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.
> open source server code if you are going to cease support
When I was a senior exec at a big public tech company, there was a product we decided to discontinue and we thought would be nice to just open source. Somehow I ended up in charge of managing that process and was shocked at how complex, time-consuming and expensive it was in a multi-billion dollar, publicly-traded corp vs some code my friends and I wrote.
Legal had to verify that there was no licensed library code used and that we had clear, valid copyright to everything there. The project had been written over several years, merged with a project we'd acquired with a startup, some key people weren't around any more, the source control had transitioned across multiple platforms, etc. And even once we nailed all that down sufficiently, we didn't get an "all clear" from legal, we just got a formal legal opinion that any liability was probably under $1M. And then we had to convince an SVP to endorse that assumption of $1M potential liability and make a business case for approval to the CEO.
For a public company, the default assumption for any online game would be "the server side code WILL be open sourced" (under threat of prosecution). That means legal would mandate "No commercially licensed libraries can be used, any open source libraries will have to be vetted to ensure the license is compatible and everything else will need to pass IP and compliance audit." That will certainly have an impact on development time frames and economics.
Of course, it would also create a demand for open-source game server libraries, which would surely appear after a while and make the whole process much easier.
So while I believe you about all those difficulties existing today, it's plausible that they would mostly fade away over time. I think temporary growing pains would be an acceptable price for the significant long-term public benefit.
That’s exactly the benefit of a law - it’s a forcing measure to require businesses to invest in processes to understand open sourcing, and to go forward when otherwise no one would make a business case for approval.
And makes it more expensive. There is the seen benefit and then the unseen cost. Every game released will have to account for the possibility of it, and will create issues for people who really didn't want those issues. After awhile people will forget there are associated issues and costs, but they will still be there.
Every game released whose developers have chosen to complicate its design with a client-server architecture. It's not like this is going to hurt the little three-man teams making games on shoe-string budgets. Yeah, it's going to make big budget games a little more expensive, just like how cars with seatbelts are a little more expensive to build, and like how it's a little more expensive to do proper waste management instead of dumping sludge into a river.
What? This a mandate in law that requires a company to do work in order to comply. Studios will spin out LLCs for a game so that if it fails it doesn't end up as a liability. Unintended consequence: more dead games.
It's impossible for the law to cause more games to die, because already the default fate of online games is for them to die. If, with the law, a studio chooses to use an LLC to create the game to conditionally release sources once it shuts down, that was a game that without the law would have died anyway because the studio wouldn't have chosen of its own volition to release sources.
If a studio on it's last legs is required to service a failing product instead of working on a new one the studio will simply close and not comply. That's what tends to happen with forced regulations like this.
And it's what would have happened anyway without the law. How is this difficult to understand? It's not like it's only a few games that shut down without recourse for the players. Ross Scott already did the research on this. Something like 95% of all online games that shut down do so without providing any way for the players to continue playing in some way or without issuing refunds.
Or it could make it a lot cheaper, if the server were developed entirely on open-source infrastructure from the start. Hopefully the actual game logic would be developed entirely in-house, making it easier to audit before releasing.
The final phase of Symbian OS was becoming the open-source Symbian Foundation. This required the existing codebase, hundreds of thousands of files, to be categorised properly (mostly homegrown, some acquired, some licensed) and where necessary restructured so that each directory only had one kind. Painful, exacting, tedious archaeology which all-but-froze development for weeks. Like a long-deferred merge, the cost to pay for belatedly resolving a mess of licenses is daunting.
Huh? The point is that game developers would never be able to use commercial libraries again. Thus making all development significantly more expensive.
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 as soon as someone finds a security vulnerability (or even just a gameplay glitch) that can't be feasibly patched.
Imagine an MMO where special text in the chat causes viewers' clients to crash, or a glitch exists to duplicate items or money, or where anybody can crash the server to run arbitrary commands.
I play SubSpace (a MMO spaceship game released in the 90s) to this day. It was shut down soon after release.
The original server binaries were left on the original CDROM by a programmer.
Then PriitK, a creator of Kazaa and then Skype and Joost!, went on to re-create the client due to cheating/hacking, naming it Continuum.
Years later the server is reimplemented as A Small Subspace Server (ASSS), making it a complete fan remake of the original game (sans graphics). This is also when we finally got server side mods, everything before that was client only or a hack.
That implies the community that builds around it would not reverse engineer and remake the binaries. Which many already do (to be fair), it just so happens that it's way, way harder when the servers are entirely gone already for a game and you have no way to capture server/client traffic for example. Even if the binaries are flawed, just having those in there and being able to spin up a server to see the packet flow already greatly helps in preservation, much more if you have the binary itself and can also peek at server logic for certain things like conflict resolution, instead of having to guess post-game-shutdown!
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)
Gaming might be unique in the sense that it's the only industry where 1) consumers make a one-time purchase of a product, but then 2) the manufacturer remains responsible for the online component.. forever? I can't think of any other examples in real life where this happens across an industry (maybe a few niche products).
Maybe this is the reason MS has been pushing Game Pass so hard, to get rid of the "purchase" part entirely.
An online service requires the continual investment in the costs required to run the service and comes with the expectation that the service happening on someone else's computer could cease to exist the second you stop paying or at the end of the current contract cycle.
A game although specified as a license is treated and described as a purchase that is expected to work forever on the end users device so long as it fits the specs.
I wonder where the 'extents' of the game product/service you buy can be defined. I could foresee a game client/server/toolkit like Bioware's Neverwinter Nights being released but as a barebones legally compliant framework that lets you play. Then on the other side of the line they have an optional online service that provides a scenario to play in (running the same server the public has), if that service goes away the game still works, just as buying a load of D&D kits doesn't give you a DM to run games in perpetuity. As another example, there's a lot of servers for games like Counter-strike where the experience and how it runs the gameplay is modded server-side only.
The public responds to complexity and ambiguity by not giving you any money whereby you get to make money making french fries. Logically the most trivial thing people are going to do is make a minimalist multiplayer mode which allows users to join each others games like we did in 1995.
> 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?
> 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's not feasible to open-source all of that, especially given that it may well still be in use for more recent titles
If they're still running their authentication server (for example), then they wouldn't need to release that service.
Patching the game to no longer contact the authentication server would also be acceptable, for services that aren't a core part of the game. It's pretty likely the game already allows this for development/debugging.
If they've accepted money from people to buy the game, and don't want to keep the authentication service running, and don't want to patch the game to no longer require the authentication service, and don't want to refund people, and don't want to release the authentication service so others can run it - I think it's fair for a regulation to force one of those.
Guarantee X years of server time from launch. If you shut down early, pro rated refund and open source server code. After the launch window, close server with no penalty if desired, but just still open source code. Or keep server open if it's profitable. Or some other option.
The specifics can be hammered out, but something middle ground seems sensible.
> 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.
Said this in another comment: In case a company or new management wants to renew an IP, maybe there should be a waiting period like 1-5 years before they are legally required to release/open-source the server code.
Or how about this: what if, in order to launch a new online-only game in the first place, companies have to submit a copy of the source code as it is on launch day, to the courts or wherever. Then the courts could release it if the game hasn't been active for N years...
The sad truth is that these things have high operating costs, especially if they need moderation. I would guess this bill just makes it more risky to make the games in the first place. It’s already brutally hard to make money on games.
I feel like the effect of this might just be that shutting an online game makes it more likely to take a whole company down if you have to issue refunds. Alternatively, it might push multiplayer games towards free-to-play if in-app-purchases are excluded.
Sorry to hear about your situation. For the game you're shutting down online services for, forgive my nieve question but how much work is it to expose an environment variable called `GAME_SERVER_URL` and then document the API contract it expects on the other end?
Servers have a real cost, nobody is denying that, but I think the people who bought the game should have an option/alternative in case the servers are down.
We looked into it. Hackers got part of the way there so we decided not to make a change. They might be able to do it after the title is fully sunset and the team disbanded.
We basically have to get as much done on a 3/4 month timeline as possible and it isn’t a priority like saving content or refunding gift cards is. Shutting down is a lot of work.
Anything you can add to the knowledge pool is already going to be of immense help for your community reverse engineering in the future. Be it as simple as stuff like "Our in-game chat runs over IRC" for example - that already simplifies that entire part of figuring it out of machine code out once servers are gone. ANY knowledge you can share no matter how small it is always helps when all you have is a binary file and no server to respond to your requests.
At least part of the answer is this doesn't meet the requirement of the proposed law. You need to actually provide the functionality of the server-side, not just its API.
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.
So what's preventing companies from giving games for free and requiring a subscription or one time membership fee for online play? They'd only be required to refund the full price of the game: $0.
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.
The solution here is for publishers to give away the client, and simply charge a subscription.
Keypoint:
> would require a digital game operator to communicate specified information to purchasers and prospective purchasers of a digital game 60 days before the operator ceases to provide services necessary for the ordinary use of the game, and, beginning on the date an operator ceases to provide services necessary for the ordinary use of the game, require the operator to provide the purchaser with an alternate version of, a patch or update to, or a refund for, the game,
"or a refund for the the game".
"Here's your $0 back, thanks for playing!"
That makes it a bit tricky for games like WoW that charge for expansions, as well as subscription. But I'm sure MS can figure something out.
the bill explicitly doesn't apply to games that are free or are on a subscription system. (I assume free-to-play with microtransactions would be covered by this bill though, unless those microtransactions are subscription-based or time-limited.)
I am indeed worried that this will push games to be subscription-based, so I would advocate making the bill apply even to subscription-based games. Though that would require some thought, of course, as it's not obvious how it should apply to such a game.
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.
Dave: But movies cost millions of dollars to make.
Robert K. Bowfinger: That's after gross net deduction profit percentage deferment ten percent of the nut. Cash, every movie cost $2,184.
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.
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.
Presuming that the code is the company's asset, and doesn't use third-party licensed assets. Otherwise you'll be in line for a refund with all of the other company's creditors. Or you get part of the code that you can't use.
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.
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?
> 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?
That is indeed a valid way to comply with it. What that changes, at least, is that the consumer has the expectation that access ends with the end of the subscription, as opposed to where the expectation is for the access to never end.
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.
I still support this law. If they move to subscriptions to “dodge” this law, that’s fine in a way. At least consumers won’t be under the false impression they own something in the rare case they’re paying a subscription to play a game.
It would basically mandate subscription model for online games. Also wonder if it'd introduce legal risk for online mode in a game that also has local play, say Call of Duty or the newer Super Smash Bros, or if "ordinary use" is clearly not that.
Upfront purchase for something that depends on online services to work raises some questions. The problem with the bill is they want either literally infinite support or an open source server in the end. It'd make sense if there were some time limit based on the price of the game, just to guard against scams like asking $50 for a game that's shut down a year later.
> The problem with the bill is they want either literally infinite support or an open source server in the end.
No the bill doesn't state that. From the bill text [1]
(2) Beginning on the date a digital game operator ceases to provide services necessary for the ordinary use of the digital game, the operator shall provide the purchaser with one or more of the following:
(A) A version of the digital game that can be used by the purchaser independent of services controlled by the operator.
(B) A patch or update to the purchaser’s version of the digital game that enables its continued use independent of services controlled by the operator.
(C) A refund in an amount equal to the full purchase price paid for the digital game by the purchaser.
Just curious, how did you arrive at the infinite support or open source server interpretation?
Oh I didn't mean open source, it can be a binary (if applicable), but same problem, they'd need to provide a way to run the online servers locally. The third option is a refund, which isn't feasible.
Or patch out the online requirements. In many cases, the only real online requirement is a license key check. Also the refund is, afaict, intended to be essentially a last resort option to make the customer as whole as possible.
Found this quote from the game industry interesting and depressing:
> Consumers receive a license to access and use a game, not an unrestricted ownership interest in the underlying work
Could the game industry just side step this legislation by moving games entirely to a subscription model, with no upfront purchase? When they stop offering the subscription, you lose access to the game. Similar to how various online SaaS businesses work.
> Could the game industry just side step this legislation by moving games entirely to a subscription model, with no upfront purchase? When they stop offering the subscription, you lose access to the game. Similar to how various online SaaS businesses work.
Yes. With a subscription there is already an expectation that you will lose access when you stop paying. But I doubt they'd get much buy-in from gamers for that on most games.
This happened to me back in 2024 when Supercell abruptly shut down the game “Clash Mini”. Lost $100+ in in-game purchases.
They did offer to transfer things to other Supercell games, but that had no value to me as I didn’t play those.
I complained to the App Store, but Apple refused to refund purchases made more than 60 days ago (IIRC).
I know things don’t necessarily last forever, especially digital assets, but to spend a lot of money on something only to have it shut down and made unusable within months really stings.
Bought PGA Tour 2k21 for $50. In October the servers shut down completely neutering the game. I think you're allowed to play a few courses still. But the career mode, which is why I originally bought the game, was completely turned off. Mind you that career mode had zero Internet needed features. It's like a sports franchise mode.
So good on this bill. 2K should rot for deprecating a game I bought for $50 only 5 years ago.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Going for all apps at once is, IMO, an impossible ask. So the better option is to tackle one area first to set a precedent then that can be used to make the fight in other areas easier.
Because going up against all types of big software publishers at once would invite MUCH more lobbying which would make any progress likely impossible. Better to start in one area, gaming in this case, to get a precedent out there, which then makes the fight against general software publishers easier.
It would be fair in general to disallow charging a one-time fee for something that's shut down soon later. I don't expect perpetual support, but there should be some target based on the price that any well-intended software maker will exceed.
Also if you advertise "lifetime license," that should mean lifetime.
Adobe turned the license servers off that the installers used to verify your CS6 installer key. No check pass, no install. Of course, you can just use an LLM to build a patch, or pirate a copy, but it's the principle I suppose.
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.
I don't see any world in which these "stop killing games" laws result in anything close to what the proponents are asking for, for multiple reasons, one of the biggest being that the proponents don't have a clear, coherent, cohesive vision that takes into account all of the side-effects, and everyone you talk to in this space has a slightly different idea of what they want, and even the main proponent, Ross Scott, has a vague vision that changes from month to month, and shifts in mututally-exclusive ways depending on what objection is currently being responded to. I think what will happen is we'll get (A) a law that doesn't work due to some glaring loophole (such as being able to skirt the law by simply giving the community the server binary with no documentation) or (B) a law that DOES work but is so impossible to ahere to that companies simply accept that they'll be sued and bake it into the price of the game.
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?
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.
What if an Indie developer wants to make a game, where the primary mechanics and state live in a "service" they control? Why should they be burdened with this stuff if they move on, if indeed they sold a "service" and not a piece of software?
My view has nothing to do with Corporations... I just really don't understand what players feel they are entitled to here. If you want "software" then buy that, and don't use the Service games.
Unpopular view I suppose. Maybe it would mean more games you could actually own, but I think it would just have bad effects.
It's not difficult not to lie to your customers. If you are actually selling a subscription then don't claim the customer is buying the game, and this law won't apply to you.
> So game should be playable forever then? You bought an online game 20 years ago, it should still work today.
yes
> For 20 years you need to support, patch, keep people and infrastructure.
No, you should just not make it impossible for people to do so. (via stuff like online activation and such). Most 20 year old games you can still run via a VM or something like that. If it requires online activation and the server for that are shut down, you can't.
> Why the tech industry does not do it? I still want to use windows XP. Why my Nexus 5 does not work anymore ect..
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??
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.
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.
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.
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.
What you're noticing - that companies suddenly started closed-sourcing their server code, isn't just something that happened for no reason. Internet connections got fast, and it enabled more complex games like MMORPGs and MOBAs which are an order of magnitude more complex than the shooter games you're probably thinking of (Quake III?)
A LOT of architectural thinking goes into scaling MMORPGs, and it starts at the data model. I've watched quite a few interviews with WoW devs, and the data model for their system is counter-intuitive. That constitutes a trade secret in my mind.
And that's something that companies that produce MMORPGs/MOBAs/etc. can conclusively demonstrate in court.
That said, it's possible that companies could release a "nerfed" version of their server code with trade secrets removed for the community to run once the official game servers are taken down. It isn't clear if that'll be in scope of the law, or if that's even what proponents of Stop Killing Games would be okay with. We'll have to see.
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'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.
If you paid $60 bucks for a sega genesis game in 1990 you were paying about $156 adjusting for inflation. Different figures for different values of "back in the day" obviously.
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.
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.
> open source server code if you are going to cease support
When I was a senior exec at a big public tech company, there was a product we decided to discontinue and we thought would be nice to just open source. Somehow I ended up in charge of managing that process and was shocked at how complex, time-consuming and expensive it was in a multi-billion dollar, publicly-traded corp vs some code my friends and I wrote.
Legal had to verify that there was no licensed library code used and that we had clear, valid copyright to everything there. The project had been written over several years, merged with a project we'd acquired with a startup, some key people weren't around any more, the source control had transitioned across multiple platforms, etc. And even once we nailed all that down sufficiently, we didn't get an "all clear" from legal, we just got a formal legal opinion that any liability was probably under $1M. And then we had to convince an SVP to endorse that assumption of $1M potential liability and make a business case for approval to the CEO.
For a public company, the default assumption for any online game would be "the server side code WILL be open sourced" (under threat of prosecution). That means legal would mandate "No commercially licensed libraries can be used, any open source libraries will have to be vetted to ensure the license is compatible and everything else will need to pass IP and compliance audit." That will certainly have an impact on development time frames and economics.
Of course, it would also create a demand for open-source game server libraries, which would surely appear after a while and make the whole process much easier.
So while I believe you about all those difficulties existing today, it's plausible that they would mostly fade away over time. I think temporary growing pains would be an acceptable price for the significant long-term public benefit.
That’s exactly the benefit of a law - it’s a forcing measure to require businesses to invest in processes to understand open sourcing, and to go forward when otherwise no one would make a business case for approval.
And makes it more expensive. There is the seen benefit and then the unseen cost. Every game released will have to account for the possibility of it, and will create issues for people who really didn't want those issues. After awhile people will forget there are associated issues and costs, but they will still be there.
Every game released whose developers have chosen to complicate its design with a client-server architecture. It's not like this is going to hurt the little three-man teams making games on shoe-string budgets. Yeah, it's going to make big budget games a little more expensive, just like how cars with seatbelts are a little more expensive to build, and like how it's a little more expensive to do proper waste management instead of dumping sludge into a river.
What? This a mandate in law that requires a company to do work in order to comply. Studios will spin out LLCs for a game so that if it fails it doesn't end up as a liability. Unintended consequence: more dead games.
It's impossible for the law to cause more games to die, because already the default fate of online games is for them to die. If, with the law, a studio chooses to use an LLC to create the game to conditionally release sources once it shuts down, that was a game that without the law would have died anyway because the studio wouldn't have chosen of its own volition to release sources.
If a studio on it's last legs is required to service a failing product instead of working on a new one the studio will simply close and not comply. That's what tends to happen with forced regulations like this.
And it's what would have happened anyway without the law. How is this difficult to understand? It's not like it's only a few games that shut down without recourse for the players. Ross Scott already did the research on this. Something like 95% of all online games that shut down do so without providing any way for the players to continue playing in some way or without issuing refunds.
Putting on my Pollyanna hat...
Or it could make it a lot cheaper, if the server were developed entirely on open-source infrastructure from the start. Hopefully the actual game logic would be developed entirely in-house, making it easier to audit before releasing.
Not everything that makes a product more expensive to release is the end of the world.
Middle ground could be completely open API from the start, so community could build alternative server from the ground up.
The final phase of Symbian OS was becoming the open-source Symbian Foundation. This required the existing codebase, hundreds of thousands of files, to be categorised properly (mostly homegrown, some acquired, some licensed) and where necessary restructured so that each directory only had one kind. Painful, exacting, tedious archaeology which all-but-froze development for weeks. Like a long-deferred merge, the cost to pay for belatedly resolving a mess of licenses is daunting.
Nah, you just open source it in a broken state without anything that had separate licensing, so nobody is happy and the law is followed.
> so nobody is happy and the law is followed.
An outcome so common they invented a word for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malicious_compliance
If the bill is properly worded open sourcing the code shouldn't imply that all 3rd party libraries also have to be open sourced.
Is your argument that companies would be forced to obey the laws if they are mandated to open source discontinued games? And it's a... bad thing?
Not OP, but it's more the warning not to underestimate the cost required for compliance, and apprehension of this cost may deter their creation.
Huh? The point is that game developers would never be able to use commercial libraries again. Thus making all development significantly more expensive.
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 as soon as someone finds a security vulnerability (or even just a gameplay glitch) that can't be feasibly patched.
Imagine an MMO where special text in the chat causes viewers' clients to crash, or a glitch exists to duplicate items or money, or where anybody can crash the server to run arbitrary commands.
I play SubSpace (a MMO spaceship game released in the 90s) to this day. It was shut down soon after release.
The original server binaries were left on the original CDROM by a programmer.
Then PriitK, a creator of Kazaa and then Skype and Joost!, went on to re-create the client due to cheating/hacking, naming it Continuum.
Years later the server is reimplemented as A Small Subspace Server (ASSS), making it a complete fan remake of the original game (sans graphics). This is also when we finally got server side mods, everything before that was client only or a hack.
We even got on Stream Greenlight.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/352700/Subspace_Continuum...
Props for bringing up Subspace! What a fun game that deserves more players! (And a new client ui)
That implies the community that builds around it would not reverse engineer and remake the binaries. Which many already do (to be fair), it just so happens that it's way, way harder when the servers are entirely gone already for a game and you have no way to capture server/client traffic for example. Even if the binaries are flawed, just having those in there and being able to spin up a server to see the packet flow already greatly helps in preservation, much more if you have the binary itself and can also peek at server logic for certain things like conflict resolution, instead of having to guess post-game-shutdown!
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)
Closed source binaries rot.
It would like a month to the community to figure out the APIs and few years to decompile it... If they really want to.
No worse than the closed source binaries of the games themselves, surely.
GOG has a whole business around making old closed source binaries run
Game engines/code aren't all open source. The game developer might not have the legal rights to release the source.
Also, does this stop at games? Why not any online service ever? Why not any program at all?
Gaming might be unique in the sense that it's the only industry where 1) consumers make a one-time purchase of a product, but then 2) the manufacturer remains responsible for the online component.. forever? I can't think of any other examples in real life where this happens across an industry (maybe a few niche products).
Maybe this is the reason MS has been pushing Game Pass so hard, to get rid of the "purchase" part entirely.
> I can't think of any other examples in real life where this happens across an industry
Vehicles? Maybe not necessarily forever, but I'd expect the large car manufacturers to all still have some level of support for a 20-year-old car...
Amazon just ended support for older Kindles. Not sure how that's any different.
An online service requires the continual investment in the costs required to run the service and comes with the expectation that the service happening on someone else's computer could cease to exist the second you stop paying or at the end of the current contract cycle.
A game although specified as a license is treated and described as a purchase that is expected to work forever on the end users device so long as it fits the specs.
I wonder where the 'extents' of the game product/service you buy can be defined. I could foresee a game client/server/toolkit like Bioware's Neverwinter Nights being released but as a barebones legally compliant framework that lets you play. Then on the other side of the line they have an optional online service that provides a scenario to play in (running the same server the public has), if that service goes away the game still works, just as buying a load of D&D kits doesn't give you a DM to run games in perpetuity. As another example, there's a lot of servers for games like Counter-strike where the experience and how it runs the gameplay is modded server-side only.
The public responds to complexity and ambiguity by not giving you any money whereby you get to make money making french fries. Logically the most trivial thing people are going to do is make a minimalist multiplayer mode which allows users to join each others games like we did in 1995.
> 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?
Right, like "Oh no, this first video game related regulation in the entire history of the industry is too much for us."
> 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's not feasible to open-source all of that, especially given that it may well still be in use for more recent titles
If they're still running their authentication server (for example), then they wouldn't need to release that service.
Patching the game to no longer contact the authentication server would also be acceptable, for services that aren't a core part of the game. It's pretty likely the game already allows this for development/debugging.
If they've accepted money from people to buy the game, and don't want to keep the authentication service running, and don't want to patch the game to no longer require the authentication service, and don't want to refund people, and don't want to release the authentication service so others can run it - I think it's fair for a regulation to force one of those.
Guarantee X years of server time from launch. If you shut down early, pro rated refund and open source server code. After the launch window, close server with no penalty if desired, but just still open source code. Or keep server open if it's profitable. Or some other option.
The specifics can be hammered out, but something middle ground seems sensible.
> 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.
Said this in another comment: In case a company or new management wants to renew an IP, maybe there should be a waiting period like 1-5 years before they are legally required to release/open-source the server code.
Or how about this: what if, in order to launch a new online-only game in the first place, companies have to submit a copy of the source code as it is on launch day, to the courts or wherever. Then the courts could release it if the game hasn't been active for N years...
I happen to be shutting down an online game right now.
https://www.tyleo.com/blog/sunsetting-rec-room-how-to-give-a...
The sad truth is that these things have high operating costs, especially if they need moderation. I would guess this bill just makes it more risky to make the games in the first place. It’s already brutally hard to make money on games.
I feel like the effect of this might just be that shutting an online game makes it more likely to take a whole company down if you have to issue refunds. Alternatively, it might push multiplayer games towards free-to-play if in-app-purchases are excluded.
Sorry to hear about your situation. For the game you're shutting down online services for, forgive my nieve question but how much work is it to expose an environment variable called `GAME_SERVER_URL` and then document the API contract it expects on the other end?
Servers have a real cost, nobody is denying that, but I think the people who bought the game should have an option/alternative in case the servers are down.
We looked into it. Hackers got part of the way there so we decided not to make a change. They might be able to do it after the title is fully sunset and the team disbanded.
We basically have to get as much done on a 3/4 month timeline as possible and it isn’t a priority like saving content or refunding gift cards is. Shutting down is a lot of work.
Anything you can add to the knowledge pool is already going to be of immense help for your community reverse engineering in the future. Be it as simple as stuff like "Our in-game chat runs over IRC" for example - that already simplifies that entire part of figuring it out of machine code out once servers are gone. ANY knowledge you can share no matter how small it is always helps when all you have is a binary file and no server to respond to your requests.
At least part of the answer is this doesn't meet the requirement of the proposed law. You need to actually provide the functionality of the server-side, not just its API.
What are the insurmountable obstacles to releasing the server code for the community to run?
Do you think any compagny would want to release some very sensitive / secret sauce code?
As I understand it, the obstacles are mostly legal. Our development team would love to just throw the code on GitHub.
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.
It seems like California is the furthest country in the EU.
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.
So what's preventing companies from giving games for free and requiring a subscription or one time membership fee for online play? They'd only be required to refund the full price of the game: $0.
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...
The solution here is for publishers to give away the client, and simply charge a subscription.
Keypoint:
"or a refund for the the game"."Here's your $0 back, thanks for playing!"
That makes it a bit tricky for games like WoW that charge for expansions, as well as subscription. But I'm sure MS can figure something out.
the bill explicitly doesn't apply to games that are free or are on a subscription system. (I assume free-to-play with microtransactions would be covered by this bill though, unless those microtransactions are subscription-based or time-limited.)
I am indeed worried that this will push games to be subscription-based, so I would advocate making the bill apply even to subscription-based games. Though that would require some thought, of course, as it's not obvious how it should apply to such a game.
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
From the movie "Bowfinger" [0]
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0131325/?ref_=nm_flmg_job_1_acc...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.
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.
Presuming that the code is the company's asset, and doesn't use third-party licensed assets. Otherwise you'll be in line for a refund with all of the other company's creditors. Or you get part of the code that you can't use.
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.
Step 1: Open LLC dedicated to this specific video game title.
Why not? They'll spin a new LLC for every title and leave it empty shell, without capital to be recovered by the users should they sue.
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?
> 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?
That is indeed a valid way to comply with it. What that changes, at least, is that the consumer has the expectation that access ends with the end of the subscription, as opposed to where the expectation is for the access to never end.
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.
They could, but there is very little evidence to show that a dislike for subscription models outweighs people's desire to consume quality content.
Evidence is strong that people follow the content they want, and then secondarily choose the least friction delivery model.
I still support this law. If they move to subscriptions to “dodge” this law, that’s fine in a way. At least consumers won’t be under the false impression they own something in the rare case they’re paying a subscription to play a game.
It would basically mandate subscription model for online games. Also wonder if it'd introduce legal risk for online mode in a game that also has local play, say Call of Duty or the newer Super Smash Bros, or if "ordinary use" is clearly not that.
Upfront purchase for something that depends on online services to work raises some questions. The problem with the bill is they want either literally infinite support or an open source server in the end. It'd make sense if there were some time limit based on the price of the game, just to guard against scams like asking $50 for a game that's shut down a year later.
> The problem with the bill is they want either literally infinite support or an open source server in the end.
No the bill doesn't state that. From the bill text [1]
(2) Beginning on the date a digital game operator ceases to provide services necessary for the ordinary use of the digital game, the operator shall provide the purchaser with one or more of the following: (A) A version of the digital game that can be used by the purchaser independent of services controlled by the operator. (B) A patch or update to the purchaser’s version of the digital game that enables its continued use independent of services controlled by the operator. (C) A refund in an amount equal to the full purchase price paid for the digital game by the purchaser.
Just curious, how did you arrive at the infinite support or open source server interpretation?
[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
Oh I didn't mean open source, it can be a binary (if applicable), but same problem, they'd need to provide a way to run the online servers locally. The third option is a refund, which isn't feasible.
Or patch out the online requirements. In many cases, the only real online requirement is a license key check. Also the refund is, afaict, intended to be essentially a last resort option to make the customer as whole as possible.
Found this quote from the game industry interesting and depressing:
> Consumers receive a license to access and use a game, not an unrestricted ownership interest in the underlying work
Could the game industry just side step this legislation by moving games entirely to a subscription model, with no upfront purchase? When they stop offering the subscription, you lose access to the game. Similar to how various online SaaS businesses work.
> Could the game industry just side step this legislation by moving games entirely to a subscription model, with no upfront purchase? When they stop offering the subscription, you lose access to the game. Similar to how various online SaaS businesses work.
Yes. With a subscription there is already an expectation that you will lose access when you stop paying. But I doubt they'd get much buy-in from gamers for that on most games.
This happened to me back in 2024 when Supercell abruptly shut down the game “Clash Mini”. Lost $100+ in in-game purchases.
They did offer to transfer things to other Supercell games, but that had no value to me as I didn’t play those.
I complained to the App Store, but Apple refused to refund purchases made more than 60 days ago (IIRC).
I know things don’t necessarily last forever, especially digital assets, but to spend a lot of money on something only to have it shut down and made unusable within months really stings.
In-game purchases. LMAO.
All this will do is move all games to a subscription model with an N-day subscription waver packed in the box.
I'm on the treadmill so this may appear jumbled.
Bought PGA Tour 2k21 for $50. In October the servers shut down completely neutering the game. I think you're allowed to play a few courses still. But the career mode, which is why I originally bought the game, was completely turned off. Mind you that career mode had zero Internet needed features. It's like a sports franchise mode.
So good on this bill. 2K should rot for deprecating a game I bought for $50 only 5 years ago.
If the government funds it I'd love to do maintenance on baldur's gate v1 for the rest of my life.
Looks like it will just push game publishers to a subscription model.
> 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?
> So they just make their game free two months before they want to close?
Which, afaict, wouldn't change anything in terms of liabilities, because of the people that paid for the game before it went free.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
Wish they'd extend it to all apps, I'm over 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 they really have no intention of open sourcing or refunding.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260116112028/https://juicessh....
Going for all apps at once is, IMO, an impossible ask. So the better option is to tackle one area first to set a precedent then that can be used to make the fight in other areas easier.
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.
Because going up against all types of big software publishers at once would invite MUCH more lobbying which would make any progress likely impossible. Better to start in one area, gaming in this case, to get a precedent out there, which then makes the fight against general software publishers easier.
It would be fair in general to disallow charging a one-time fee for something that's shut down soon later. I don't expect perpetual support, but there should be some target based on the price that any well-intended software maker will exceed.
Also if you advertise "lifetime license," that should mean lifetime.
How were they shut down? Like as in the old software refuses to start or they cant renew maintenance / no security updates?
Adobe turned the license servers off that the installers used to verify your CS6 installer key. No check pass, no install. Of course, you can just use an LLM to build a patch, or pirate a copy, but it's the principle I suppose.
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.
I don't see any world in which these "stop killing games" laws result in anything close to what the proponents are asking for, for multiple reasons, one of the biggest being that the proponents don't have a clear, coherent, cohesive vision that takes into account all of the side-effects, and everyone you talk to in this space has a slightly different idea of what they want, and even the main proponent, Ross Scott, has a vague vision that changes from month to month, and shifts in mututally-exclusive ways depending on what objection is currently being responded to. I think what will happen is we'll get (A) a law that doesn't work due to some glaring loophole (such as being able to skirt the law by simply giving the community the server binary with no documentation) or (B) a law that DOES work but is so impossible to ahere to that companies simply accept that they'll be sued and bake it into the price of the game.
This is the main reason I never bother playing new MMOs or online-only games, after a few that I liked shut down after barely 1 year.
Hellgate London, Paragon...
The law should go further: If an IP isn't revived within N (say 5) years, release the source code for the servers.
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?
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.
yep, that is what I meant by the DMCA, but I should probably have been more clear.
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.
You were able to use it. Nothing lasts forever. People need help with a world that is hell, not video game related problems.
The law is exactly the place to deal with entitlements.
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.
What if an Indie developer wants to make a game, where the primary mechanics and state live in a "service" they control? Why should they be burdened with this stuff if they move on, if indeed they sold a "service" and not a piece of software?
My view has nothing to do with Corporations... I just really don't understand what players feel they are entitled to here. If you want "software" then buy that, and don't use the Service games.
Unpopular view I suppose. Maybe it would mean more games you could actually own, but I think it would just have bad effects.
It's not difficult not to lie to your customers. If you are actually selling a subscription then don't claim the customer is buying the game, and this law won't apply to you.
So game should be playable forever then? You bought an online game 20 years ago, it should still work today.
For 20 years you need to support, patch, keep people and infrastructure.
Why the tech industry does not do it? I still want to use windows XP. Why my Nexus 5 does not work anymore ect..
> So game should be playable forever then? You bought an online game 20 years ago, it should still work today.
yes
> For 20 years you need to support, patch, keep people and infrastructure.
No, you should just not make it impossible for people to do so. (via stuff like online activation and such). Most 20 year old games you can still run via a VM or something like that. If it requires online activation and the server for that are shut down, you can't.
> Why the tech industry does not do it? I still want to use windows XP. Why my Nexus 5 does not work anymore ect..
You can still use windows xp and a nexus 5.
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.
Yeah I have no sympathy for companies, but unfortunately companies just pass their costs along to the consumer, and I do have sympathy for those.
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??
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What you're noticing - that companies suddenly started closed-sourcing their server code, isn't just something that happened for no reason. Internet connections got fast, and it enabled more complex games like MMORPGs and MOBAs which are an order of magnitude more complex than the shooter games you're probably thinking of (Quake III?)
A LOT of architectural thinking goes into scaling MMORPGs, and it starts at the data model. I've watched quite a few interviews with WoW devs, and the data model for their system is counter-intuitive. That constitutes a trade secret in my mind.
And that's something that companies that produce MMORPGs/MOBAs/etc. can conclusively demonstrate in court.
That said, it's possible that companies could release a "nerfed" version of their server code with trade secrets removed for the community to run once the official game servers are taken down. It isn't clear if that'll be in scope of the law, or if that's even what proponents of Stop Killing Games would be okay with. We'll have to see.
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'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.
If you paid $60 bucks for a sega genesis game in 1990 you were paying about $156 adjusting for inflation. Different figures for different values of "back in the day" obviously.
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.
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.