions. I think the previous cases where this act would apply are few but good thing they wouldn't increase under this act.

California and meaningless feel good legislation with massive loopholes? A match made in heaven!

If this is how the bill ends up being enacted, it will only push more big game developers into making their titles subscription only. A win for gamers' rights, I suppose.

I can see them adding a $1 per year subscription at the very least.

Why not $0?

$1 refundable subscription

At least that somewhat aligns incentives between players and the game studio. If an old game has a long-lasting player base, then a modest subscription makes it more likely that the studio would keep the servers up and running, if not actively patching the game. With a game that you pay for up-front, a long-lived player base can be a liability for the company (ongoing costs without many new purchases.)

Why is this a problem? Quake 3 came out a quarter century ago, yet there are still community host servers available

Quake 3 can also be played fully offline, for various measures of "play" and "fully".

After about 2010 companies stopped providing the server binary. Games like Modern Warfare 2, Battlefield 2, etc could be played by communities in perpetuity on private servers. If the next game (MW3, BF3) were terrible, you didn't have to buy the sequel, what you had was "good enough" and you could wait for the next version to be released in 2-3 years.

With the current "closed server" model, you can't get a copy of the server code, can't host truly private servers, and when the sequel MW4, BF4 comes out, those private servers won't survive and it forces everyone to move to the sequel regardless of the quality of the game. You can technically still hire a private server for games like BF3 (circa 2012) but very few people are going to pay the $70/month to host an official one via whatever terms EA has come up with, and you absolutely can't run it with plugins, mods, and especially custom maps or game modes, you have to play it "vanilla".

Quake 3 the server is included with the game, anyone can run it, modify it and it's very plugin friendly, which is largely why it is still around today. Closed servers you can't directly access is a deliberate decision to kill the game when the sequel is released, by not allowing users to extend what they "bought". Otherwise we would still all be playing Battlefield 3 on custom maps with CTF and 128 v 128 player servers and everything else. You can modify a handful of things on the paid private servers but it's extremely limited and there's no community feedback on any of this.

> After about 2010 companies stopped providing the server binary. Games like Modern Warfare 2, Battlefield 2, etc could be played by communities in perpetuity on private servers. If the next game (MW3, BF3) were terrible, you didn't have to buy the sequel, what you had was "good enough" and you could wait for the next version to be released in 2-3 years.

That's not true about Modern Warfare 2. Modern Warfare 2 was the first Call of Duty game where you could no longer host your own servers. In its predecessor, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, however, that was still possible. For MW2, unofficial servers created by players only became available later on. However, Activision has taken legal action against many of these projects.

Amusingly, all Call of Duties are still basically Quake mods. They've ALL ran on heavily modified quake engine, forked off of ioq3

It seems similar to operating an arcade or a movie theater and saying that you can have thousands of people enter but then only having space for a couple while still taking everyone's money.

I think it's more likely that the big studios will start rolling out trivial offline modes (less risky) rather than overhaul their revenue models (more risky).

It's not meaningless feel-good legislation, it's actively harmful by disincentivizing a bad thing, in favor of an even worse thing. See also car fuel economy standards that push car makers into killing the wagon market segment in favor of SUVs.

> See also car fuel economy standards that push car makers into killing the wagon market segment in favor of SUVs.

by the way, why wasn't this bug fixed long ago?

What will the negative impact of this law be, exactly? Hurting live service games which are already cancer?

No it will make everything a live service game

Good luck with that.

The industry already tried to make everything a live service game in the 2020-2022 period and it was financially disastrous because gamers rejected it.

Gamers have made it clear that they don't want a market full of live service games unless they are free to play (and even then, very few will survive).

They'll make rare exceptions for things like GTA6, but these will be unicorns.

That certainly won't stop out of touch CEOs from choosing to do just that anyways. CEOs and making the stupidest possible decisions are also a match made in heaven.

sony already cancelled like 5 in development live service games now since concord bombed? Certainly a lesson that is hard to learn.

It incentivizes subscription-based games.

Not exactly the same thing, but a few years ago the law changed to require a sesame-allergen notice on foods that had sesame. Some manufacturers starting adding sesame to foods that didn't need it, because they concluded that including the notice was easier than guaranteeing that their product was sesame-free. The intent of the law was to protect people with sesame allergies, but the result was fewer choices for them.

Sometimes laws have unintended consequences.

https://apnews.com/article/sesame-allergies-label-b28f8eb3dc...

If a manufacturer is unwilling to guarantee/monitor the lack of sesame in their food, and you having a presumably severe sesame allergy… isn’t it correct not to be eating that food?

Like previously you trusted their lack of sesame based on vibes, which you probably shouldn’t have been doing, and now they’re explicitly telling you not to trust them on this; this seems to me strictly better. You’ve lost a choice that never really existed in the first place

An actually unintended consequence would be if they introduced sesame because they were going to have to put the label on it anyways

The result was same choices as before, but more information about it.

Per manufacturers, these were unsafe to eat things - they just wanted to kinda preted there is no danger in them.

The natural incentives had already pointed to subscription based games, these companies attempted it, and consumers mostly rejected it. I'm extremely dubious that this regulation would be enough to reverse that. It's a much easier decision for a company to put a small development team on readying the server tools for public release than brute forcing a new business model on a resistant consumer base and all the associated risks that come along with it.

If by subscription you mean World of Warcraft style continuous subscription then yes, it doesn't work for most games. But I'd argue the modern battle pass model is just another flavor of subscription. And according to the article, free to play games with battle passes and micro transactions also get an exemption from the proposed bill, so companies will just move to that instead.

Battle passes/mtx would IMO definitely fall under monetary considerations, which would make the excemption not apply. But as is written now, there still needs to be a precedent set for that, to really cement that interpretation

Are we still talking about negative impacts of this regulation? Because I don't follow the argument that games going free-to-play is bad for the consumer. Consumer pressure has pushed most games with battle passes and microtransactions to limit those to optional expansions of the base game, often merely cosmetic. People can and do spend hundreds of hours playing Fortnite without paying a cent and I don't see how that type of outcome is bad for the consumer.

And if the consumer doesn't invest any money into the experience, I have a hard time justifying a requirement for the publisher to provide options to keep the game running in perpetuity, so I'm fine with that exception.

It’s basically going to incentivize gambling and skinners box type implementations to juice revenue.

Sure, people can opt out and some will. However the base human psychology is pretty well documented. If the ability to simply not engage in what amounts to addictive behavior was enough we wouldn’t have the crazy online gambling epidemic. That is at least to me obviously bad for the consumer even if you can simply choose not to engage.

Some ethical game companies will likely draw the line at what you say - but I predict far more will realize they can juice revenue quite easily by simply moving towards incentivizing more lootbox type things.

You are treating multiple related issues as one singular issue. Battle passes and microtransactions aren't inherently a form a gambling. They can be implemented with gambling, but plenty of games aren't setup that way. If we have a problem with a model that specifically relies on gambling, we can regulate it like other jurisdictions have done[1]. But this specific piece of regulation is addressing something else and doesn't do anything to point the market specifically towards gambling.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loot_box#Regulation_and_legisl...

The market for subscription games is vastly smaller than the market for offline games. The industry learned that when everyone tried to make a wow killer.

If people dislike subscription-based games, companies will adapt by making non-subscription games designed with end-of-service in mind. It only creates an incentive as much as people are willing to pay for the subscription.

> However, it excludes games provided via subscription services, free-to-play games, and games that are inherently playable offline indefinitely.

Live service games overwhelmingly fall into exactly this category. If anything they're being incentivized over making a game that has an online multiplayer but focus being singleplayer or anything intended to be released and moved on from.

Subscription only games get way less revenue than pay once for the most part. So I don't think moving to subscriptions isn't gonna be as attractive to publishers as you think.

Also, with a subscription the customer has VERY different expectations, compared to a one time purchase. As in, they expect the access to go away once they no longer pay.

Of course its an incentive, however the disincentives to purchasing (subscribing/spending), and thus producing, such games still exist.

So this only really applies to games you have to purchase once but are online-only? That's... an incredibly narrow law, that only covers a class of games which are particularly stupid by design. (Continuous cost without continuous revenue.)

It also covers games with any form of MTX, even if the base game is free. So most live service games.

I don't read it that way. "Free-to-play" games generally include games with microtransactions, and the bill text does nothing to disagree with that:

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

> (2) Any digital game that is advertised or offered to a person for no monetary consideration.

This solely refers to the game being available for free, not for any additional powerups or cosmetics being available for free.

> > (2) Any digital game that is advertised or offered to a person for no monetary consideration.

I'd argue buying any form of MTX creates a monetary consideration. Though, I guess it is kind of a gray area that's gonna have to be ruled on.

> This solely refers to the game being available for free, not for any additional powerups or cosmetics being available for free.

I didn't intend to mean additional stuff being free. I meant additional stuff you can buy, resulting in the no monetary considerations carveout not applying.

This is absolutely not a gray area. MTX are monetary consideration. Free games in this case are more likely advergames.

Gray area, as in it has to be ruled on in court because that's 100% gonna be an avenue for some companies to try and weasel out of obligations.

Courts are not so easily amused.

> Continuous cost without continuous revenue

That would be the case if the publisher had any intent to actually keep the service online. Empirically they do not, hence the law.

We shall call it the Diablo 4 law.

Don’t a bunch of shooters also follow this model?

I assume you're actually a gamer, and not just an economist speculating on a market you're not exposed to? Because I don't know how to reconcile your comment with my reality. There are tons of live-service single-purchase games, I would even say they the overwhelmingly default model in 2026 compared to WoW-style subscription games.

If you want an answer to your "continuous cost without continuous revenue" riddle, the answer is in-game purchases, DLC, attracting new accounts over time, and the unspoken unadvertised promise "we can cut our losses at any time and shut down servers." This lattermost incentive is what is unhealthy for the market and what should be regulated to no longer be an incentive (short of having peer- or community-hosted servers, at least).

See Diablo 4. One time purchase, live service game. I'm almost certain blizzard makes most of its revenue from it on the cosmetics shop.

also pretty much all first person shooters are in this category

There are a bunch of these, and they are silly/unviable. I see a lot more free-to-play than single-purchase live service games, but the latter is a fun additional exploit in that they get you to pay up front for something that they never have any intention to survive long-term.

Currently I'm heavily playing both a free-to-play with microtransactions title (Heroes of the Storm) and a subscription title (EVE Online), both of which are live service games which would be exempt from this bill by definition, but are both games I would meaningfully like to play even if the companies decided they didn't want to run them anymore. (Yes, I'm aware both games I am playing regularly are old as time itself.)

Meanwhile, yes, there are single purchase games with an online model, and they fail and get shut down because they were never sustainable to begin with. The bill would arguably cover something like the FPS-of-the-years which are intended to grab everyone's attention for a few months and then die off when the company needs you to buy the next version of the title because they get no recurring revenue from you continuing to play the current one. (See Call of Duty, Battlefield, etc.)

> Currently I'm heavily playing both a free-to-play with microtransactions title (Heroes of the Storm) and a subscription title (EVE Online), both of which are live service games which would be exempt from this bill by definition, but are both games I would meaningfully like to play even if the companies decided they didn't want to run them anymore. (Yes, I'm aware both games I am playing regularly are old as time itself.)

[emphasis mine]

AFAICT, the MTX would make HOTS not be eligible for the "no monetary considerations" carveout.

Edit, didn't realize you were the same person I replied to on another comment, sorry for repeating myself.

No worries, I disagree with your read on the text of the bill there, but I can appreciate there being reason for debate. ;)

I can absolutely see how you came to your interpretation. Thanks for being so cordial.

This definitely has to be ruled on to know one way or another for sure.

Ah, I see your point better now. I agree that free-to-play and single-purchase live service games are essentially the same breed, that free-to-plays are similarly widespread, and would indeed like microtransaction-funded titles to be subjected to the same stipulations in the bill.

> there are single purchase games with an online model, and they fail and get shut down because they were never sustainable to begin with

I still don't think I agree with this (it's the exact same business model, just with an onboarding cost to e.g. be less dependent on MTX, or to cultivate a smaller but more dedicated fanbase, or to shut out bots), but that's beside the above points.

This is really about Ubisoft's The Crew, a one-time-paid mostly-singleplayer car race game about infights and revenges in an illegal street racing group, that required Internet connection, which server got shut down. So yeah.

The required connection and authentication was likely an anti-piracy measure, so kind of doubly yeah.

> That's... an incredibly narrow law, that only covers a class of games which are particularly stupid by design. (Continuous cost without continuous revenue.)

Eh, it sounds unintuitive, but in practice it's extremely common. Almost every first-person shooter (well, you could really expand that to "almost every competitive multiplayer game") made by major studios is either a one-time purchase or entirely free. The ongoing revenue comes from cosmetics and other in-game goodies.

This sort of economy makes sense when you consider consoles (especially back in the day), where it's easy to get people to buy a disc but hard to get people to sign up for a subscription.

Diablo 3 and 4 would be massive examples? Hell Divers. Monster Hunter, perhaps?

Online head to head games like Street fighter? Maybe RTS games like Dawn of War?

Pay Day.

Seems like all of these would be hit and will move to freemium or subscription.

incentive towards making more games qualify for those exceptions

Yes, please, produce more "games that are inherently playable offline indefinitely".

> However, it excludes games provided via subscription services, free-to-play games, and games that are inherently playable offline indefinitely.

How is that incentivizing offline games? Half of the service game focused industry would be exempt

They will also prefer subscription or free-to-play than actual offline gaming. This is going to be a disaster

I don't think it's going to be a disaster, doing nothing is not quite a disaster when the AAA games sector has been ticking over like this for the past 10 years or so.

The law is worded so that this does extremely little even if fully passed by CA's legal system due to the very broad exceptions. Exactly as lobbyists want it.

Makes great headlines for SKG while doing pretty much nothing material for them though.

>> It also prohibits the continued sale or distribution of games that have become unusable due to service termination.

Does anyone know how this should be interpreted?

Maybe to have a concrete example, let's take Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 (RCT2), with OpenRCT2 as a sort-of mod for it, but imagine that RCT2 was originally a subscription game where you paid per month to play it and that it terminated before OpenRCT2 started. Existing copyright laws already prohibit continued distribution, which OpenRCT2 doesn't do, so does this change anything? Does this law move what used to be civil (copyright) cases into criminal law (so there needs not exist a rights-holder to file suit; the state can just push cases as they see fit)? Could the OpenRCT2 devs still (as I believe they hitherto can) release a 'donation version' with bonus gimmicks if they so wanted, or would that be classified as a sale of something that enables playing the original RCT2 and so illegal?

You'll just get subscription games with a free year subscription code in the box. If anything I bet it will accelerate the death of free multiplayer.

They are going to do what movie industry is already doing: create shell company for release of each game.

Then they will shut down the company when they want, and there will be nobody to come for.

I mentioned this in a separate thread. It seems like a huge risk to release an online game if you don't do this now. A single bad game can take down a studio. Now there's even more risk because a previously successful game may come with a big bill in the future if you have to do refunds or some late architecture change when you instead want to take a product down to save money.

Perhaps they should just write games in a way where they can actually release server code when they it shuts down?

Perhaps "they" can write games however they want? If you don't like it, don't do business with them?

This is a weird thing to be legislating on.

I think it’s a great thing to be legislating on. I would like to see it on the federal level, myself.

Consumer protection laws are "weird"? I'd hate to live in your world...

It's too late to decide not to do business with them once they've stopped you from using a product you already bought.

The word "buy" is defrauding people when the thing purchased can be bricked before even getting it home.

Perhaps "they" are in a country with laws, and the laws now include restrictions on "however they want"?

>Perhaps "they" can write games however they want?

No? I don't want any developer to suddenly "want" to write code that bricks my OS for instance. What if they decide to do this after the game was released and I bought it?

These laws just complicate things, make it more expensive to run a game company and these government people don't get it. This will just result in making it more expensive to make games and keep them running. On top of that, it incentivises subscription based games.

> 'it excludes games provided via subscription services, free-to-play games, and games that are inherently playable offline indefinitely. It also prohibits the continued sale or distribution of games that have become unusable due to service termination.'

The only winners are lawyers. NOT gamers. The lawyers always like to call their laws "protect X" lol

Disagree. I can see the challenges for games that are really only meant to be played on a centralized server, but what about games that need to connect to a server just to play locally? Demanding consumers be able to do that is not making things particularly hard on the company.

That's correct. This will make it more expensive to make games. However, the games will be better for it, and the games made the most expensive are those with exploitive business models such as lootboxes.

So nobody to come after you for copyright violation if you run a community-patched (a.k.a. cracked) version of the game?

Well, no. Just like other purpose-built vehicles (like the ones for motion picture productions), they will transfer rights to other entities before shutting down.

How is something like that not considered when a law like that is passed?

Despite the good intentions of SKG, their efforts are being heavily shaped by the intense lobbying against them.

This law has a lot of weird omissions and obvious loopholes because industry lobbyists want it that way for their clients. It's a very clever law in the studio and publisher's favor. It changes pretty much nothing. The worst GaaS plagues on the industry will be able to keep trucking along as usual and the few service games remaining that have an upfront cost will slap on the tiniest singleplayer function to meet the law. Hell a model viewer might even meet it, or at the very least bait people into trying to waste time in court over it.

All while making nice headlines implying that SKG is making meaningful progress (they're not)

Judges are in fact allowed to notice that someone is obviously fucking with them.

And then lose the rights to those franchises/codebases/etc? I don't think that'll realistically happen.

right, but what are you going to do? Have strong regulations for anonymous, criminal, businesses which operate as a shadow political class that can multiply at whim and influence global governance?

Yah, right!

So, CA should get rid of those loopholes, too!

We need to culturally accept things like "zero day law patches" for loopholes and unintended consequences. Legislators, don't just pass a law, see it incentivizing something unintended, and then throw up your hands crying "Well, we tried!" Patch the law as soon as the bad behavior starts!

And how you would craft a law to prevent a company from forming sub-companies for specific games to isolate risk? Or make it illegal for a company to go bankrupt?

Creating sub-companies is common business practice that even small businesses use. Like if a small company wants to buy a building, they may form an LLC to hold the property to isolate that risk from the rest of their business.

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

Besides bankruptcy there is also shutting a business down, in which case are no new owners. Lavabit and Silent Circle being examples of businesses that shutdown rather than comply with laws they didn't like.

Shutting down operations as Lavabit/Silent Circle did doesn't negate existing contractual obligations. Voluntarily dissolving the company would also involve completing performance of outstanding contracts.

How would this solve anything?

Performance under existing contracts is still required to shutdown. The mechanisms for getting around contract performance without bankruptcy essentially require handing control of the company to the contractual counter-parties.

Bankruptcy sells the assets on behalf of creditors that have specific priority in law. Just releasing code to users would be a pretty serious abrogation of creditor rights.

The most likely outcome is that some PE firm would buy the software rights out of bankruptcy and figure out how to bleed money out of people that want to continue using that software.

> Just releasing code to users would be a pretty serious abrogation of creditor rights.

Would it, if legally required at the point of sale of the good the source code is based on and utilizes? I doubt creditors claiming ignorance of state law works well as a defense.

I don't know how you'd craft that law--I'm just saying they should. How to encode the spirit of the law into the letter of the law is the job for legislators.

Whenever the topic of regulating companies comes up, there's way too much fatalistic "Oh dear, we can't possibly incentivize good corporate behavior because companies are oh-so-clever and there's just no way to handle all the edge cases they will exploit!"

We'll never get anywhere at all if we simply give up the moment someone forms a shell LLC.

Sub-companies are owned by companies. Don't cap liabilities to the limited assets of a sub-company that actively violates the law.

Or cap them to a reasonable standard: 100% of revenues derived from the game.

Loopholes are possible from excessive regulations. Regulating everything will never stop. Vote with your money and support game studios that provide the best online support. Or buy games that are standalone purchases that don’t require online services.

Excessive regulations? Or insufficient regulations and regulatory capture?

You can keep plugging holes, but each time you plug you are using a narrower specification of who is at fault or who is exempt. That creates loopholes. This is known as “Whack-a-mole regulation”.

If the only alternative to imperfect solutions you'll accept is no solution then I disagree. I think the treatment here is still better than the disease.

Voting with your money on its own rarely accomplishes much unless it is an overwhelming majority vote. There are also a huge number of things that simply cannot be managed properly, to the overall benefit of society, by demand-side market forces. There is a time and place for regulation, carefully considered and designed, with a change/revision process in place.

A big problem with lawmaking systems in the USA at all levels of government is that the change/revision process is virtually nonexistent. Laws are not adjusted as requirements change and understanding shifts. Regulation is hard in that environment, but the optimal amount of it is certainly much greater than "none at all".

It's simply not possible to maintain a functioning society without regulations on at least some things at least some of the time. Anti-regulation dogma is just propaganda by rich people who would become richer if their preferred bad behavior wasn't prohibited by regulation.

Or vote with your vote and support lawmakers that make good laws.

There are always ways around it. Especially laws around business.

Be interesting to see what this does to the online aspect of GTA 6.

I do wish this had been around when Firefall [1] shutdown, haven't really bothered with live service games since then.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefall_(video_game)

GTA 6 isn't going to release on PC for a while. Consoles are still dependent on other services that aren't affected by this legislation anyway...

  Under the bill, companies selling digital games released or resold after January 1, 2027, must provide at least 60 days' notice before terminating service. Furthermore, they must ensure that purchasers can continue to access the game—such as by providing an alternative version or a patch—and must offer refunds if doing so is not possible.

I'm excited about what this could mean for Bethesda games like ESO and Fallout. These franchises have historically been single player. The single-player focus is directly connected to the rich modding communities behind these games.

When online-only ESO and Fallout 76 were released, many longtime players were frustrated at the total lack of control they've enjoyed with prior titles. On top of this, the games are practically impossible to complete when attempting to play them like a single-player game. It makes these games far less immersive compared to their older single-player counterparts.

Looking forward to the far away day when these alternate/patched versions allow Elder Scrolls / Fallout fans the opportunity to fix mistakes made by Bethesda/Zenimax.

I wish subscription games could be preserved too, but this is probably about as good as it's going to get.

I doubt companies are going to go all in on subscription games, since that's more or less been tried and failed, and only WoW and a few others are left standing from that. Or maybe they'll try and fail, since the temptation is just too great (think Sony and Concord trying their luck with hero shooters, even though everyone with threw or more brain cells knew it would never make back what it cost).

The details direct from the legislature: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...

It looks less like a ban on killing games, and more like a road-map for how publishers could change products/marketing/T&Cs to avoid flak and liability.

(Not an ideal source btw: "This article was originally written in Korean and translated with the help of NC AI." The Bill is tiny can be read at https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm... )

It seems like one reasonable response from game companies is to include a service agreement with all games that explicitly limits the guaranteed server uptime. Ie “buying this game only guarantees operation until Dec 31 2028”

No clue if the market will go for that but it would meet the issue head on. “Companies will provide server binaries” on the other hand feels like pure fantasy.

Overall I’m glad folks are trying to do something about this.

If they did that, people would notice, it would be talked about, and it would be factored into (some) people's decisions on whether the game was worth the price. That's the market figuring out how to appropriately price a good based on information about it, which I think would be good. Even if that's the only thing this legislation changes I think it would be a good change, by forcing what was an ambiguous aspect of the good you purchased into a well understood and legally enforced aspect.

Releasing server-side code would be a non-starter for lots of companies. For one, many of them don't actually own all of the code they use to implement the game server. There's lots of proprietary middleware in use in online games.

Perhaps a workaround is to just have 1 server online indefinitely. Technically the online services are still functional - the match queue times would just be very, very large.

Release a spec. Release a binary distribution. I’m sure they could find a way to make it happen if it was in the studios’ interest.

> There's lots of proprietary middleware in use in online games

If bills like this pass, there'd be financial pressure on middleware providers to allow distribution at end-of-life (or for their component to be easily severed) else they'd lose out on all customers selling games in California/EU/etc.

Yep, everything is negotiable. So is price.

It's not like the market for middleware changes by this. I honestly don't see it having much of an effect on price. They're gonna take their middleware and go where exactly?

Its not pressure to release the source code. Its that they need to release the server so anyone can run it.

From Day 1 any Doom client could be a multiplayer server and this is how it worked for almost all games - Descent, Quake, C&C etc...

Right, but presumably the Doom and Quake server code was written by id Technologies themselves. That's not the case with a lot of modern multiplayer games. They license middleware like Photon Engine and don't have the rights to redistribute the server software, even in binary format.

I guess they could just strip our the parts of the server code that they don't have the rights to redistribute, but then it wouldn't be functional.

Or just not use that kind of component in the first place. There are bound to be alternatives that they could use and redistribute.

> Technically the online services are still functional - the match queue times would just be very, very large.

That would violate the law.

Would it? Online services are not terminated. There's no SLA defined in the law:

> 60 days before a digital game operator ceases to provide services necessary for the ordinary use of the digital game, the operator shall communicate all of the following information to purchasers and prospective purchasers of the digital game:

> (i) The date on which services necessary for the ordinary use of the digital game will cease.

> (ii) Any services that will no longer be provided by the operator.

> (iii) Any game features that will no longer be available to the purchaser.

> (iv) Any known security risks that may result from the cessation of services.

> (v) How the purchaser can continue to use the digital game, or obtain a refund, pursuant to paragraph (2).

Scaling in the number of game servers isn't termination of service, though, and would not match the conditions laid out above.

Laws aren’t interpreted that way. If you realistically can’t use the service, that’s termination.

But again, the players can use the service. The companies scaled back network resources, degrading the experience, but the service is still fundamentally available. Unless they put specific SLAs in the license agreement, the players are still receiving the online services that they advertised.

Even if this law just caused companies to put into their sales contracts that they will support the servers to a certain date X years in the future and then handling of the online services would pass to a third party that might charge a nominal fee to administer the service, that would be an enormous win for the free market (in that it makes obvious what was ambiguous about a good) and for people both better knowing how a good will function in the future and what future costs there might be. In a way, this could just force companies to provide the equivalent of a warranty for the functioning of the online aspects of the software.

People far too often forget the absolutely vital aspect information plays in the free market, and anything that increases information (for example, how long a good should be expected to continue to function) is a net good, when compared to a complete lack of information about that.

The reasonable compromise should be to force devs to release server binaries if they are not willing to run the servers themselves.

i don't know, do game developers have a right to sell a Remastered Multiplayer Edition later? in my opinion, yes.

Government forced speech is never reasonable. If you don't like the arrangement, just don't buy the game. Tell them why you didn't buy the game. Hope for a better future where more of the industry is built on open source. That's all anyone can do. That's all anyone should be able to do.

There's always someone willing to blame the victim.

The answer to companies committing fraud is not "buyer beware".

What are you proposing then? The government is not allowed to compel speech for good reason.

That’s not a Carte Blanche that forbids the government from everything.

The government can compel speech from food and other producers to print content and nutritional labels on their products. The government can compel speech on a yearly basis when we file taxes. The can compel speech such as guidance maps and websites to be accessible to the blind (ADA). They can compel vehicle owners to provide insurance and ownership information, which is a kind of speech.

> That’s not a Carte Blanche that forbids the government from everything.

I never said it was. Yes, commercial speech has diminished protections, but it is not annulled. It is still protected to a degree, even if less than ordinary speech. You may consider selling a game to someone and then shutting it down Fraud, but I somehow doubt the supreme court would agree with you (although you might be able to convince a lower circuit court to). Compelling speech is usually something that undergoes strict scrutiny. Compelling commercial speech requires that you pass the test established in Central Hudson Gas & Electric Corp. v. Public Service Commission (unless SCOTUS decides on one of it's random whims to overturn that ruling, which for all we know it might).

Don't get me wrong: I am in no way anti-regulation. But compelling speech is something that needs to be handled carefully.

Edit: removed the strawman thing (that was inaccurate and I apologize for the accusation).

This is not just free speech, it's commerce, and the government has the ability to regulate commerce. Warranties and lemon laws are not regulating speech - they're regulating sales and the legal requirements for those sales. Providing a method for playing a game a customer purchased after the company decides to abandon it is putting a legal requirement on the sale of goods.

Welp, better get rid of all nutritional facts, allergy warnings, medical side effect notices and all the other signage mandated by government for your safety.

Except shutting down a game is not fraud.

How is selling something and then removing the ability to use what was paid for not fraud? (setting aside the EULAs companies currently get away with using to sidestep the question)

There's even a specific term for scams where you pay money based on a specific description for an item being sold that is then changed after the time of sale known as a "bait and switch".

> Government forced speech is never reasonable.

Government forced speech includes food companies needing to add ingredient labels on packaging including allergen info, landlords needing to notify tenants before entering their homes, stores having to post accurate prices for the products they sell, and employers having to provide workers with safety data sheets for the hazardous materials they work with. These are all perfectly reasonable. Thanks to government forced speech we have more freedom/rights and better lives.

I don't think forcing a person or business to divulge their intellectual property, simply because they no longer wish to provide downstream products or services, is reasonable. That said, as a consumer I really don't like when something goes away. Overwatch 1 was probably the most brutal experience for me. In the end, I don't think anyone has any kind of special entitlements here.

The server binaries will almost always include other proprietary information that the studio will not want to release. Any sanitation of this binary further condemns this as a silly idea because now you are also compelling the individual or business to do additional (presumably unpaid) work so that arbitrary consumers can use their products or services indefinitely.

If this was about open source software I’d agree about not forcing people to do additional work, but if you’re selling something for money you should be obligated to do the bare minimum of stripping secrets out of a binary so the product you sold can actually work (and this will be barely any work if it’s designed with this in mind in the first place)

We already obligate them to do other basic necessities for consumer protection such as refunding or replacing faulty products

> The server binaries will almost always include other proprietary information that the studio will not want to release.

Or even information that they are contractually forbidden from releasing. A typical scenario would be a game developed as a fork of a proprietary codebase which was licensed from another company. Forcing the licensee to release material would infringe on the rights of the licensor.

It would at least be reasonable to expect this for future games, just treat the server binary the same way as the client in terms of what code you include (there way be some more involved if they have to migrate off a reusable codebase but I think it’s worth it)

I don't think it's reasonable for a law to dictate how software must be developed. If a developer wants to create some software by taking some licensed code and modifying it, that's their prerogative - it seems rather overreaching for the law to mandate that any licensed code must be structured as a library. (And in practice it'd be rather limiting for that to be the case.)

It is of course reasonable to restrict what you can do with a product you’re selling for money. There are plenty of laws and regulations that already do this. Without these kinds of laws intellectual property wouldn’t even exist - copyright was only created to benefit society by providing an incentive for people to create and invent things

It’s no different from mandating that the software can’t be malware that puts a ransom on your data, contain other people’s copyrighted content without permission, or just not work despite you claiming that it does when you sold it

And it’s not mandating that anything is structured in a particular way, just that the game works as the buyer would expect and how they achieve that is up to them

Almost every law that exists about software exists to dictate what a consumer is or isn't allowed to do with software on their own computer using their own hardware.

For once, there is a law that actually dictates the responsibilities that a developer has to the customer, and all that responsibility states is that the developer can not revoke the use of software that a customer has already fully paid for under certain narrow circumstances; somehow this is what you find to be unreasonable?

I think you may have misunderstood the situation I'm outlining:

1. Developer A writes some software.

2. Developer B licenses that software from Developer A, under the terms that (for instance) it only be used internally by Developer B and not disclosed.

3. Developer B makes modifications to that software and uses it as part of the implementation of a video game server.

4. Developer B goes bankrupt.

Under this proposed law, Developer B would be obligated to release the modified software, breaching their agreement with Developer A and potentially causing them financial harm.

For new games, they would know from the beginning that they’ll need to release the server software eventually, so they wouldn’t be able to agree with those terms

If the this law or something similar had been passed before step 2, then Developer B made a mistake.

If the law passed after the game was released, then it doesn’t apply.

There is lots of software not specific to games out there that comes with very murky licensing when it comes to redistribution. That’s fine because it’s predominantly used for backend, but now we’re talking about distributing binaries (or source code if you’re python). Here [0] is the license for a closed source python module - what do I do if I’m using this? SQL server is widely used and not redistributable, and has lots of proprietary features as a more common one

[0] https://github.com/Azure/MachineLearningNotebooks/blob/maste...

There's also scenarios like games that depended on GameSpy being forced out into the cold. Battle for Middle Earth 2 is a good example of this. The LOTR rights expiring isn't what got them. It was another provider going away in a puff of smoke and not enough player base to justify a complete rewrite of the backend.

https://www.ea.com/news/update-on-ea-titles-hosted-on-gamesp...

> Or even information that they are contractually forbidden from releasing.

Laws trump contracts.

Setting aside for a moment whether or not this specific legislation is a good implementation of the idea, I cannot understand how people don’t comprehend that this only happens because there is currently no obligation to release their server binaries or code.

The second that becomes a legal requirement with associated penalties, developers will stop licensing technology under those kinds of terms.

Why would developers stop licensing? They will just tear the middleware out and release as-is, leaving the community to fill the API gaps.

Right, they'll stop licensing proprietary sever code. But that in turn drives up the cost of game development since they'd have to either purchase redistributable licenses or develop their own networking software.

I suspect companies will just scale down the servers to 1 instance with bare minimum support. Technically the online service is still active, thereby eliminating the requirements to distribute source code, even if it can only handle a handful of active players and terrible latency.

I think if you have a market where you don't license distribution for your software mostly because "hey, you can sell that for more, maybe", then changing the market so that everybody has to buy distribution should actually force the middleware price down, if anything, because they're no longer able to segment their market on it.

Why do people keep bringing up source code? It’s just as much a canard as the stupid “nonredistributable middleware” argument.

The ideal way for a game company to keep their game alive after they have stopped supporting it is to build it with that in mind from the start. A lot of the server–side components, such as monitoring, authentication, database storage, moderation, anti–cheat, etc, etc can all be made optional. It’s a small upfront cost, but set up the build system so that you can build without all of those components, or with simpler versions of them. That includes anything you cannot legally redistribute. If your last game used a middleware component that was critical to the functionality of the game but that you cannot redistribute, then you do need to find a replacement for that specific middleware component for your future games.

Then, when the end of life date of your game approaches you simply build the server binaries one last time, this time turning off all of the optional components, and let your customers download it. You don’t have to give them the source code and you don’t have to violate any license agreements in the process. Your customers can arrange for any necessary hosting of the servers themselves, most likely by simply running the server process on their own computer.

And of course the option remains to simply write a single–player game that runs entirely on the customer’s computer, with no networked components at all. It’s a little bit old–school, but lots of game developers manage to make money that way.

Middleware isn't just things like matchmaking. Crucial components like client-side prediction, state reconciliation, and other netcode is often part of it. Stripping out all the proprietary components would leave the game in a non-functional state. This isn't just source code, the developers often have to pay license for each server instance that uses the middleware.

> And of course the option remains to simply write a single–player game that runs entirely on the customer’s computer, with no networked components at all.

So the solution is to just stop developing multiplayer games? This is just a laughable response.

> Stripping out all the [critical] proprietary components would leave the game in a non-functional state.

Correct. This is why I said that there would be multiple responses depending on the type of component. Many proprietary components are not critical and could easily be stripped out without harming the End–of–life version of the game, like matchmaking. But obviously that still leaves the critical ones. For those the game developer would obviously have to avoid any license agreement that would be unduly burdensome once the game was in the EOL state. Either there are already components without these onerous license terms, the existing components will be relicensed, new ones will be written and made available under less onerous licensing terms, or developers will just write their own. The market will provide.

> So the solution is to just stop developing multiplayer games?

No, not to stop developing multiplayer games but to stop putting networked components into single–player games. Remember that this all started with The Crew, which was purely a single–player game that was killed precisely because it nevertheless wouldn’t run if no server was available. If you don’t choose to make that design decision in the first place then this law has no effect on you at all. Your game is automatically safe from being killed when you stop selling it. You won’t have to do anything extra at all for players to keep playing it as long as they want to.

If they dont want to release the source then just keep running the servers! I think its ridiculous that people can buy games and the games just stop working and its ok because of some legalese that literally no one reads. Alternatively, why not just align your incentives with the user and charge subscriptions.

Games are interesting because players will sink a lot of time and sometimes money in and so it goes beyond a smart alarm clock or a fitness tracker imo.

> I think its ridiculous that people can buy games and the games just stop working and its ok because of some legalese that literally no one reads.

It's entertainment. It's ok for entertainment to end, especially when it's this cheap. There aren't any situations where I haven't gotten my money's worth out of a title I've played for 1000+ hours.

> Alternatively, why not just align your incentives with the user and charge subscriptions.

Because most people balk at subscriptions. And that's kind of the answer to a lot of "why don't they just" questions in this area. They can't release the server because of proprietary libs, but they're using those because it's way, way, way cheaper than not doing that and the people who write those libs really know what they're doing. People won't buy your game at the price you'd need to set to do everything in house.

> It's entertainment. It's ok for entertainment to end

Sometimes it ends right after you bought it with no way of knowing it would, or before you bought it. Not everyone gets 1000+ hours out of a title, sometimes the day you install they announce that the servers are going down forever.

I'd rather discuss actual problems people had with specific titles. Hypothetical edge cases always turn into corner cases during cross-examination. If we think about people who bought a game closing on day one we need to think about the people who shop at stores with a no-return policy. I'm not sure who's problem that should be.

>I'd rather discuss actual problems people had with specific titles

Here is one - I never got to play The Crew which got closed in 2024. But I would certainly like to do that now and some time later (10, 20 or even 50 years later). The same goes for Diablo 3 and 4, which did not shut down yet but they might. I just want to be sure that I will be able to play a game in the future. I do replay and reevaluate games, so for me it's important to keep them available all the time. Especially if I paid money for them.

Company's only exist so far as state law allows them to operate within them. It's not forcing them to do something after some point in time, it's a requirement to be a business at all.

The binaries can be obfuscated.

Not meaningfully. AI-guided reverse-engineering is very effective.

This also isn't relevant to third-party code obtained under license. It is a de facto restriction on code dependencies, which may significantly increase development costs.

While AI isn't particularly good with obfuscated code, it is true that code obfuscation in most old games can be removed relatively easily. The attack and defense state-of-the-art has moved on from those days.

True. Better would be to eliminate society damage like "intellectual property" and require everything to be available regardless

> now you are also compelling the individual or business to do additional (presumably unpaid) work

This is not unpaid work as they had already received payment at the time of purchase of the game. They should take into account the cost associated with this work at the time of sale.

What if, as a very high number do, the server uses something like a proprietary SQL database?

So what, dedicated hackers will find a way around that. There's bigger fish to fry.

Dedicated hackers already find a way around limitations. By that logic there’s no reason to do any of this.

After years of plugging away at it, sure. We can't rely on years of free labor from the community to make the games we bought work. Even if they had to substitute some proprietary libraries, it would be a much better starting point.

Oh I agree - I don’t think saying hackers will find a way is a good solution at all!

You only need that fancy database when you have lots of users. When you release a server binary that anyone can run it doesn’t need to support quite so many. Have a compile–time flag that excludes the fancy database when set, and have it fall back to something simpler like SQLite or Postgres or whatever you want.

The backend for a game is not just an .exe file. It can be a mess of a system that relies on all kinds of services that need maintenance and that one dev who knows how to reset the cache.

I agree that it's shitty that buyers can lose access to a game they bought, but I really struggle to see how this could function practically.

> It can be a mess of a system that relies on all kinds of services

Nowadays, this is much less of a "can" and more of a "definitely is" :(

Based on what I see as (non-game) security consultant in terms of service complexity, what modern FOSS projects consider a normal container constellation, and on what I see from at least one indie dev whom I personally know. It has been a topic I've brought up since he put so many hours into it and the game is fun and the binary didn't even run if you don't have a compatible Google Play Services version, much less the various back-ends that it connects to for accounts, level data, level thumbnails, matchmaking, etc. until you even get to the real-time multiplayer server

At the very least this hopefully stops them from suing modders that recreate the server software.

There’s no reason that has to be a serious impediment. Just release all of the components, plus a terraform file that sets it all up properly.

In practice a lot of those components can be simplified when you don't have to support a huge number of players. A server that only supports dozens of players can just use SQLite instead of a big multi–az database cluster. The cache can just be an in–process cache instead of a connection to an external Redis instance, etc, etc.

It would be enough to guarantee no legal threats against users who reverse-engineer the protocol and implement their own server. (A catchy name for it: "Fair Game Act".)

No, the reasonable compromise should be that the game remains playable, how that is achieved is up to the dev. Some will release the binaries, some make the spec open to the public for people to implement their own, some will patch out the online requirement, etc...

The developers may not have licenses for all the components of the server-side code. Lots of proprietary middleware is in use in online games.

This should be true for all software then, not just a subset of software.

I’ve thought about how to introduce a bill and find sponsors for extending first sale and related rights to digital goods. I understand the current terms and licensing, but we’ve lost too much to non-transferable contracts and millennials and later will likely have no books, music, or games that can be inherited by their children. It’s crazy that after thousands of years of sharing copies of writings, hundreds of years of sharing recordings, and decades of sharing games, we’re going to give it all up because it’s a license now.

The problem is, where to even start? I would think EFF would be spearheading something like this, but I haven’t come across anything. There have been attempts in the past, but they don’t seem to have ongoing support.

60 days before shutdown, a game company just needs to transition their game to subscription-required. That gets them out from under this law. Then if enough players subscribe, the company could decide to keep the servers going longer than planned.

So just make every game free to play and then require a paying to unlock the actual game.

As ever it will come down to judicial discretion whether trivial word games are allowed to nullify the law or not.

That'd IMO count as a monetary consideration, and thus not be excempt.

I wonder if making the game free to play before shut down would allow them to skirt the law?

I doubt it, as that'd not nullify the contract established by people who bought the game before it went FTP.

So if I'm a game dev that lives in the US outside of California, do I have to care about this? Or do I have to explicitly block Californians from buying my game if I don't want to be affected by it?

Writing is on the wall for more subscriptions. California will never learn - killed hollywood with most production being moved overseas, and now gaming.

I wonder if they will do something similar for software

Seeing this headline I thought it was about AB Hernandez. Guess I should have realized the assembly would not have passed such a bill.

Are they going to pay for the servers and support techs and bandwidth? I know it sucks but running online games costs money

Edit: If this was just about local games it’d be simple

Thank you so much Ross and friends

The key bit:

> 'AB 1921' is one of the first instances of bringing these demands into the institutional fold. Under the bill, companies selling digital games released or resold after January 1, 2027, must provide at least 60 days' notice before terminating service. Furthermore, they must ensure that purchasers can continue to access the game—such as by providing an alternative version or a patch—and must offer refunds if doing so is not possible.

I get that some developers are going to be irked by this, and I get that there will now be some perverse incentive to move to a 'subscription-only' model.

Now that the Stop Killing Games movement has overcome the major hurdle of landing actual legislative change from zero, its not much of a step from this point to extend these protections to anti-consumer practices around subscription-based games too, if they prove abusive.

It's not just about consumer rights, it is also about preserving and promoting arts and culture that can and are passed down through the next generation, which, ironically, helps keep growing and sustaining the industry.

Imagine what arts and culture might be like, seemingly everlasting copyright lifetimes notwithstanding, if Nintendo yanked Super Mario World from everyone because the online services to keep running the game simply costed too much or because the Mario franchise wasn't 'meeting profit expectations'. [Yes, I realise Super Mario World didn't have an 'online' component in the 90s, but imagine if it did...]

Remember that not too long ago it was very common place to self-host servers for games, and for quite a few this is still possible (such as DayZ and Minecraft). Thanks to community efforts, it is also still possible to play long abandoned online games that were once locked behind authentication and server listing providers, such as Battlefield 2 (previously fronted by GameSpy) that has been revived with BF2Hub (bf2hub.com).

Some games[1][2] even have a resurgence after long being forgotten. The revival of Dark Ages wouldn't have happened, and old friendships rekindled, if it was switched off because 'profit'.

Yes, Battlefield 2 had an offline component and could be still played sans GameSpy and BF2Hub, though a big part of the experience and culture around the game was the online community and gameplay against other real humans that made it so successful.

Relatively speaking (and legal/licencing complications aside) it is really not that difficult, especially for games publishers that cash in multiple millions of dollars in raw profits, to patch out authentication server mechanisms controlled by the publisher, and/or release the authentication/game server software binaries or source freely but unsupported after their deprecation date.

The legislation is designed to make these pro-consumer ethics at the forefront of game design. Video games are a big contributor to culture and human connection, and permitting companies to both freely yank a product that someone rightly paid for without compensation - you will own nothing and be happy about it - and kill off parts of our culture, is a horrible place to be as a society.

[1] https://youtu.be/FIFty-O4rOE [2] https://youtu.be/0zNtATsb5eg

Wow, this comment section is terrible, lets cut through the noise. The "you're buying a license, not a game" argument is the industry writing its own rules and then citing those rules as if they came from somewhere neutral. EULAs are not negotiated contracts; you cannot counter-offer, you cannot opt out, and there is no competing storefront with better terms. The moment you frame a unilateral "take it or leave it" clause as a legal shield against consumer protection law, you've already lost the moral argument. More importantly, that same "license" framework is what justifies their copyright protection, their anti-piracy enforcement, their DMCA claims. You don't get to invoke ownership-level legal protections against consumers while delivering zero ownership to them. Pick a lane. Also, also, for "technically impossible to preserve", the bill doesn't ask for eternal servers. It asks for an offline patch or a refund. Fan communities do the patch part for free, on weekends with no legal team, for Pete's sake! If a volunteer modder can strip authentication from a dead MMO, a company with actual engineers can do it too. And if they truly can't? Then refund the customer. The "complexity" argument was always a misdirection, the bill already hands them an exit door for genuine edge cases. They're not opposing it because it's unworkable. They're opposing it because it closes a very profitable loophole.

This isn't really about ownership in the abstract, it's about honest labeling. Owning a copy has never meant you can duplicate it. You can't run off copies of a book you bought, but nobody thinks that means the publisher can take it off your shelf when they stop printing it. The ESA conflates the copyright they keep with the copy you bought. The real difference with live-service games is server dependency, and that's where the dishonesty lives. If a game can't run without an online service the publisher controls, people deserve that caveat before they pay. Don't sell it with the word "Buy" and a one-time price and then treat it like a subscription you can end. This bill just forces that honesty: notice, an offline patch, or a refund.

>This bill just forces that honesty: notice, an offline patch, or a refund.

According to the bill text I can find, notice does not matter. The exceptions are subscriptions, f2p, or simply already offline games.

Notice in this case means replacing “buy” with “rent.”

So instead of whole products sold at a one time price, there will be more and more subscription based services micro-transaction slop. 10/10 California. Never change.

But right now we have games that you have purchased for a one-time price, the developer revokes your ability to play it years later, and you have no recourse.

Why would you be entitled to infinite support? For a game with an online component? Why does the game's purchase price extend to infinity instead of "for as long as the developer supports the game"?

You aren't entitled to infinite support. You are entitled to keep using the thing you paid money for. If the publisher can't support the online service, they're obliged to make the game still playable by either releasing server code or offline modes.

If you sell a product for money, you don't then get to later take the product away and keep the money.

It's not endless support but more "Don't stop me from playing the game". For example, win xp is no longer supported. You can still use it.

For a lot of games the current situation is essentially the same as "The OS is no longer profitable enough, so the developer prevents you from using it"

You still can sell X months access, if that's what you plainly state is being bought.

I don't think you could sell "for as long as the developer supports the game" specifically, since that'd be an illusory promise (no actual obligation if the product can be revoked immediately), making the contract unenforceable and the customer entitled to restitution (a refund).

"infinite support" is pretty much just "leave the customer with the product they bought working". There doesn't need to be any ongoing costs.

Increasingly it seems like the fact that the game needs support for online components was invented in order to give it an expiry time.

Gamers simply don't have the impression that they're getting value from the "support," rather than getting shafted come end of life.

This is such a terrible solution to a literal non-problem.

You should be able to make software that has a limited lifespan if you want. I just think that's fine. Games should not be special.

You should be able to sell something and then take it away when you're tired of it.

Would you feel the same if your phone permanently bricked itself because the vendor decided it was out of date and they just don't feel like supporting it anymore?

If you sell a product for money, you don't have the right to take that product away and keep the money.

Well, they're not selling you the game. They're licensing you the ability to play their game.

And yes, I think it should be legal for a hardware product (like Spotify's "Car Thing" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_Thing) to stop working because they don't want to support the online component. It's fine to get mad at the company, but I think it should be legal to do.

> They're licensing you the ability to play their game.

And Apple will no longer sell you a phone, but a license to use it. And it will brick itself when they decide (or when you try to open/repair it).

> Well, they're not selling you the game. They're licensing you the ability to play their game.

I don't think that's a reasonable reading of what it means to "buy a game", by most people's interpretation of the word "buy".

Regardless of that, the neat thing about regulation is that we don't have to settle for that interpretation, and instead force the one that's better for the consumer!

Then communicate that lifespan front and center. One game I can think of that did that, afair, was "the cube" from peter molyneux.

If there was ever a game that should never be recreated, and kept dead and buried forever, it's Peter Moolyneux's cube clicker "Curiosity", which was released on 6 November 2012, and thankfully ended on May 26, 2013, but never delivered on its grandiose promises:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity:_What%27s_Inside_the...

Before Curiosity ever reared its ugly cube, Ian Bogost's game Cow Clicker, released July 21, 2010, actually monetized delaying the Cowpocalypse from its scheduled one-year termination date of July 21, 2011 until September 7, 2011:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Clicker#%22Cowpocalypse%22...

>"Cowpocalypse" event and conclusion

>In 2011, an alternate reality game known as the "Cow ClickARG" was held, where a series of clues from the "bovine gods" eventually revealed that a "Cowpocalypse" would occur on July 21, 2011 (exactly one year since the original release of the game). From then on, every click made by players would deduct thirty seconds from a countdown clock leading to the Cowpocalypse. However, players could extend the countdown clock by paying to supplicate with Facebook Credits: paying 10 credits would extend the countdown by a single hour, while 4,000 would extend the countdown by an entire month.

>After $700 worth of extensions, the countdown clock expired on the evening of September 7, 2011. At this point, the game remained playable, but all the cows were replaced by blank spaces and said to have been raptured. Bogost intended the Cowpocalypse event to signal the "end" of the game to players; when addressing a complaint by a fan who felt the game was no longer fun after the cow rapture, Bogost responded that "it wasn't very fun before."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47110605

DonHopkins 3 months ago | parent | context | favorite | on: Gamedate – A site to revive dead multiplayer games

I want to recreate the server for Peter Molyneux's "Curiosity: What's Inside the Cube?", but put a life changing Rightward-Facing Cow from Ian Bogost's social commentary game "Cow Clicker" inside the cube, instead of a huge disappointment and a pack of broken promises and lies and hype and literal promises of godhood and credits and royalties.

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

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31981916

DonHopkins on July 4, 2022 | parent | context | favorite | on: Cow Clicker (2010)

A decade ago attempted to troll Peter Molyneux at the Unity3D "Unite 2012" conference after his insufferably vainglorious keynote presentation of his "Curiosity: What's Inside the Cube?" Cube Clicker game, jokingly guessing that the big secret inside the box was a cow, but he just didn't get the joke, even after I explained it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity:_What%27s_Inside_the...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24380418

DonHopkins on Sept 5, 2020 | parent | context | favorite | on: Bullfrog After Populous

His Cube game was the epitome of dopamine addiction games, all that was wrong with Zynga/Facebook games, the rage at the time. Nothing at all original about that: a total cop-out of game design.

When Peter Molyneux gave his insufferably vainglorious keynote presentation of Cube at the Unity3D Unite conference at Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam, I chatted him up afterwards and attempted to troll him by guessing that the big surprise in the box was a cow.

I don't think he got the point that I was trying to make an ironic reference to Ian Bogost's Cow Clicker, which is a parody of and social commentary on dopamine games.

I tried to explain the joke to him, and he still didn't get it. At least Ian Bogost had the self awareness to design Cow Clicker in the service of making a critical statement about game design, and the capacity of shame to be embarrassed when it was an accidental run-away success.

Unite 2012 : Keynote - Founders & Peter Molyneux (The BS starts at 1h 8m 21s -- It's been 8 years since I saw this live, and it's much worse than I remembered, especially now knowing how it turned out!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24AY4fJ66xA&t=1h08m21s

>1h 48m 06s, with arms spread out like Jesus H Christ on a crucifix: "Because we can dynamically put on ANY surface of the cube ANY image we like. So THAT's how we're going to surprise the world, is by giving clues about what's in the middle later on."

http://www.cowclicker.com/

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

>In the wake of a controversial speech by Zynga's president at the Game Developers Choice Awards in 2010, Bogost developed Cow Clicker for a presentation at a New York University seminar on social gaming in July 2010. The game was created to demonstrate what Bogost felt were the most commonly abused mechanics of social games, such as the promotion of social interaction and monetization rather than the artistic aspects of the medium. As the game unexpectedly began to grow in popularity, Bogost also used Cow Clicker to parody other recent gaming trends, such as gamification, educational apps, and alternate reality games.

>Some critics praised Cow Clicker for its dissection of the common mechanics of social network games and viewed it as a commentary on how social games affect people.

https://qz.com/34024/life-really-is-a-game-with-a-lot-of-cli...

>Life really is a game—with a lot of clicks—and then you die

>Curiosity is just the latest in a series of social experiments that rely on user interactions with seemingly no point. Of course, Zynga is the king of this phenomenon, providing games full of sticky and addictive action that encourage more clicks for the sake of clicks. Arbitrary value becomes real value, even when it’s not meant to. Just ask Ian Bogost, who created the satirical social game Cow Clicker that went on to such absurd popularity that he felt compelled to continue developing it, trapping himself in an ironic loop that refuses to end. In Cow Clicker, you literally click one cow every six hours to collect Mooney, which lets you buy other cows to click on.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27324466

DonHopkins on May 29, 2021 | parent | context | favorite | on: Y Combinator backed MMO metaverse game is a blatan...

Is Peter Molyneux a scammer? Or just a pathological liar who believes his own hype? He made some fantastic games in the past, but then...

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

The Lesson of Peter Molyneux

https://techcrunch.com/2015/02/15/the-lesson-of-peter-molyne...

Peter Molyneux - Dreamer? Or Con Man?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62-J4KDMAIk&ab_channel=Shott...

Peter Molyneux Interview: "I haven’t got a reputation in this industry any more"

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/peter-molyneux-interview-go...

>RPS: Do you think that you're a pathological liar?

>Peter Molyneux: That's a very...

>RPS: I know it's a harsh question, but it seems an important question to ask because there do seem to be lots and lots of lies piling up.

>Peter Molyneux: I'm not aware of a single lie, actually. I'm aware of me saying things and because of circumstances often outside of our control those things don't come to pass, but I don't think that's called lying, is it? I don't think I've ever knowingly lied, at all. And if you want to call me on one I'll talk about it for sure.

My comment was not meant as any form of value judgement upon the game at all. Only that it is an example I could think of where the death of the game was communicated upfront and where it was expected.

Think of your favorite movies.

Now imagine your kids never being able to watch them.

Same for books.

Same for music.

Games are an art form distinct from the above, and can in many ways be more powerful than they are. I've played games that toyed with my emotions in ways few movies can.

As such, they need to be preserved just as all the above categories.

I'm incredibly glad I can still play most of my 80's and 90's DOS games. People playing games now should still be able to play them. At least the ones that can be played "locally".

An online game isn't the dos game you played as a kid. It's temporal. It's the roller coaster you rode as a kid. A law forcing the any roller coaster built to stay open so your children can ride it is just silly and going to deter interesting rollercoasters people might not like from being built.

Moreover, if a game is art, it is a form of speech, no? And compelled speech seems like a moral violation.

> Moreover, if a game is art, it is a form of speech, no? And compelled speech seems like a moral violation

Online games are a service that have art in them. That is why they come with licenses and privacy policies. They are an actual service that already has consumer protections.

Hand waving any criticisms or attempts at regulating them because they are "art" is deeply dishonest.

I think this will cause a big schism in the Stop Killing Games movement. Game devs who were sympathetic to the movement will expect that this is enough, but a lot of people in the movement will be unsatisfied with the carveouts for MMORPGs and XBOX Game Pass and the like.

A lot of people in the movement think game companies are the root problem when what they actually have a problem with is current copyright law.

As someone in the movement since basically the beginning, this bill is enough in a lot of areas.

Subscription games already always had a "no pay, no play" expectation, so I don't see any problem with that carveout. The only real problem I can see is that in-game purchases in free to play games are not additionally explicitly named. (Though, "no monetary considerations" shouldn't include ftp + mtx)

Also, most gamepass games are available for purchase as well, so I don't see the problem there either, except the possibility that a game is removed from gamepass so you lose access despite paying, but that's something for the courts to figure out.

Right, well, the courts will figure it out, and if they decide on something you disagree with, and someone else in SKG agrees with it, is that not exactly what I predict?

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