> The bill applies to digitally sold games. However, it excludes games provided via subscription services, free-to-play games, and games that are inherently playable offline indefinitely. It also prohibits the continued sale or distribution of games that have become unusable due to service termination.
I believe this is the key paragraph. I wonder if this will be an incentive towards making more games qualify for those exceptions. I think the previous cases where this act would apply are few but good thing they wouldn't increase under this act.
California and meaningless feel good legislation with massive loopholes? A match made in heaven!
If this is how the bill ends up being enacted, it will only push more big game developers into making their titles subscription only. A win for gamers' rights, I suppose.
I think it's more likely that the big studios will start rolling out trivial offline modes (less risky) rather than overhaul their revenue models (more risky).
At least that somewhat aligns incentives between players and the game studio. If an old game has a long-lasting player base, then a modest subscription makes it more likely that the studio would keep the servers up and running, if not actively patching the game. With a game that you pay for up-front, a long-lived player base can be a liability for the company (ongoing costs without many new purchases.)
So this only really applies to games you have to purchase once but are online-only? That's... an incredibly narrow law, that only covers a class of games which are particularly stupid by design. (Continuous cost without continuous revenue.)
I don't think forcing a person or business to divulge their intellectual property, simply because they no longer wish to provide downstream products or services, is reasonable. That said, as a consumer I really don't like when something goes away. Overwatch 1 was probably the most brutal experience for me. In the end, I don't think anyone has any kind of special entitlements here.
The server binaries will almost always include other proprietary information that the studio will not want to release. Any sanitation of this binary further condemns this as a silly idea because now you are also compelling the individual or business to do additional (presumably unpaid) work so that arbitrary consumers can use their products or services indefinitely.
If this was about open source software I’d agree about not forcing people to do additional work, but if you’re selling something for money you should be obligated to do the bare minimum of stripping secrets out of a binary so the product you sold can actually work (and this will be barely any work if it’s designed with this in mind in the first place)
We already obligate them to do other basic necessities for consumer protection such as refunding or replacing faulty products
If they dont want to release the source then just keep running the servers! I think its ridiculous that people can buy games and the games just stop working and its ok because of some legalese that literally no one reads. Alternatively, why not just align your incentives with the user and charge subscriptions.
Games are interesting because players will sink a lot of time and sometimes money in and so it goes beyond a smart alarm clock or a fitness tracker imo.
> The server binaries will almost always include other proprietary information that the studio will not want to release.
Or even information that they are contractually forbidden from releasing. A typical scenario would be a game developed as a fork of a proprietary codebase which was licensed from another company. Forcing the licensee to release material would infringe on the rights of the licensor.
There's also scenarios like games that depended on GameSpy being forced out into the cold. Battle for Middle Earth 2 is a good example of this. The LOTR rights expiring isn't what got them. It was another provider going away in a puff of smoke and not enough player base to justify a complete rewrite of the backend.
It would at least be reasonable to expect this for future games, just treat the server binary the same way as the client in terms of what code you include (there way be some more involved if they have to migrate off a reusable codebase but I think it’s worth it)
I don't think it's reasonable for a law to dictate how software must be developed. If a developer wants to create some software by taking some licensed code and modifying it, that's their prerogative - it seems rather overreaching for the law to mandate that any licensed code must be structured as a library. (And in practice it'd be rather limiting for that to be the case.)
Almost every law that exists about software exists to dictate what a consumer is or isn't allowed to do with software on their own computer using their own hardware.
For once, there is a law that actually dictates the responsibilities that a developer has to the customer, and all that responsibility states is that the developer can not revoke the use of software that a customer has already fully paid for under certain narrow circumstances; somehow this is what you find to be unreasonable?
It is of course reasonable to restrict what you can do with a product you’re selling for money. There are plenty of laws and regulations that already do this. Without these kinds of laws intellectual property wouldn’t even exist - copyright was only created to benefit society by providing an incentive for people to create and invent things
It’s no different from mandating that the software can’t be malware that puts a ransom on your data, contain other people’s copyrighted content without permission, or just not work despite you claiming that it does when you sold it
And it’s not mandating that anything is structured in a particular way, just that the game works as the buyer would expect and how they achieve that is up to them
Company's only exist so far as state law allows them to operate within them. It's not forcing them to do something after some point in time, it's a requirement to be a business at all.
Not meaningfully. AI-guided reverse-engineering is very effective.
This also isn't relevant to third-party code obtained under license. It is a de facto restriction on code dependencies, which may significantly increase development costs.
It would be enough to guarantee no legal threats against users who reverse-engineer the protocol and implement their own server. (A catchy name for it: "Fair Game Act".)
The backend for a game is not just an .exe file. It can be a mess of a system that relies on all kinds of services that need maintenance and that one dev who knows how to reset the cache.
I agree that it's shitty that buyers can lose access to a game they bought, but I really struggle to see how this could function practically.
Government forced speech is never reasonable. If you don't like the arrangement, just don't buy the game. Tell them why you didn't buy the game. Hope for a better future where more of the industry is built on open source. That's all anyone can do. That's all anyone should be able to do.
Government forced speech includes food companies needing to add ingredient labels on packaging including allergen info, landlords needing to notify tenants before entering their homes, stores having to post accurate prices for the products they sell, and employers having to provide workers with safety data sheets for the hazardous materials they work with. These are all perfectly reasonable.
That’s not a Carte Blanche that forbids the government from everything.
The government can compel speech food and other producers to print content and nutritional labels on their products. The government can compel speech on a yearly basis when we file taxes. The can compel speech such as guidance maps and websites to be accessible to the blind (ADA). They can compel vehicle owners to provide insurance and ownership information, which is a kind of speech.
This is not just free speech, it's commerce, and the government has the ability to regulate commerce. Warranties and lemon laws are not regulating speech - they're regulating sales and the legal requirements for those sales. Providing a method for playing a game a customer purchased after the company decides to abandon it is putting a legal requirement on the sale of goods.
I think this will cause a big schism in the Stop Killing Games movement. Game devs who were sympathetic to the movement will expect that this is enough, but a lot of people in the movement will be unsatisfied with the carveouts for MMORPGs and XBOX Game Pass and the like.
So instead of whole products sold at a one time price, there will be more and more subscription based services micro-transaction slop. 10/10 California. Never change.
But right now we have games that you have purchased for a one-time price, the developer revokes your ability to play it years later, and you have no recourse.
This what California's political machinery is focused on? Rather than the colossal waste that is the high speed rail project, or rampant corrupt use of State and local funds for social welfare projects that go nowhere?
I understand you can focus on two things at the same time, and moonshot projects are worth it. (More NASA funding please.) But as a California taxpayer I can't take our government seriously.
> The bill applies to digitally sold games. However, it excludes games provided via subscription services, free-to-play games, and games that are inherently playable offline indefinitely. It also prohibits the continued sale or distribution of games that have become unusable due to service termination.
I believe this is the key paragraph. I wonder if this will be an incentive towards making more games qualify for those exceptions. I think the previous cases where this act would apply are few but good thing they wouldn't increase under this act.
California and meaningless feel good legislation with massive loopholes? A match made in heaven!
If this is how the bill ends up being enacted, it will only push more big game developers into making their titles subscription only. A win for gamers' rights, I suppose.
I think it's more likely that the big studios will start rolling out trivial offline modes (less risky) rather than overhaul their revenue models (more risky).
I can see them adding a $1 per year subscription at the very least.
At least that somewhat aligns incentives between players and the game studio. If an old game has a long-lasting player base, then a modest subscription makes it more likely that the studio would keep the servers up and running, if not actively patching the game. With a game that you pay for up-front, a long-lived player base can be a liability for the company (ongoing costs without many new purchases.)
Why is this a problem? Quake 3 came out a quarter century ago, yet there are still community host servers available
Quake 3 can also be played fully offline, for various measures of "play" and "fully".
Why not $0?
Of course its an incentive, however the disincentives to purchasing (subscribing/spending), and thus producing, such games still exist.
So this only really applies to games you have to purchase once but are online-only? That's... an incredibly narrow law, that only covers a class of games which are particularly stupid by design. (Continuous cost without continuous revenue.)
> Continuous cost without continuous revenue
That would be the case if the publisher had any intent to actually keep the service online. Empirically they do not, hence the law.
It also covers games with any form of MTX, even if the base game is free. So most live service games.
The reasonable compromise should be to force devs to release server binaries if they are not willing to run the servers themselves.
I don't think forcing a person or business to divulge their intellectual property, simply because they no longer wish to provide downstream products or services, is reasonable. That said, as a consumer I really don't like when something goes away. Overwatch 1 was probably the most brutal experience for me. In the end, I don't think anyone has any kind of special entitlements here.
The server binaries will almost always include other proprietary information that the studio will not want to release. Any sanitation of this binary further condemns this as a silly idea because now you are also compelling the individual or business to do additional (presumably unpaid) work so that arbitrary consumers can use their products or services indefinitely.
If this was about open source software I’d agree about not forcing people to do additional work, but if you’re selling something for money you should be obligated to do the bare minimum of stripping secrets out of a binary so the product you sold can actually work (and this will be barely any work if it’s designed with this in mind in the first place)
We already obligate them to do other basic necessities for consumer protection such as refunding or replacing faulty products
If they dont want to release the source then just keep running the servers! I think its ridiculous that people can buy games and the games just stop working and its ok because of some legalese that literally no one reads. Alternatively, why not just align your incentives with the user and charge subscriptions.
Games are interesting because players will sink a lot of time and sometimes money in and so it goes beyond a smart alarm clock or a fitness tracker imo.
> The server binaries will almost always include other proprietary information that the studio will not want to release.
Or even information that they are contractually forbidden from releasing. A typical scenario would be a game developed as a fork of a proprietary codebase which was licensed from another company. Forcing the licensee to release material would infringe on the rights of the licensor.
There's also scenarios like games that depended on GameSpy being forced out into the cold. Battle for Middle Earth 2 is a good example of this. The LOTR rights expiring isn't what got them. It was another provider going away in a puff of smoke and not enough player base to justify a complete rewrite of the backend.
https://www.ea.com/news/update-on-ea-titles-hosted-on-gamesp...
> Or even information that they are contractually forbidden from releasing.
Laws trump contracts.
It would at least be reasonable to expect this for future games, just treat the server binary the same way as the client in terms of what code you include (there way be some more involved if they have to migrate off a reusable codebase but I think it’s worth it)
I don't think it's reasonable for a law to dictate how software must be developed. If a developer wants to create some software by taking some licensed code and modifying it, that's their prerogative - it seems rather overreaching for the law to mandate that any licensed code must be structured as a library. (And in practice it'd be rather limiting for that to be the case.)
Almost every law that exists about software exists to dictate what a consumer is or isn't allowed to do with software on their own computer using their own hardware.
For once, there is a law that actually dictates the responsibilities that a developer has to the customer, and all that responsibility states is that the developer can not revoke the use of software that a customer has already fully paid for under certain narrow circumstances; somehow this is what you find to be unreasonable?
It is of course reasonable to restrict what you can do with a product you’re selling for money. There are plenty of laws and regulations that already do this. Without these kinds of laws intellectual property wouldn’t even exist - copyright was only created to benefit society by providing an incentive for people to create and invent things
It’s no different from mandating that the software can’t be malware that puts a ransom on your data, contain other people’s copyrighted content without permission, or just not work despite you claiming that it does when you sold it
And it’s not mandating that anything is structured in a particular way, just that the game works as the buyer would expect and how they achieve that is up to them
True. Better would be to eliminate society damage like "intellectual property" and require everything to be available regardless
Company's only exist so far as state law allows them to operate within them. It's not forcing them to do something after some point in time, it's a requirement to be a business at all.
The binaries can be obfuscated.
Not meaningfully. AI-guided reverse-engineering is very effective.
This also isn't relevant to third-party code obtained under license. It is a de facto restriction on code dependencies, which may significantly increase development costs.
It would be enough to guarantee no legal threats against users who reverse-engineer the protocol and implement their own server. (A catchy name for it: "Fair Game Act".)
The backend for a game is not just an .exe file. It can be a mess of a system that relies on all kinds of services that need maintenance and that one dev who knows how to reset the cache.
I agree that it's shitty that buyers can lose access to a game they bought, but I really struggle to see how this could function practically.
What if, as a very high number do, the server uses something like a proprietary SQL database?
So what, dedicated hackers will find a way around that. There's bigger fish to fry.
i don't know, do game developers have a right to sell a Remastered Multiplayer Edition later? in my opinion, yes.
Government forced speech is never reasonable. If you don't like the arrangement, just don't buy the game. Tell them why you didn't buy the game. Hope for a better future where more of the industry is built on open source. That's all anyone can do. That's all anyone should be able to do.
> Government forced speech is never reasonable.
Government forced speech includes food companies needing to add ingredient labels on packaging including allergen info, landlords needing to notify tenants before entering their homes, stores having to post accurate prices for the products they sell, and employers having to provide workers with safety data sheets for the hazardous materials they work with. These are all perfectly reasonable.
There's always someone willing to blame the victim.
The answer to companies committing fraud is not "buyer beware".
What are you proposing then? The government is not allowed to compel speech for good reason.
That’s not a Carte Blanche that forbids the government from everything.
The government can compel speech food and other producers to print content and nutritional labels on their products. The government can compel speech on a yearly basis when we file taxes. The can compel speech such as guidance maps and websites to be accessible to the blind (ADA). They can compel vehicle owners to provide insurance and ownership information, which is a kind of speech.
This is not just free speech, it's commerce, and the government has the ability to regulate commerce. Warranties and lemon laws are not regulating speech - they're regulating sales and the legal requirements for those sales. Providing a method for playing a game a customer purchased after the company decides to abandon it is putting a legal requirement on the sale of goods.
So just make every game free to play and then require a paying to unlock the actual game.
As ever it come down to judicial discretion whether trivial word games are allowed to nullify the law or not.
I think this will cause a big schism in the Stop Killing Games movement. Game devs who were sympathetic to the movement will expect that this is enough, but a lot of people in the movement will be unsatisfied with the carveouts for MMORPGs and XBOX Game Pass and the like.
A lot of people in the movement think game companies are the root problem when what they actually have a problem with is current copyright law.
So instead of whole products sold at a one time price, there will be more and more subscription based services micro-transaction slop. 10/10 California. Never change.
But right now we have games that you have purchased for a one-time price, the developer revokes your ability to play it years later, and you have no recourse.
This what California's political machinery is focused on? Rather than the colossal waste that is the high speed rail project, or rampant corrupt use of State and local funds for social welfare projects that go nowhere?
I understand you can focus on two things at the same time, and moonshot projects are worth it. (More NASA funding please.) But as a California taxpayer I can't take our government seriously.
What's important is you came here, didn't address the article at all, and rambled off some talking points.