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.
Then they will shut down the company when they want, and there will be nobody to come for.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Or cap them to a reasonable standard: 100% of revenues derived from the game.
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.
This is a weird thing to be legislating on.
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?
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)
> '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
Yah, right!