It seems like the fair solution to this problem is to open source server code if you are going to cease support for an online game. That way the community has the opportunity to run their own servers if they want to.
I also really support giving 60 day notice if an online game is going to shut down. Places I have worked have had policies like that for games they are sun setting and I think the best game publishers think a lot about how to do that operation. It's not simple, because if people think a game is going away their behavior changes. And nothing sucks like buying online content for a game right before it shuts down. No matter what you do people will tell you they didn't know the game was shutting down. And if you give away content that you previously sold that also sometimes angers the community.
The problem is when companies know a game isn't working they tend to want to shut it down right away because the money they spend keeping it up is never coming back. And maybe the company is going to die too. So I do support a law for a 60 day notice.
> As currently amended, the act would not apply to completely free games and games offered “solely for the duration of [a] subscription. Any other game offered for sale in California on or after January 1, 2027, would be subject to the law if it passes.
So they just make their game free two months before they want to close?
Note, this law would affect less than 1% of all games _released_. Just that those happens to be the games that a sizeable part of the population plays. And even then, you spend more tying your game to a online service than not doing so in the first place.
Do they need to put some funds in escrow? Or will they just shut down the entire company and let the players sue for it. (I know that big publishers won't do that, but I'm sure the lawyers could create shell corporations to solve that problem.)
Or they could just demonstrate that they have an offline play capability right from the moment they sell it.
Just make the punishment the seizure and full release of the game assets (all source code, version control history, tooling, and release of copyright/trademarks).
It's always going to be a wild goose chase trying to take money when there isn't any (actually or by design), just take the product and let the public update it as a last resort.
My favorite example of this is when Warner Brothers said that Malibu’s Most Wanted wasn’t profitable because they spent so much money marketing Harry Potter that year.
It doesn't really matter how they comply, so long as the punishment for bon-compliance is serious enough to motivate a good-faith attempt. I'm wary of jumping right into encoding specifics into legislation. That said, I'll be surprised if this actually has the necessary teeth.
Bankruptcy is a universal get-out-of-punishment free card. At least, if you're a corporation large enough and foresighted enough to shove your liabilities off onto a fictional subsidiary before starting.
This appears to treat subscription style games and free to play with in game purchases differently than other games.
I would assume if that law passed the simplest compliance would just be to charge subscriptions and stop selling games directly. It seems like doing that would comply with that law without requiring much to change?
AFAIK the issue is with one time purchase games, where is not clear if you will be able to play forever or whenever they want to pull the plug, if they change to subscription based model or free to play, then it will be clear for the players what they are paying for.
So 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 microservices.
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 third party software like proprietary network code, commercial physics engines, or specific anti cheat 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.
> Releasing server code also exposes the inner workings of the company's technology.
And yet releasing standalone servers back in the 00s was the norm, rather than the exception. I don't buy the argument.
I mean, I guess the argument works from an anti consumer perspective, since it throws up a smokescreen with a vague "legal risks" scent in order to justify the SaaS business model that proprietary servers enforce.
Agreed! Far too many companies selling software as lifetime license and their renegade on that deal. A refund should be allowed. Or simply make the software offline without drm
The "final boss" of bad legislation. Often, Government intrusion into the markets is worth the side effects.
But in this case, even the best-case outcome is extremely dumb. Companies are forced to expend resources just so a few niche hobbyists are not inconvenienced. And there will be side effects, ultimately including geo-fencing of games to exclude California. It's a big market, but you can't make up for a net loss with volume.
it seems like it would be good programming to parameterize the details of how to connect to a server, so really all the game developer would need to do is document the requirements for the server/make the server software.
..things they'd be doing anyway as they developed the game??
Dumb. Just make it legal to reverse engineer the software, the community will take care of the rest, in a way the community actually wants, instead of getting just the bare minimum compliance from the original company, if they even still exist.
I tend to agree with you that allowing the community to keep games running would be a more desirable outcome, but I don't believe California could make such a law. As I understand it, reverse engineering is already illegal federally because of things like the DMCA. California can't just make the DMCA not apply in this case because its not a California law. However they can pass consumer protection laws making there be consequences for abandoning a game when the consumers are in California. Given the alternative is probably do nothing this does seem good.
I don't know about California, but AFAIK reverse engineering is legal, but breaking DRM protection isn't, so what companies did was to put DRM in their software, hence the reverse engineering became illegal.
You want the "community" to reverse engineer the game server, where all the game logic lives, from the game client? This is the state of many online only games.
Of course it should be legal to reverse engineer software you own, but you have to actually have access to the software to reverse engineer it.
We can do both! This seems more viable for the moment, unfortunately. Challenging copyright gets much more pushback than even pro-consumer obligations like these.
Can't say I support this. Legislative bodies should be dealing with actual problems in the world that meaningfully make the lives of regular people worse, not gamer entitlement.
Most "gamers" don't want to pay $5 for a game you spent 10,000 hours slaving to make. They will complain the game was too short when Steam shows they spent 10+ hours playing it.
The same is true for TV, movies, books. It's an insanely competitive market for people's time and attention. There are more games on Steam with 10,000 hours of dev time put into them than you can play in a lifetime. Standards for what's worth your limited time and money are therefore extremely high.
If you're passionate about making games chances are you're not going to succeed financially. Set your sights on personal success in the artistic sense. Can you communicate what you wanted, can you enrich some people's lives a bit with your work? It doesn't pay the bills, and that's not really fair, but it's also not unique. Lots of valuable labor receives no reward.
None of this is really relevant to the law in question though, which is itself pretty basic consumer protection against a company yanking back something it sold.
Minecraft, GTA are still some of the largest media franchises of any kind in the world. By players and by expense. They'll continue to make it worth it.
I don't see a problem? As a hacker and HN poster, I believe the free market will determine the value of a game. If it's not economically feasible anymore to make games for under $5, the market will adjust.
I'm old enough to remember a time when you bought a copy of a game and played it locally. Most games were around $60 and we paid it. It is only more recently that someone decided that viewing ads was a better way to pay for games - you got what you wanted and no one values games anymore.
Even back in the day, if I paid 60 bucks and spent less then 40 hours solving the game I was disappointed and felt like I paid too much. I invested in the hardware and software and I expect something out it.
Happy to pay for your game but don't hobble it or subject me to ads.
There are a half dozen games in my catalog that I've played for 10,000 hours for free.
Sure, I'll spend $5 on a game I play for 10 hours, but it's still a bad value for me comparatively. When I do it, it's usually because I like what the developer did and want them to get some financial support. This is also why there are hundreds of unplayed games in my Steam account. It's then also a charity, not a business.
Your $5 game is competing with every game I have available to me and the market is _saturated_. A lot of game development is just bad investment. Like Ubisoft spending $500 million to develop Beyond Good and Evil 2. If that ever even releases, but why would you spend half a billion dollars following up a flop. A beloved flop but a flop.
Consumers of creative works generally are paying for the result, not the process.
currently there's a huge risk Marathon might get shut down like high guard or concord because of player numbers. If they shut it down, nobody could play it anymore.
If there's a system in place for us to be able to host our own servers, or... I don't know? OWN the game we bought and play it because we OWN it because we PAID for it. Then yeah, that's good and it's a good movement and I fully support it.
I genuinely don't understand the other side of this argument because it just feels like no for the sake of no.
I care about the topic from a legal and technical standpoint and am interested to see the outcome, just have no skin in the game and no sympathy for the industry or a bunch of children (both literal and figurative) who will whine whichever way it goes.
It seems like the fair solution to this problem is to open source server code if you are going to cease support for an online game. That way the community has the opportunity to run their own servers if they want to.
I also really support giving 60 day notice if an online game is going to shut down. Places I have worked have had policies like that for games they are sun setting and I think the best game publishers think a lot about how to do that operation. It's not simple, because if people think a game is going away their behavior changes. And nothing sucks like buying online content for a game right before it shuts down. No matter what you do people will tell you they didn't know the game was shutting down. And if you give away content that you previously sold that also sometimes angers the community.
The problem is when companies know a game isn't working they tend to want to shut it down right away because the money they spend keeping it up is never coming back. And maybe the company is going to die too. So I do support a law for a 60 day notice.
> As currently amended, the act would not apply to completely free games and games offered “solely for the duration of [a] subscription. Any other game offered for sale in California on or after January 1, 2027, would be subject to the law if it passes.
So they just make their game free two months before they want to close?
Note, this law would affect less than 1% of all games _released_. Just that those happens to be the games that a sizeable part of the population plays. And even then, you spend more tying your game to a online service than not doing so in the first place.
Do they need to put some funds in escrow? Or will they just shut down the entire company and let the players sue for it. (I know that big publishers won't do that, but I'm sure the lawyers could create shell corporations to solve that problem.)
Or they could just demonstrate that they have an offline play capability right from the moment they sell it.
Just make the punishment the seizure and full release of the game assets (all source code, version control history, tooling, and release of copyright/trademarks).
It's always going to be a wild goose chase trying to take money when there isn't any (actually or by design), just take the product and let the public update it as a last resort.
The entertainment industry has a long history of making successful movies appear unprofitable on paper to avoid paying royalties.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
My favorite example of this is when Warner Brothers said that Malibu’s Most Wanted wasn’t profitable because they spent so much money marketing Harry Potter that year.
It doesn't really matter how they comply, so long as the punishment for bon-compliance is serious enough to motivate a good-faith attempt. I'm wary of jumping right into encoding specifics into legislation. That said, I'll be surprised if this actually has the necessary teeth.
Bankruptcy is a universal get-out-of-punishment free card. At least, if you're a corporation large enough and foresighted enough to shove your liabilities off onto a fictional subsidiary before starting.
Step 1: Open LLC dedicated to this specific video game title.
This appears to treat subscription style games and free to play with in game purchases differently than other games.
I would assume if that law passed the simplest compliance would just be to charge subscriptions and stop selling games directly. It seems like doing that would comply with that law without requiring much to change?
AFAIK the issue is with one time purchase games, where is not clear if you will be able to play forever or whenever they want to pull the plug, if they change to subscription based model or free to play, then it will be clear for the players what they are paying for.
If the government funds it I'd love to do maintenance on baldur's gate v1 for the rest of my life.
So 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 microservices.
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 third party software like proprietary network code, commercial physics engines, or specific anti cheat 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.
> Releasing server code also exposes the inner workings of the company's technology.
And yet releasing standalone servers back in the 00s was the norm, rather than the exception. I don't buy the argument.
I mean, I guess the argument works from an anti consumer perspective, since it throws up a smokescreen with a vague "legal risks" scent in order to justify the SaaS business model that proprietary servers enforce.
Does it though? Just release the a standalone server once the game is done making money.
Updated my original post to explain why this wouldn't work.
How many small studio games have online multiplayer? Like really?
Not a bad idea, but why does this only apply to games?
I prime example of other software this would have benefited is AutoCAD.
People who refused the conversion to a subscription, and maintained their "lifetime" licenses, where shut down after a couple of years.
Agreed! Far too many companies selling software as lifetime license and their renegade on that deal. A refund should be allowed. Or simply make the software offline without drm
The "final boss" of bad legislation. Often, Government intrusion into the markets is worth the side effects.
But in this case, even the best-case outcome is extremely dumb. Companies are forced to expend resources just so a few niche hobbyists are not inconvenienced. And there will be side effects, ultimately including geo-fencing of games to exclude California. It's a big market, but you can't make up for a net loss with volume.
it seems like it would be good programming to parameterize the details of how to connect to a server, so really all the game developer would need to do is document the requirements for the server/make the server software.
..things they'd be doing anyway as they developed the game??
California seems to be a leading grounds for online law as well for the technology itself.
Lots of clearly needed specific laws. Europe is fine too, but they err on the side of caution and smother actual innovation.
Which is interesting because the Silicon Valley companies themselves incorporate in DW anyways, so it seems to be a separate consumer led legal trend.
Dumb. Just make it legal to reverse engineer the software, the community will take care of the rest, in a way the community actually wants, instead of getting just the bare minimum compliance from the original company, if they even still exist.
I tend to agree with you that allowing the community to keep games running would be a more desirable outcome, but I don't believe California could make such a law. As I understand it, reverse engineering is already illegal federally because of things like the DMCA. California can't just make the DMCA not apply in this case because its not a California law. However they can pass consumer protection laws making there be consequences for abandoning a game when the consumers are in California. Given the alternative is probably do nothing this does seem good.
I don't know about California, but AFAIK reverse engineering is legal, but breaking DRM protection isn't, so what companies did was to put DRM in their software, hence the reverse engineering became illegal.
You want the "community" to reverse engineer the game server, where all the game logic lives, from the game client? This is the state of many online only games.
Of course it should be legal to reverse engineer software you own, but you have to actually have access to the software to reverse engineer it.
People did it for World of Warcraft, and continue to do so with each expansion.
I can host and play a WotLK server locally, offline on my desktop with AI player bots with minimal issues thanks to the work of the community
Reverse engineering implies that you don't have access to the source code.
We can do both! This seems more viable for the moment, unfortunately. Challenging copyright gets much more pushback than even pro-consumer obligations like these.
Can't say I support this. Legislative bodies should be dealing with actual problems in the world that meaningfully make the lives of regular people worse, not gamer entitlement.
Most "gamers" don't want to pay $5 for a game you spent 10,000 hours slaving to make. They will complain the game was too short when Steam shows they spent 10+ hours playing it.
Now they want more.
The same is true for TV, movies, books. It's an insanely competitive market for people's time and attention. There are more games on Steam with 10,000 hours of dev time put into them than you can play in a lifetime. Standards for what's worth your limited time and money are therefore extremely high.
If you're passionate about making games chances are you're not going to succeed financially. Set your sights on personal success in the artistic sense. Can you communicate what you wanted, can you enrich some people's lives a bit with your work? It doesn't pay the bills, and that's not really fair, but it's also not unique. Lots of valuable labor receives no reward.
None of this is really relevant to the law in question though, which is itself pretty basic consumer protection against a company yanking back something it sold.
Minecraft, GTA are still some of the largest media franchises of any kind in the world. By players and by expense. They'll continue to make it worth it.
I don't see a problem? As a hacker and HN poster, I believe the free market will determine the value of a game. If it's not economically feasible anymore to make games for under $5, the market will adjust.
I'm old enough to remember a time when you bought a copy of a game and played it locally. Most games were around $60 and we paid it. It is only more recently that someone decided that viewing ads was a better way to pay for games - you got what you wanted and no one values games anymore.
Even back in the day, if I paid 60 bucks and spent less then 40 hours solving the game I was disappointed and felt like I paid too much. I invested in the hardware and software and I expect something out it.
Happy to pay for your game but don't hobble it or subject me to ads.
They still sell plenty of games as a one-time $60 purchase. Though instead of owning a physical copy, you might only have a key to some DRM system.
There are a half dozen games in my catalog that I've played for 10,000 hours for free.
Sure, I'll spend $5 on a game I play for 10 hours, but it's still a bad value for me comparatively. When I do it, it's usually because I like what the developer did and want them to get some financial support. This is also why there are hundreds of unplayed games in my Steam account. It's then also a charity, not a business.
Your $5 game is competing with every game I have available to me and the market is _saturated_. A lot of game development is just bad investment. Like Ubisoft spending $500 million to develop Beyond Good and Evil 2. If that ever even releases, but why would you spend half a billion dollars following up a flop. A beloved flop but a flop.
Consumers of creative works generally are paying for the result, not the process.
This is the road of stupid that stop killing games has paved.
why do you have to be negative?
currently there's a huge risk Marathon might get shut down like high guard or concord because of player numbers. If they shut it down, nobody could play it anymore.
If there's a system in place for us to be able to host our own servers, or... I don't know? OWN the game we bought and play it because we OWN it because we PAID for it. Then yeah, that's good and it's a good movement and I fully support it.
I genuinely don't understand the other side of this argument because it just feels like no for the sake of no.
Dumb law, but I don't care about video games anyway. Let the screaming children have what they want this time, they'll get to reap the outcome.
If you do not care then why did you take the time to share an opinion on the topic?
I care about the topic from a legal and technical standpoint and am interested to see the outcome, just have no skin in the game and no sympathy for the industry or a bunch of children (both literal and figurative) who will whine whichever way it goes.
What an asinine comment.
Gaming companies rendering games you paid for unusable is a real problem, just as much as planned obsolescence occuring in everyday items.
Screaming children? Really? Most gamers are over 18 and there's billions of them.