Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/05/bill-to-keep-online-games-playable-clears-key-hurdle-in-california/

by Lihh27 • 2 months ago

596 462 2 months ago

kgwxd2• 2 months ago

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.

idle_zealot3• 2 months ago

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.

rrego• 2 months ago

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.

thewebguyd• 2 months ago

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

MobiusHorizons2• 2 months ago

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.

norman7842• 2 months ago

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.

johnea2• 2 months ago

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.

ktallett• 2 months ago

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

scott_w4• 2 months ago

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.

Melatonic• 2 months ago

How were they shut down? Like as in the old software refuses to start or they cant renew maintenance / no security updates?

k12sosse• 2 months ago

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.

traderj0e5• 2 months ago

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.

johnea2• 2 months ago

I agree, and the user's of AutoCAD that I know, weren't; asking for any "support", they just wanted the software to keep working...

Akronymus12• 2 months ago

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.

knollimar10• 2 months ago

I thought they just wanted to thwart DRM; people still pirate AutoCAD 2018.

account4259• 2 months ago

It only applies to games because the people behind it (Ross Scot) chose to limit their efforts that way. If you want to campaign for an even larger scope feel free to put in the effort.

jfengel2• 2 months ago

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.

idle_zealot3• 2 months ago

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.

jfengel2• 2 months ago

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.

0x457• 2 months ago

Step 1: Open LLC dedicated to this specific video game title.

mdavidn• 2 months ago

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

jrflowers• 2 months ago

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.

EdwardDiego• 2 months ago

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

whartung2• 2 months ago

From the movie "Bowfinger" [0]

  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.

[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0131325/?ref_=nm_flmg_job_1_acc...

kenhwang• 2 months ago

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.

throw_a_grenade• 2 months ago

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.

buzer3• 2 months ago

One good option could be to make the distributor (like Steam or Play Store) liable as well. They would then have an interest on making sure that publisher/developer holds up on their side of the deal.

For example they could require that they provided with those EOL patches/sources when game is released, require liability insurance in case of bankruptcy etc.

account4259• 2 months ago

That's an interesting point. Steam likes to pretend they are only facilitating the transaction and the developer/publisher is the real seller when it suits them but I bet that isn't how most players experience the deal.

schobi• 2 months ago

I would expect that this leads to cases where the game is handed over to a shell company that goes bankrupt. The shell does not have the rights to all parts of the code and can thus release only part of it in a state that is useless. Some parts might have a weird license attached and so on.

Escrow or demonstration upfront will raise the bar before releasing new games in California.

account4259• 2 months ago

If the law requires the shell company to release the source code then they have to release it. The parent can then go and sue the shell company all they want for releasing things without license but that no longer involves the public.

bitbasher• 2 months ago

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.

idle_zealot3• 2 months ago

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.

tencentshill• 2 months ago

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.

annoyingnoob2• 2 months ago

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.

traderj0e5• 2 months ago

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.

michaelmrose3• 2 months ago

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.

busterarm• 2 months ago

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.

Freedom2• 2 months ago

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.

throwaway858258• 2 months ago

Price alone is a useless metric. Digital goods have no marginal cost.

LightHugger6• 2 months ago

There is no reason to reply like this unless you are some kind of scammer with no ethics. I hope this bill bankrupts your business model.

account4259• 2 months ago

So? Worth of something to your customers is not the same as the effort you put into it. Plenty of alternative entertainment sources you're competing with that are much more affordable than 50 cents per hour.

comrade1234• 2 months ago

If the government funds it I'd love to do maintenance on baldur's gate v1 for the rest of my life.

account4259• 2 months ago

Between GemRB [0], ports to the BG2 engine (Tutu, BGT) as well as older community patches for BG1 itself, that game is already well maintained. It also doesn't have publisher operated server component though.

[0] https://gemrb.org/

phyzix57612• 2 months ago

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.

chromadon• 2 months ago

Does it though? Just release the a standalone server once the game is done making money.

phyzix57612• 2 months ago

Updated my original post to explain why this wouldn't work.

braiamp8• 2 months ago

How many small studio games have online multiplayer? Like really?

knollimar10• 2 months ago

it'll be a lot less with this law

StableAlkyne• 2 months ago

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.

phendrenad26• 2 months ago

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.

dminik4• 2 months ago

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.

knollimar10• 2 months ago

CS:GO's server architecture makes perfect sense for a game that would be easy to release server software.

What do you do for, say, a failing MMO built on a proprietary game engine you're trying to make a sequel for?

account4259• 2 months ago

Sure, the skins no longer work

Hey, that actually sounds like a positive. Might have to try the game again.

TZubiri• 2 months ago

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.

yieldcrv• 2 months ago

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

Lonestar14403• 2 months ago

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.

buellerbueller2• 2 months ago

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??

tombert2• 2 months ago

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.

collingreen3• 2 months ago

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.

phendrenad26• 2 months ago

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.

Lonestar14403• 2 months ago

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.

Thaxll2• 2 months ago

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..

smalley• 2 months ago

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?

norman7842• 2 months ago

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.

sheept• 2 months ago

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.

traderj0e5• 2 months ago

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.

Akronymus12• 2 months ago

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...

Akronymus12• 2 months ago

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.

throwaway274482• 2 months ago

Licenses to game software*. It's extremely rare to actually purchase something of value today. But yes, subscriptions are the norm.

swathsofgrass2• 2 months ago

Subscriptions in games would be the death of gaming imo.

denkmoon• 2 months ago

mmorpgs seem to be healthy and now we even buy games full price then buy battle passes every 3 months to get shiny skins

account4259• 2 months ago

"Subscriptions" are already what you have when companies are allowed to shut down games whenever they want more money from you.

account4259• 2 months ago

Another way to phrase this would be that games that are already effectively a long term subscription with an unspecified period would need to be more clear about the deal they are offering. That's already a good outcome as it would improve the ability of actually perpetually available game purchases to compete.

kkukshtel• 2 months ago

This is the road of stupid that stop killing games has paved.

ssenssei• 2 months ago

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.

11235813212• 2 months ago

The main no argument is that it makes risky games riskier for the developer, publisher and IP holder. Games like Marathon never get approved.

LorenDB• 2 months ago

Are you by chance the first second-generation Blizzard employee?

georgeecollins• 2 months ago

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.

mjr00• 2 months ago

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.

dminik4• 2 months ago

This has an easy solution. If the middleware cannot be used in a new regulatory environment then it will either die or adapt.

Ukv6• 2 months ago

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.

gsich4• 2 months ago

Then don't. People will find a way to replace those.

account4259• 2 months ago

So?

A) This state is not inherent but a result of there being no general requirement to release the sources. Middle ware would use different licenses if that was required to have any customers.

B) Omitting the sound code did not stop the community from releasing source ports based on that release, with sound of course.

weberer• 2 months ago

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.

bluGill• 2 months ago

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.

Imustaskforhelp• 2 months ago

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)

Terr_2• 2 months ago

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.

neksn• 2 months ago

Closed source binaries rot.

strags2• 2 months ago

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.

Ukv6• 2 months ago

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.

account4259• 2 months ago

Excuses. If there is a legal requirement you can watch all those concerns evaporate away.

jayd164• 2 months ago

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?

parliament32• 2 months ago

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.

michaelmrose3• 2 months ago

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.

buzer3• 2 months ago

The game developer might not have the legal rights to release the source.

Then the game developer/publisher should choose to use another technology or be ready to replace that piece when game reaches EOL. If no game developer can use that technology, the vendor will end up loosing a lot of sales. They can then decide if more permissive license would make sense.

mrandish5• 2 months ago

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.

gbear605• 2 months ago

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.

dudul• 2 months ago

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?

thombat2• 2 months ago

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.

foresto• 2 months ago

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.

guelo• 2 months ago

If the bill is properly worded open sourcing the code shouldn't imply that all 3rd party libraries also have to be open sourced.

Nition• 2 months ago

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.

whateverboat• 2 months ago

To be fair, it was in a time and age where BOM was not that common. I am assuming nowadays, with BOMs being in place, the process should be much easier.

IG_Semmelweiss• 2 months ago

open source server code if you are going to cease support
Legal had to verify that there was no licensed library code used and that we had clear, valid copyright to everything there.

I can tell you the other side of that equation. There's no poison pill -short of outright fraud- that will kill an acquisition of a software company, than open source code embedded deep in the product.

I've been in both sides of the table of M&A activity, and in the due dilligence, smart acquirers will always look at the code and libraries in use. If there's anything that even has the hint of open source, that is heavily scrutinized: what is open source by default can't be owned by anyone and if it cannot be owned, it doesn't have IP value.

Most deals that ran into this issue would stop dead in their tracks, and it would take a while to spin back up, that is if the deal went thru at all

umvi• 2 months ago

Better to just publish the protocols/APIs and let the community roll their own

throwaway858258• 2 months ago

If the market is big enough licensed libraries will just change their terms.

marsbars241• 2 months ago

I’m curious if you think the law would cause companies to keep better track of these things as development happens. If there was tracking for all the shared libraries from the get go, I’m guessing it would have been an easier transition?

WalterBright• 2 months ago

This difficulty has been greatly reduced by git. With git, you can have the complete provenance of every line of code.

Git has ended the accusations people have leveled at me for code theft. (I beat them all back because I had meticulous documentation and the accusers always had nothing. Git just made that easy.)

For my work, Git (and Github) have been a godsend.

JoeAltmaier• 2 months ago

AI today may be able to streamline that process.

Have it read and compare the code with what it knows about open source. Many AI engines can also google that and give a comprehensive list of similarities.

Reduces the list of things to check by maybe orders of magnitude and months to days.

watwut2• 2 months ago

Legal had to verify that there was no licensed library code used

Your company did not tracked libraries licenses in the first place?

pjmlp2• 2 months ago

That is already the case in enterprise projects for many years now.

Since around 2010, that in most projects I am involved, the CI/CD pipelines can only talk to internal repos with vetted dependencies.

You can still do whatever locally, however the build will break when using non authorised dependencies.

rcxdude• 2 months ago

More likely, those commercially licensed libraries will wind up needing to adjust their terms to allow for this kind of release.

(Also, legal will basically never give an 'all clear'. That's not their job, their job is to inform you of the risks, and so it's extremely rare that they will not come up with some)

account4259• 2 months ago

That will certainly have an impact on development time frames and economics.

I don't think there would be much of an impact long term as third party frameworks would be forced to adapt their licensing or die. It's not like years old source code is really as valuable as some companies pretend.

A lot of the pain you experienced is mainly due to making the decision to open source after the code was already written rather than from the start - its really no different than any other late requirements change.

SecretDreams• 2 months ago

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.

Razengan2• 2 months ago

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...

summerlight3• 2 months ago

Many developers with good will actually tried that and gave up due to lots of problems. This is not just bad ROI but also a legal minefield. Engineers usually cannot argue against this kind of risks. Enforcing this will unlikely work in higher courts. Though something like open sourcing protocols for server reimplementation may have some chances.

While I see problems in the law but the spirit is reasonable. We need to push toward this direction. At least there should be difficult economical trade-off for publishers when they decide to shut down the game. Nowadays, some random executive just takes look into some excel, see some games have declining revenue and decides to "simplify the business" without much thoughts. This has to stop.

mifydev• 2 months ago

Based on comments below the solution is to make the API public and publish the architecture design, along with the binaries.

This way the company can avoid spending too much money on open sourcing the code, and the community can just rewrite the server while keeping the original binaries running.

roarcher• 2 months ago

I think this is a more desirable solution for customers than a refund anyway--if I like a game, I don't want my $60 back in exchange for never being able to play it again. I just want to keep playing it.

account4259• 2 months ago

Yes, the $60 is nothing compared to your time investment into a game you like.

imtringued2• 2 months ago

This doesn't make sense. The developers should only be obligated to provide a dedicated server plus an in-game server browser that supports a standardized service discovery protocol. The players must figure out themselves how to run the software on their computer.

SkiFire13• 2 months ago

open source server code

No, and requiring this will likely give the opposition counter points.

You don't need the source code at all. You only need the ability to run the server yourself.

abustamam• 2 months ago

When the 6 person startup I worked for shut down, the founders spent a few months of their own time to open source the product because people still liked it, they just didn't wanna pay for it.

So people were allowed to selfhost.

Of course this probably doesn't scale or work for every company but I thought it was nice to see.

matheusmoreira• 2 months ago

Just make it a literal crime for corporations to interfere with community work on games they don't care about supporting. The problem will take care of itself. People are more than willing to put in the work themselves, it's just that hateful corporations will send them cease and desist letters if not actual lawsuits.

account4259• 2 months ago

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.

For a number of reasons (licensing issues, code being lost, etc.) this will only work if source code must be escrowed long before that time.

selectively2• 2 months ago

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.

scott_w4• 2 months ago

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.

selectively2• 2 months ago

You were able to use it. Nothing lasts forever. People need help with a world that is hell, not video game related problems.

pessimizer• 2 months ago

The law is exactly the place to deal with entitlements.

braiamp8• 2 months ago

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.

imzadi• 2 months 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?

okanat4• 2 months ago

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.

Akronymus12• 2 months ago

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.

ThrowawayR2• 2 months ago

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.

chadgpt33• 2 months ago

I have good news for you: everything is legal if you don't get caught.

notJim• 2 months ago

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...

whartung2• 2 months ago

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.

throwawayk7h• 2 months ago

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.

trashburger• 2 months ago

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?

dbt00• 2 months ago

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.

account4259• 2 months ago

They shouldn't get to replace the music without a partial refund either IMO as that can be a significant part of the purchase decision. Just negotiate music licensing based on copies sold, and ideally the same for other content - then everyone is happy except for the rent seeking publisher who can't just count pure profit after the nth sale for something they didn't even create themselves.

cube00• 2 months ago

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....

Akronymus12• 2 months ago

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.

mrandish5• 2 months ago

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.

braiamp8• 2 months ago

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.

golemotron• 2 months ago

It seems like California is the furthest country in the EU.

washadjeffmad• 2 months ago

I played games online over dial-up, a few asynchronously via email, in the 1990s. Until the modern era, if some sort of direct TCP/IP connection wasn't built in, then an add-on usually supplied everything needed for private multiplayer and map editing.

I don't think companies should be on the hook for maintaining moderation, hosting, and development at no cost in perpetuity, but addressing not providing any legal way to access or modify content from a onetime sale forces companies to pick a model so consumers can make informed purchases.

I've often wondered how the gaming industry has gotten away for so long muddying whether they're selling products or services.

knollimar10• 2 months ago

Isn't this settled? Vernor vs Autodesk, they're services

swathsofgrass2• 2 months ago

"even making the problem worse."

Exactly.

grayhatter4• 2 months ago

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.

I believe it's possible to write laws that serve the people they're supposed to protect. It may take iteration, but you have to start somewhere.

I'm willing to tolerate the new problems that may arise from trying to solve an existing one. Presenting the unknowns as something to be avoided because it might be complicated and require additional effort to fix, is not a sane refutation.

knollimar10• 2 months ago

"It may take iteration, but you have to start somewhere."

It's hitting the assembly floor. Whether this is good depends, imo, entirely on indie carveouts for revenue. I'm afraid of shortsighted legislation like certain sections of DMCA.

Talking about the problems now is important. "Add this or the harm is worth more than the benefit" isn't a blanket refutation, but it is a refutation of the existing bill

mrandish5• 2 months ago

I believe it's possible to write laws that serve the people they're supposed to protect.

I agree. In theory it should be possible to create a fully transparent legislative drafting process incorporating red-teaming, open comment periods and mandated iteration cycles where bugs and unintended consequences inconsistent with the original intent are required to be addressed years after a law is passed. I'd love to design such a process.

Unfortunately, that's not at all how legislation gets made. It's opaque and fully penetrated at every level by highly-organized, well-funded special interests working to subvert the process in overt and covert ways. There have been entire books written about the incredibly sophisticated and devious ways legislation gets nerfed, loop-holed and corrupted. I once had dinner with a long-time Washington lobbyist for a public interest group. He has decades of experience seeing how the sausage is really made in the backrooms. It was a very depressing dinner.

The one thing that doesn't happen in recent decades of U.S. law-making is any chance of revisiting and revising a law once it is passed and not working. The reality is the U.S. Constitution and law-making process was brilliantly conceived 250 years ago by smart people with the highest ideals for mankind. It's amazing that system survived for as long as it did. But it's now been corrupted by black hats at Ring 0. And you can't deploy patches to resecure a system once the patching process itself has been pwned.

The only legislation which still gets passed in any reasonably pure form are things which no well-funded political or corporate vested interests care to fight over. Games now represent more yearly revenue than movies and music combined and most of the money now rolls-up to giants like MSFT, EA, Sony, etc. The chances of any legislation passing with real teeth to meaningfully restrict online games are virtually nil. Although if legislators see it as a popular enough issue, we might see a law pass with much fanfare but it will have subtle nerfs and kill-switches built in ensuring it makes no real difference in practice.

If you're wondering why legislators propose such laws if they know they're doomed to ultimately make no difference, it's for two reasons: 1. To get some positive press just for proposing something they know will never be enacted in law, or 2. Proposing a law which very well-funded vested interests will mobilize to kill or nerf generates an extraordinary amount of cash "donations" to campaigns, political parties and PACs. I learned from the lobbyist I had dinner with that #2 is far more common than #1.

quickthrowman• 2 months ago

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.

Either it’ll go this way, or you’ll get the client for free and it’ll cost $(full game price) to create an online account. Free client means no refunds, thanks for playing!

account4259• 2 months ago

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.

No, without legal guarantees that perpetual licensing actually means perpetual availability there is actually no such thing. All this would change would force companies to accurately advertise the contract their are intending to honor, thus allowing more honest companies to compete.

jayd164• 2 months ago

All this will do is move all games to a subscription model with an N-day subscription waver packed in the box.

Razengan2• 2 months ago

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.

phendrenad26• 2 months ago

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.

JacobKfromIRC4• 2 months ago

I agree with most of this, but "server binary with no documentation" is an extremely good outcome compared to the status quo.

People can reverse-engineer a server binary, but reverse-engineering a server that is no longer running is not guaranteed to be possible.

There are worse potential loopholes you didn't mention though.

LightHugger6• 2 months ago

Ross has had a consistent vision for years and i'm not sure where this delusion otherwise is coming from. At this point i'm wondering if people like you are just astroturf bots funded by the ESA.

phendrenad26• 2 months ago

Assuming people who bring new ideas to the table are bots or part of an evil conspiracy is a great way to irrelevancy. That said, I'm curious if wouldn't mind watching some interviews with him and try to suss out exactly what he thinks companies should do, and what companies should be affected. There's a lot of (and this is what it sounds like to me) "maybe publish an API spec, maybe share the binary, maybe publish full source code, I dunno!"

Reason077• 2 months ago

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.

ThePowerOfFuet• 2 months ago

Lost $100+ in in-game purchases.

You lost the money the moment you made in-game purchases.

tdeck3• 2 months ago

Frankly if they kept the game up it might be $1,000 by now.

techteach004• 2 months ago

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.

dgellow4• 2 months ago

But you knew exactly what you were buying. It’s not hidden to you that an internet connection is required when you buy the game. Game developers are generally pretty terrible and do a lot of really shady things to extract value from their players. But that one isn’t one. The terms are clearly stated before your purchase

rileymat23• 2 months ago

I’d debate that there are “clearly stated terms” when the result is completely unpredictable, will it work for 10 years or 3 hours? Reading the terms you have no idea.

The original sin is selling a product that has an ongoing cost for a fixed price without creating an ongoing trust to pay those costs. Imagine I had a gas station that sold all you can use gasoline for a car for 4k. Then I sell a bunch of memberships and pay myself then go bankrupt. That’s straight up fraud.

techteach004• 2 months ago

If the TOS said the game would be destroyed in 5 years I would not have made the purchase. You're making my point. Why didn't the TOS tell me the plan?

rgoulter2• 2 months ago

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.

I suspect this is the same as IO Interactive's "Hitman: World of Assassination".

99% of the game is single player. The game allows you to unlock additional things in the game (different starting locations in a level, more equipment).

But, if you play the game offline, all of that progression is completely blocked off.

I guess what happened is the progression ties to the saving, which is heavily coupled to online syncing. And so the logic is like `if (offline) { useSafeMode() }`. But it's so lame.

account4259• 2 months ago

In some cases the online dependence is purely business decision to be able to sell you "micro" transactions.

techteach004• 2 months ago

Can any smart hackers crack this so I can play career mode again lol? Please?

varenc• 2 months ago

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.

Akronymus12• 2 months ago

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.

okanat4• 2 months ago

Yes. However gamers are not businesses who operate on cost minimization (especially employee cost minimization) that made SaaS possible. The existing purely subscription games do not have the same amount of customers/players as the ones do not admit that.

So openly admitting that your game is a subscription will be quite bad marketing for your company.

braiamp8• 2 months ago

That's a lie. Consumers buy a copy of the product. There's a bunch of legal fundamentals that make it so. Contracts that give one side a complete control of someone else are rarely (if ever) legal. If it were, then people could be pressured to give away their fundamental rights, one of which is the right to property.

account4259• 2 months ago

They can try but there is a reason why they are selling what is effectively already a subscription for an unspecified length as a purchase - because the market mostly does not want subscriptions.

codazoda• 2 months ago

Looks like it will just push game publishers to a subscription model.

tyleo14• 2 months ago

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 other business models like ads, free-to-play, or subscription.

steelbrain• 2 months ago

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.

tyleo14• 2 months ago

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.

lbrandy• 2 months ago

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.

pointlessone2• 2 months ago

What are the insurmountable obstacles to releasing the server code for the community to run?

tyleo14• 2 months ago

As I understand it, the obstacles are mostly legal. Our development team would love to just throw the code on GitHub.

Thaxll2• 2 months ago

Do you think any compagny would want to release some very sensitive / secret sauce code?

GloriousKoji• 2 months ago

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.

rileymat23• 2 months ago

That’s an honest business model, absent in game purchases or user generated content.

luxuryballs2• 2 months ago

This makes the Minecraft model look all that much better than it already was, users pay for an account, the servers are self hosted by the community, as far as I can tell on the surface level Minecraft would already comply with this legislation.

Akronymus12• 2 months ago

Not quite, afaict. When the auth servers are shut down, you wouldnt be able to play it anymore, even in single player.

JacobKfromIRC4• 2 months ago

Does Minecraft's offline mode not work indefinitely? I'm not familiar with the official launcher but this article [1] doesn't say anything about needing to reconnect occasionally.

[1] https://www.practical-tips.com/games/play-minecraft-offline-...

ben0x539• 2 months ago

I imagine people will immediately patch out the auth requirement once the auth servers go away for good.

aero_code• 2 months ago

In addition to the sibling comment, even Minecraft server has an "online-mode" setting, and if it's set to false, it doesn't authenticate players. Whenever my family has played on LAN, we've never used any auth servers (which is clear because we don't give Minecraft any credentials). The setting only applies to LAN players, but that should be easy enough to work around with a VPN or something.

luxuryballs2• 2 months ago

the auth servers aren’t a meaningful blocker in terms of technical debt imo

okdood64• 2 months ago

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?

bdcravens• 2 months ago

Seems to me like this will incentivize upgrades in a game being very limited time, tied to an event or season (though many games already do this)

ChoGGi• 2 months ago

Look, patches would be nice. I don't want a refund, I want to continue playing the game.

What I'd prefer is modders not getting sued when they try to implement the online aspect for free, heck or paid at that stage.

If the game is popular enough, the community tends to take care of it. Maybe some legal form of officially abandoning the game?

account4259• 2 months ago

Having the refund there is important as an anchor for determining the damages if a company refuses to comply. It's not a sustainable option for companies to rely on and that's by design.

thayne2• 2 months ago

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

Well, I predict we'll start seeing more games offered "solely for the duration of a subscription". And also games spun out into their own subsidiary that will just go bankrupt and not comply.

tyleo14• 2 months ago

Subsidiary is what I was thinking too. Imagine you were just some indie dev freelancing and all of a sudden you have a big shutdown bill.

vasachi• 2 months ago

You wouldn’t get one if you followed the law and released the server.

LightHugger6• 2 months ago

the idea of a "shutdown bill" is absurd and irrelevant to the law being discussed unless you are a scammer being forced to refund people.

pavlus2• 2 months ago

If it's a subsidiary - they can't capitalize on the big name in marketing. If it's a subscription - they don't get the "buy now, play never" customers from Steam. I think it will be a win regardless.

aeternum• 2 months ago

California is really trying to become Europe with regulation as their primary GDP.

account4259• 2 months ago

IKR how dare they care about the rights of their citizens. Outrageous!

Our_Benefactors• 2 months ago

This is some remnant of the stop killing games initiative no doubt. Bad for the industry as a whole, and piratesoftware didn’t deserve to be dragged for being against it, in spite of his other flaws.

LightHugger6• 2 months ago

He was dragged for persistently lying about it, doing everything in his power to shut down discussion of it, and being absurdly hostile on a personal level to the founder of the initiative unprovoked. Not for being against it.

ETH_start• 2 months ago

Laws like this superficially seem good because it's not nice when online games shut down without a patch but they have the harmful effect of eliminating the long tail of — you could say — low quality offerings, that don't offer these features

It's better to have more offerings on the market, even low quality ones, than fewer. Limiting the low quality offerings does not result in high quality ones naturally emerging to substitute them. It just leads to fewer offerings.

There are two things I think that low quality offerings are good at doing. First, they're good at experimenting with new features. If it's very cheap to try a new feature, because the cost of deploying a new game is quite low and you're basically pumping out a bunch of marginally valuable games, then new features get iterated on more quickly. That eventually flows back up to the better quality games. The second benefit is that it meets some niche needs, where a certain player wants something that's very unusual or otherwise non-existent on the market. And this 5x9 half-baked game provides it. Again, it's very few people who want this feature, but there are a huge number of features like that. It's a very long tail.

I moderate an online community and we introduced democratic rulemaking and people kept proposing and then voting in rules to restrict this or that kind of post because it was low quality or distracted people or whatever and eventually the forum became so much less usable because of the cumulative effect of all these small restrictions. That effect of making the forum less usable was most pronounced on newcomers, who didn't know all the rules and basically couldn't break in because of the barrier to understanding how to generate content that complied with the morass of restrictions.

jmyeet• 2 months ago

My principles on this are:

1. If a game no longer works then the publisher loses copyright protections. This would often apply to online-only games. There are other games that are a mix of online and offline play that should be treated slightly differently;

2. If the hardware to run a game is no longer sold (eg legacy consoles), then there should be copyright protections for anyone making emulators to make the game work;

3. After a certain period of the underlying hardware and game not being sold, the game itself loses copyright protections. Say... 5 years? Maybe even less;

4. Loss of any online services sold with a game should mean that there is no copyright claim against third-parties making their own servers.

Making a game server isn't necessarily that hard. Forcing companies to open source their servers is problematic and may not even be possible if, say, the studio shuts down. Gamers are a resourceful lot however. I mean, just look at emulators. They can make their own servers if they need them. Just make the law indemnify them against copyright claims if the studio/publisher has switched off those online services and the problem will largely take care of itself.

The rest is just treating games like orphan works. There was a time when identifying a copyright holder was hard and extending copyright had to be actively done or it just expired. If they abandon a game this way, they should effectively just lose copyright (IMHO).

I expect this to be somewhat of a forcing function. If a studio really wants to maintain copyright to a game they no longer sell for a console that nobody makes anymore, then porting it to Steam and continuing to sell it is their path to maintaining copyright. And that should make it playable still.

speedylight• 2 months ago

I love California for these laws because even though their jurisdiction is technically limited, it makes no sense for the companies to not make the changes available nation wide.

motoxpro2• 2 months ago

its such a bummer that because of laws like this, less games will be made. Most games dont ever make money and dont succeed.

The alternative to companies shutting games down without supporting them is not them supporting them, it is them not making them in the first place or making them very expensive (price, ads, pay to play, etc.).

The customer now has to pay a tax becasue of the cost this puts on game makers. This is not good :(

LightHugger6• 2 months ago

this is absurd and untrue. this is like being told you have to pour a concrete pillar 2 meters to the left of where you were planning so that you're not destroying some vital infrastructure, then bemoaning the loss of the concrete pillar industry.

Stop building games to self destruct. Once you fix your bad practices (which, you should not have been doing to begin with, pay for them once with some retooling and moving forward you don't need to pay more, then get some ethics and you will incur fewer costs like this going forward) there is no ongoing cost here.

account4259• 2 months ago

This law doesn't even affect most games at all, only those with a live service component - and for those what the proposed law asks is far from unreasonable.

If a game can't exist without scamming the players then perhaps it shouldn't exist so that more honest developers can get those players.

SilentM68• 2 months ago

In the case of companies or individuals that have no money, employees or assets left, how can they possibly issue refunds? It seems bill is eliminating/forcing out the little guy in favor of the more established, wealthier competitors. California laws and their legislators keep on getting stricter and weirder.

Thank you for letting me in! Sol Roth PS: Hope you like the décor. I’m redecorating your thoughts permanently.

throwaway274482• 2 months ago

Games?! can we also include infrastructure-critical software

idorosen• 2 months ago

This bill would likely cause game studios to release games exclusively via subscription plans as an unintended consequence.

dalmo3• 2 months ago

It's so blatant that it's hard to call it unintended.

weregiraffe• 2 months ago

Nah, nobody will buy games with subscription plans.

account4259• 2 months ago

No, it would at worst get companies how are currently selling a subscription of unspecified length as a "purchase" to be more honest.

christkv• 2 months ago

I guess they will organize these games as separate companies now and let them go bankrupt instead?

gib444• 2 months ago

The classic 'it's sold as pro-consumer legislation therefore it must be good' we in Europe are very, very used to.

Commiserations, California (and likely the rest of the US) - all your games will now be subscriptions.

auggierose2• 2 months ago

If this law comes, why would games not just go full-subscription and circumvent this?

account4259• 2 months ago

The games affected by this are already effectively a limited time subscription but just don't tell the players beforehand.

petterroea2• 2 months ago

One thing i think is missing from this discussion is that the problem is larger than just games, and I wish legislation was wider. It's good that games are used as an example and flag bearer due to wide appeal, but what about other software that requires online services, like the old programs that talk to activation servers?

Akronymus12• 2 months ago

those movements can use gaming as a precedent to push foe their own legislation, at least.

petterroea2• 2 months ago

Definitely, it's not a waste of time.

archargelod• 2 months ago

I believe Ross Scott from Stop Killing Games have talked about this in one of his videos. Essentially, if they try to fight for online-required software or against subscription model in general - all software companies will fight against it. That's just too ambitious and has way less chances to succeed.

pavlus2• 2 months ago

I think it's the right moment to acknowledge that Epic Games handled discontinuation of Unreal series well and responsibly [0] and how standalone servers were good for community.

* When GameSpy announced shutdown, patches were released to use Epic released the "post-GameSpy" patch, replacing the GameSpy servers with Epic's master servers for Unreal Tournament 3 [1] * Older Unreal series games later were transferred for maintenance to OldUnreal [2], and also made free.

At the same time, they are not open source, nor source available. So, there is an entity, that owns the code and maintains it, without the hassle of opensourcing it.

This is because the series have a strong community, which was in large part formed because the standalone servers, prior to algorithmic matchmaking, allowed people to gather there and learn to be social to each other and learn gaming etiquette. You had to play strategies for repeated games and be civil to others. Modern matchmaking strips us of that - you play with others once and go separate ways, so you don't have to deal with consequences and can use one-time game strategies, which leads to poor behavior and less enjoyment. Yes, you had players of drastically different skill levels on the same servers, and that was a good thing. Skilled players could teach newbies, newbies could learn the gaming etiquette and see what's possible, instead of boiling in the same pot with others playing completely different games than on the other skill levels. You had the core game and the social game on top of it, now we are all alone in our rooms interacting with strangers we will never see or play again with nor against.

Maybe Epic is not the best or the most loved company (compared to Valve) but I respect, that they understood that "this cow has gave us enough milk already", and could part ways with it, leaving existing community satisfied.

[0] https://www.epicgames.com/unrealtournament

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/13210/view/291772582...

[2] https://oldunreal.com/

kgwxd2• 2 months ago

"Think of the consumer!". Blatant government overreach is so hot right now.

Figs• 2 months ago

I appreciate the sentiment, but this law looks counter-productive if I'm reading it right. This is OBVIOUSLY going to push companies to make games into a subscription service to bypass the law even if they wouldn't have normally:

(b) This section does not apply to any of the following:
(1) Any subscription-based service that advertises or offers for sale access to any digital game solely for the duration of the subscription.

This exemption NEEDS to be removed. If a game's official servers are taken down, the community needs to be given the ability to keep running it themselves. Full stop. No exceptions.

account4259• 2 months ago

Games that the the company is allowed to kill whenever they want already are a subscription. Forcing companies to be upfront about that when they are not willing to provide the claimed deal is not counter-productive.

pipes• 2 months ago

To me it seems a bit childish to demand that some business must provide me with exactly what I want forever because at one point I paid for their service.

casey2• 2 months ago

Everyone wants a forever game. This is the 21st century equivalent of the 19th century gushers. The massive wave of dead game we see is the equivalent of P&A (Plug and Abandonment) practices of early drillers.

Don't expect the community to pick up the tab on your losses. If your game dies, give it a proper burial, don't just let it's carcass rot in the cultural stream.

Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California

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