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.)
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).
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.)
[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.
This definitely has to be ruled on to know one way or another for sure.
> 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.
The required connection and authentication was likely an anti-piracy measure, so kind of doubly yeah.
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.
That would be the case if the publisher had any intent to actually keep the service online. Empirically they do not, hence the law.
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.
> (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.
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.