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.
It doesn't need to be open source, you only need to provide server binaries to download. This was the standard until circa 2010. People were able to host dedicated servers themselves.
That would be an improvement over nothing, but closed-source means that the game is still going to die when someone finds a security vulnerability (or sometimes just a gameplay glitch) that can't be feasibly patched.
Imagine an MMO where any troll can take down the server, or where special text in the chat causes everyone's client to crash, or there's a dupe/infinite money glitch.
I want to host a closed search server that's not being updated on today's internet. It might be good enough for home use, but definitely not if I want my friends to connect.
Although I get the idea of providing server binaries but if one has to absolutely do it, then provide great modding efforts behind it.
But I have found that the greatest modding efforts/community can be generated by open source. Balatro for example is easily modified in the sense that although it might not be open source but iirc its lua files are visible.
There are other games as well which have something similar imo although that being said its possible to create modding efforts without open source in general too with say something like for example old versions of counter strike.
Personally I would prefer open source though if its possible but I understand that some game studious might be worried about it but I don't quite understand it if they are shutting down the game anyway though. I think that @mjr00's comments are nice about third party library etc. which cause issues in open sourcing so its good to have a discussion about that too (imo)
> That way the community has the opportunity to run their own servers if they want to.
That might be fine for very small titles - where the "game server" is a relatively simple binary that can be run anywhere. Larger titles depend on a huge amount of infrastructure, for authentication, progression, matchmaking, etc... It's not feasible to open-source all of that, especially given that it may well still be in use for more recent titles.
> 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.
It's nice in theory, but in practice many (most?) games are using middleware they don't have the rights to redistribute as open source. IIRC when the source code for Doom, the first major commercial game that went open source, originally came out, it had all of the sound code removed because it was dependent on a third party library. Not that you're going to have sound code in a server, but you may be using third party libraries for networking, replays, anti-cheat, etc.
If bills like this pass there'd be financial pressure for middleware providers to either license under terms that allow distribution at the game's end-of-life, or allow their middleware to be easily severed while still leaving the game playable - else they'd lose out on all customers selling games in California/EU/etc.
Which is also a nice side effect to reduce intellectual property barriers for developers that do already want to distribute their server or source code.
Should’ve thought of that before accepting significant amounts of money in exchange for a game they plan to kill when it’s no longer financially advantageous for the publisher. They’re so happy to rake in what, $60, now $70, soon $100 for a product they can disable access to for any reason at all or no reason at all, with no notice? How’s that fair? Why’s it only unfair when the hardship goes the other way around?
I doubt it's possible for legislation to mandate meaningful compliance regarding something as dynamic and rapidly evolving as online games. Despite good intentions, such legislation often results in unintended consequences including distorting the market, creating perverse incentives or even making the problem worse.
Serious problems are already apparent. Games offered “solely for the duration of [a] subscription." aren't regulated, which will greatly accelerate the death of perpetual licensing. A world where no games are available for outright purchase and offline use would be disastrous for players and historical preservation.
It would be better if they'd focus on narrower problems where they can make a positive difference. For example, mandating a freely distributable end-of-life patch to remove online activation from DRMed games. Creating a patch and uploading it once to the Internet Archive isn't a big enough burden to make companies modify their biz model or deploy armies of lawyers and MBAs to circumvent. When it comes to rapidly evolving technology, the best regulations are clearly defined, narrowly scoped and cheaper to comply with than avoid or game.
You know what? I'm tired of unintended consequences fear mongering. You know what else had a tons of unintended consequences? Mandating seat belts. This is the industry kicking and crying because they don't want to be told that they can't abuse the consumer blatantly. Joke Bloke would still be able to release their game without wondering if this kind of law exists because the law will never apply to them. These kind of laws are targeting a massive abuse by big companies with a bag of money to figure it out.
The article is really vague and a bit misleading, but the bill text appears to be surprisingly readable, and honestly not much longer than the article.
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.
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.
That’s not how things work as far par as participating on the back end of a specific project (which is contractual, not entity based). Thats a profit /loss sharing entity setup for legal accounting reasons (the entity files taxes). Generally not even required since the studio does this at their corp level. Even LLCs will pass these through. This would likely be do some partner/investor.
The contracts that celebrities get on adjusted gross (adjusted is doing 100x the work of the word gross in this context) have no specific entity revenue in mind. If costs show up later after some cash has been distributed, people absolutely freak out to give money back, so you need an arrangement that works such that that doesn’t happen.
Plenty of agents over the years sold celebrities the idea of gross on first dollar and couldn’t be bothered to read the proposed contract which led to many publicized lawsuits.
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.
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.
If the bankruptcy process already involves identifying and administering the company's assets, I feel releasing the server software (as-is) to owners of the game could be part of that.
I don't think most game owners could take the server side software and assemble it into working servers their game could contact and use. This isn't realistic and needs something to change at the fundamental server design side and the game development side. A silly answer is regulations about how you can and can't make a game. Another silly answer is a cottage industry doing game server hosting that's required to be third party by law. I don't have any good, realistic ideas that aren't just trying to force game developers to build games differently (or build different games). Maybe that's the cost here but is that better than just letting angry customers influence the market?
And yet kids take Java server components and mod components and assemble them into Minecraft servers for their friends, and there’s a whole industry around providing pre-configured servers for games like Minecraft, project zomboid, rust, etc. and those services have been around for decades. So I don’t know what the issue is.
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.
The distinction makes sense, but I wonder if the bill will inadvertently incentivize games to move to subscription based models, which would be ultimately be a worse experience for consumers.
> 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?
Law systems contain open-ended clauses and lawsuits analyze the intent. If you make your game free, just 2 months prior or even after selling it, just telling that you made it "free" will harm you more in the lawsuits due to obvious malicious intent.
I'd rather have legislation to give immunity from infringement to hackers who are either reverse engineering or cloning the game that has been shut down instead.
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.
JuiceSSH have since shut their site down after that last round of attention so I guess Paul Maddox (Microsoft) and Tom Maddox (AWS) really have no intention of open sourcing or refunding.
> The ESA also said the bill would impose unreasonable expectations on publishers regarding licensing rights for music or IP rights, which are often negotiated on a time-limited basis. “A legal requirement to keep games playable indefinitely could place publishers in an impossible position—forcing them to renegotiate licenses indefinitely or alter games in ways that may not be legally or technically feasible,” they wrote.
Wah wah munchie wah.
This would kick in next year. You have time to make contingency plans including a kill switch to put in shitty royalty free music if you need to.
> “Consumers receive a license to access and use a game, not an unrestricted ownership interest in the underlying work,” the ESA wrote. The eventual shutdown of outdated or obsolete games is “a natural feature of modern software,” the group added, especially when that software requires online infrastructure maintenance.
I mean, if government overreach (IP, DMCA 1201) is preventing us from using the things we pay money for in any way we might, might as well add more government overreach on top to claw some rights back?
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
To be fair, B2B sales have typically existed in a different world, even for physical goods. Take the Sale of Goods Act in the UK, offering consumer protections. A business simply can’t take advantage of many of its protections as it’s aimed specifically at B2C sales.
California being 4th largest economy gives it some market power, just some though. Companies still make special considerations only for California - including total exclusion - as opposed to just implementing the good idea across the nation or world.
Feels like malicious compliance, but I’m used to it now, I’ve done the same in other industries like raising or issuing capital, so I cant be mad about consumer protection style patchworks then
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.
Not being able to use a product that was purchased is an “actual problem” that “makes the lives of regular people worse.” This is going to blow your mind, but this kind of stuff is EXACTLY what people elect governments to do.
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.
> Companies are forced to expend resources just so a few niche hobbyists are not inconvenienced.
Yeah those poor companies. They should just be allowed to take our money and then stop providing a service we paid for. Won't someone please think of the corporations????
What kind of weird argument is this? If I pay for a game then I, you know, want to be able to play the game. You know what I don't care about? Whether or not it's profitable for Ubisoft to keep a cheap signing server online.
I take your point and also don't give a damn about corporate profits but it is a little bit "talking past" the parent. To me the important part of parents point was the next step: therefore the companies will just avoid selling to California which is an unintended consequence.
I think this can be argued with directly on its merits - 1. maybe, 2. also that's probably fine, 3. also that's not what happened with car emission standards, etc.
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??
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.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive was a game running all of these things (matchmaking, skins, anticheat ...). After Counter-Strike 2 was released, the servers for CS:GO were shut down. Yet, the game remains mostly playable. Sure, the skins no longer work and there's no official matchmaking, but third parties have stepped up. That's because Valve released (and have always released) server software.
I find this argument quite bad. It was done in the past and it's still being done today. There's nothing preventing any company from doing it except for a combination of laziness and greed.
Somehow I highly doubt that a small game company is going to run a "huge network of interconnected cloud services".
I've also yet to find a small game company running their own big online multiplayer game.
And most of the indie publishers usually comply with the law by not fucking over their customers by providing independent server executables or not releasing a server-tied game. AAA studios are the biggest offenders and they deserve to be fucked.
Your argument still doesn't hold, sorry. The law won't apply retroactively so the existing games can be killed. However, if the law passes, the EOL plan just becomes another product requirement you have to plan for. So you won't "rewrite" the server code, you write it to comply in the first place.
This was also the excuse people gave for GDPR and California's privacy law and everybody got forced into complying after the date of validity. Simply having an "excuse" of money loss due to engineering your game user-hostile in the first place (especially after the law became valid) isn't a good argument. It will have some preparation time and if you didn't plan for it, it is your fault.
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.
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.
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.
It doesn't need to be open source, you only need to provide server binaries to download. This was the standard until circa 2010. People were able to host dedicated servers themselves.
That would be an improvement over nothing, but closed-source means that the game is still going to die when someone finds a security vulnerability (or sometimes just a gameplay glitch) that can't be feasibly patched.
Imagine an MMO where any troll can take down the server, or where special text in the chat causes everyone's client to crash, or there's a dupe/infinite money glitch.
Closed source binaries rot.
I want to host a closed search server that's not being updated on today's internet. It might be good enough for home use, but definitely not if I want my friends to connect.
Although I get the idea of providing server binaries but if one has to absolutely do it, then provide great modding efforts behind it.
But I have found that the greatest modding efforts/community can be generated by open source. Balatro for example is easily modified in the sense that although it might not be open source but iirc its lua files are visible.
There are other games as well which have something similar imo although that being said its possible to create modding efforts without open source in general too with say something like for example old versions of counter strike.
Personally I would prefer open source though if its possible but I understand that some game studious might be worried about it but I don't quite understand it if they are shutting down the game anyway though. I think that @mjr00's comments are nice about third party library etc. which cause issues in open sourcing so its good to have a discussion about that too (imo)
> That way the community has the opportunity to run their own servers if they want to.
That might be fine for very small titles - where the "game server" is a relatively simple binary that can be run anywhere. Larger titles depend on a huge amount of infrastructure, for authentication, progression, matchmaking, etc... It's not feasible to open-source all of that, especially given that it may well still be in use for more recent titles.
> 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.
It's nice in theory, but in practice many (most?) games are using middleware they don't have the rights to redistribute as open source. IIRC when the source code for Doom, the first major commercial game that went open source, originally came out, it had all of the sound code removed because it was dependent on a third party library. Not that you're going to have sound code in a server, but you may be using third party libraries for networking, replays, anti-cheat, etc.
If bills like this pass there'd be financial pressure for middleware providers to either license under terms that allow distribution at the game's end-of-life, or allow their middleware to be easily severed while still leaving the game playable - else they'd lose out on all customers selling games in California/EU/etc.
Which is also a nice side effect to reduce intellectual property barriers for developers that do already want to distribute their server or source code.
This has an easy solution. If the middleware cannot be used in a new regulatory environment then it will either die or adapt.
Sometimes the easy solution isn't easy for all sides or even realistic. "Fuck the publishers" is easy but not going to get a lot of publisher buy in.
We all agree there is a foolproof method to fixing all bugs - delete all the code.
We also all probably agree that isn't the optimal balance.
Should’ve thought of that before accepting significant amounts of money in exchange for a game they plan to kill when it’s no longer financially advantageous for the publisher. They’re so happy to rake in what, $60, now $70, soon $100 for a product they can disable access to for any reason at all or no reason at all, with no notice? How’s that fair? Why’s it only unfair when the hardship goes the other way around?
I doubt it's possible for legislation to mandate meaningful compliance regarding something as dynamic and rapidly evolving as online games. Despite good intentions, such legislation often results in unintended consequences including distorting the market, creating perverse incentives or even making the problem worse.
Serious problems are already apparent. Games offered “solely for the duration of [a] subscription." aren't regulated, which will greatly accelerate the death of perpetual licensing. A world where no games are available for outright purchase and offline use would be disastrous for players and historical preservation.
It would be better if they'd focus on narrower problems where they can make a positive difference. For example, mandating a freely distributable end-of-life patch to remove online activation from DRMed games. Creating a patch and uploading it once to the Internet Archive isn't a big enough burden to make companies modify their biz model or deploy armies of lawyers and MBAs to circumvent. When it comes to rapidly evolving technology, the best regulations are clearly defined, narrowly scoped and cheaper to comply with than avoid or game.
You know what? I'm tired of unintended consequences fear mongering. You know what else had a tons of unintended consequences? Mandating seat belts. This is the industry kicking and crying because they don't want to be told that they can't abuse the consumer blatantly. Joke Bloke would still be able to release their game without wondering if this kind of law exists because the law will never apply to them. These kind of laws are targeting a massive abuse by big companies with a bag of money to figure it out.
The article is really vague and a bit misleading, but the bill text appears to be surprisingly readable, and honestly not much longer than the article.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
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.
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
The massive battle Peter Jackson had with the studio after none of the LoTR movies made a "profit" was very telling.
Oh, and it's even an example in that Wiki article you linked lol
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.
That’s not how things work as far par as participating on the back end of a specific project (which is contractual, not entity based). Thats a profit /loss sharing entity setup for legal accounting reasons (the entity files taxes). Generally not even required since the studio does this at their corp level. Even LLCs will pass these through. This would likely be do some partner/investor.
The contracts that celebrities get on adjusted gross (adjusted is doing 100x the work of the word gross in this context) have no specific entity revenue in mind. If costs show up later after some cash has been distributed, people absolutely freak out to give money back, so you need an arrangement that works such that that doesn’t happen.
Plenty of agents over the years sold celebrities the idea of gross on first dollar and couldn’t be bothered to read the proposed contract which led to many publicized lawsuits.
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.
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.
If the bankruptcy process already involves identifying and administering the company's assets, I feel releasing the server software (as-is) to owners of the game could be part of that.
I don't think most game owners could take the server side software and assemble it into working servers their game could contact and use. This isn't realistic and needs something to change at the fundamental server design side and the game development side. A silly answer is regulations about how you can and can't make a game. Another silly answer is a cottage industry doing game server hosting that's required to be third party by law. I don't have any good, realistic ideas that aren't just trying to force game developers to build games differently (or build different games). Maybe that's the cost here but is that better than just letting angry customers influence the market?
And yet kids take Java server components and mod components and assemble them into Minecraft servers for their friends, and there’s a whole industry around providing pre-configured servers for games like Minecraft, project zomboid, rust, etc. and those services have been around for decades. So I don’t know what the issue is.
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.
The distinction makes sense, but I wonder if the bill will inadvertently incentivize games to move to subscription based models, which would be ultimately be a worse experience for consumers.
Ultimately consumers can then make a better choice, to simply drop those subscription based games.
If the government funds it I'd love to do maintenance on baldur's gate v1 for the rest of my life.
> 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?
Law systems contain open-ended clauses and lawsuits analyze the intent. If you make your game free, just 2 months prior or even after selling it, just telling that you made it "free" will harm you more in the lawsuits due to obvious malicious intent.
I'd rather have legislation to give immunity from infringement to hackers who are either reverse engineering or cloning the game that has been shut down instead.
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.
Wish they'd extend it to all apps, I'm sick of paying money to developers who cut and run while using it as a way to land jobs at Microsoft and AWS
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46768909
JuiceSSH have since shut their site down after that last round of attention so I guess Paul Maddox (Microsoft) and Tom Maddox (AWS) really have no intention of open sourcing or refunding.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260116112028/https://juicessh....
> The ESA also said the bill would impose unreasonable expectations on publishers regarding licensing rights for music or IP rights, which are often negotiated on a time-limited basis. “A legal requirement to keep games playable indefinitely could place publishers in an impossible position—forcing them to renegotiate licenses indefinitely or alter games in ways that may not be legally or technically feasible,” they wrote.
Wah wah munchie wah.
This would kick in next year. You have time to make contingency plans including a kill switch to put in shitty royalty free music if you need to.
> “Consumers receive a license to access and use a game, not an unrestricted ownership interest in the underlying work,” the ESA wrote. The eventual shutdown of outdated or obsolete games is “a natural feature of modern software,” the group added, especially when that software requires online infrastructure maintenance.
Go fuck yourselves.
I mean, if government overreach (IP, DMCA 1201) is preventing us from using the things we pay money for in any way we might, might as well add more government overreach on top to claw some rights back?
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.
How were they shut down? Like as in the old software refuses to start or they cant renew maintenance / no security updates?
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
To be fair, B2B sales have typically existed in a different world, even for physical goods. Take the Sale of Goods Act in the UK, offering consumer protections. A business simply can’t take advantage of many of its protections as it’s aimed specifically at B2C sales.
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.
California being 4th largest economy gives it some market power, just some though. Companies still make special considerations only for California - including total exclusion - as opposed to just implementing the good idea across the nation or world.
Feels like malicious compliance, but I’m used to it now, I’ve done the same in other industries like raising or issuing capital, so I cant be mad about consumer protection style patchworks then
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
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.
Not being able to use a product that was purchased is an “actual problem” that “makes the lives of regular people worse.” This is going to blow your mind, but this kind of stuff is EXACTLY what people elect governments to do.
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.
> Companies are forced to expend resources just so a few niche hobbyists are not inconvenienced.
Yeah those poor companies. They should just be allowed to take our money and then stop providing a service we paid for. Won't someone please think of the corporations????
What kind of weird argument is this? If I pay for a game then I, you know, want to be able to play the game. You know what I don't care about? Whether or not it's profitable for Ubisoft to keep a cheap signing server online.
I take your point and also don't give a damn about corporate profits but it is a little bit "talking past" the parent. To me the important part of parents point was the next step: therefore the companies will just avoid selling to California which is an unintended consequence.
I think this can be argued with directly on its merits - 1. maybe, 2. also that's probably fine, 3. also that's not what happened with car emission standards, etc.
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??
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.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive was a game running all of these things (matchmaking, skins, anticheat ...). After Counter-Strike 2 was released, the servers for CS:GO were shut down. Yet, the game remains mostly playable. Sure, the skins no longer work and there's no official matchmaking, but third parties have stepped up. That's because Valve released (and have always released) server software.
I find this argument quite bad. It was done in the past and it's still being done today. There's nothing preventing any company from doing it except for a combination of laziness and greed.
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.
Somehow I highly doubt that a small game company is going to run a "huge network of interconnected cloud services". I've also yet to find a small game company running their own big online multiplayer game.
And most of the indie publishers usually comply with the law by not fucking over their customers by providing independent server executables or not releasing a server-tied game. AAA studios are the biggest offenders and they deserve to be fucked.
Your argument still doesn't hold, sorry. The law won't apply retroactively so the existing games can be killed. However, if the law passes, the EOL plan just becomes another product requirement you have to plan for. So you won't "rewrite" the server code, you write it to comply in the first place.
This was also the excuse people gave for GDPR and California's privacy law and everybody got forced into complying after the date of validity. Simply having an "excuse" of money loss due to engineering your game user-hostile in the first place (especially after the law became valid) isn't a good argument. It will have some preparation time and if you didn't plan for it, it is your fault.
How many small studio games have online multiplayer? Like really?
> 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.
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.
The main no argument is that it makes risky games riskier for the developer, publisher and IP holder. Games like Marathon never get approved.
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.