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Comment by gwerbin | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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?

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