> 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.
It's not meaningless feel-good legislation, it's actively harmful by disincentivizing a bad thing, in favor of an even worse thing. See also car fuel economy standards that push car makers into killing the wagon market segment in favor of SUVs.
> However, it excludes games provided via subscription services, free-to-play games, and games that are inherently playable offline indefinitely.
Live service games overwhelmingly fall into exactly this category. If anything they're being incentivized over making a game that has an online multiplayer but focus being singleplayer or anything intended to be released and moved on from.
The industry already tried to make everything a live service game in the 2020-2022 period and it was financially disastrous because gamers rejected it.
Gamers have made it clear that they don't want a market full of live service games unless they are free to play (and even then, very few will survive).
They'll make rare exceptions for things like GTA6, but these will be unicorns.
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).
Subscription only games get way less revenue than pay once for the most part. So I don't think moving to subscriptions isn't gonna be as attractive to publishers as you think.
Also, with a subscription the customer has VERY different expectations, compared to a one time purchase. As in, they expect the access to go away once they no longer pay.
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.)
It seems similar to operating an arcade or a movie theater and saying that you can have thousands of people enter but then only having space for a couple while still taking everyone's money.
After about 2010 companies stopped providing the server binary. Games like Modern Warfare 2, Battlefield 2, etc could be played by communities in perpetuity on private servers. If the next game (MW3, BF3) were terrible, you didn't have to buy the sequel, what you had was "good enough" and you could wait for the next version to be released in 2-3 years.
With the current "closed server" model, you can't get a copy of the server code, can't host truly private servers, and when the sequel MW4, BF4 comes out, those private servers won't survive and it forces everyone to move to the sequel regardless of the quality of the game. You can technically still hire a private server for games like BF3 (circa 2012) but very few people are going to pay the $70/month to host an official one via whatever terms EA has come up with, and you absolutely can't run it with plugins, mods, and especially custom maps or game modes, you have to play it "vanilla".
Quake 3 the server is included with the game, anyone can run it, modify it and it's very plugin friendly, which is largely why it is still around today. Closed servers you can't directly access is a deliberate decision to kill the game when the sequel is released, by not allowing users to extend what they "bought". Otherwise we would still all be playing Battlefield 3 on custom maps with CTF and 128 v 128 player servers and everything else. You can modify a handful of things on the paid private servers but it's extremely limited and there's no community feedback on any of this.
>> It also prohibits the continued sale or distribution of games that have become unusable due to service termination.
Does anyone know how this should be interpreted?
Maybe to have a concrete example, let's take Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 (RCT2), with OpenRCT2 as a sort-of mod for it, but imagine that RCT2 was originally a subscription game where you paid per month to play it and that it terminated before OpenRCT2 started. Existing copyright laws already prohibit continued distribution, which OpenRCT2 doesn't do, so does this change anything? Does this law move what used to be civil (copyright) cases into criminal law (so there needs not exist a rights-holder to file suit; the state can just push cases as they see fit)? Could the OpenRCT2 devs still (as I believe they hitherto can) release a 'donation version' with bonus gimmicks if they so wanted, or would that be classified as a sale of something that enables playing the original RCT2 and so illegal?
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 assume you're actually a gamer, and not just an economist speculating on a market you're not exposed to? Because I don't know how to reconcile your comment with my reality. There are tons of live-service single-purchase games, I would even say they the overwhelmingly default model in 2026 compared to WoW-style subscription games.
If you want an answer to your "continuous cost without continuous revenue" riddle, the answer is in-game purchases, DLC, attracting new accounts over time, and the unspoken unadvertised promise "we can cut our losses at any time and shut down servers." This lattermost incentive is what is unhealthy for the market and what should be regulated to no longer be an incentive.
There are a bunch of these, and they are silly/unviable. I see a lot more free-to-play than single-purchase live service games, but the latter is a fun additional exploit in that they get you to pay up front for something that they never have any intention to survive long-term.
Currently I'm heavily playing both a free-to-play with microtransactions title (Heroes of the Storm) and a subscription title (EVE Online), both of which are live service games which would be exempt from this bill by definition, but are both games I would meaningfully like to play even if the companies decided they didn't want to run them anymore. (Yes, I'm aware both games I am playing regularly are old as time itself.)
Meanwhile, yes, there are single purchase games with an online model, and they fail and get shut down because they were never sustainable to begin with. The bill would arguably cover something like the FPS-of-the-years which are intended to grab everyone's attention for a few months and then die off when the company needs you to buy the next version of the title because they get no recurring revenue from you continuing to play the current one. (See Call of Duty, Battlefield, etc.)
> Currently I'm heavily playing both a free-to-play with microtransactions title (Heroes of the Storm) and a subscription title (EVE Online), both of which are live service games which would be exempt from this bill by definition, but are both games I would meaningfully like to play even if the companies decided they didn't want to run them anymore. (Yes, I'm aware both games I am playing regularly are old as time itself.)
[emphasis mine]
AFAICT, the MTX would make HOTS not be eligible for the "no monetary considerations" carveout.
Edit, didn't realize you were the same person I replied to on another comment, sorry for repeating myself.
> That's... an incredibly narrow law, that only covers a class of games which are particularly stupid by design. (Continuous cost without continuous revenue.)
Eh, it sounds unintuitive, but in practice it's extremely common. Almost every first-person shooter (well, you could really expand that to "almost every competitive multiplayer game") made by major studios is either a one-time purchase or entirely free. The ongoing revenue comes from cosmetics and other in-game goodies.
This sort of economy makes sense when you consider consoles (especially back in the day), where it's easy to get people to buy a disc but hard to get people to sign up for a subscription.
This is really about Ubisoft's The Crew, a one-time-paid mostly-singleplayer car race game about infights and revenges in an illegal street racing group, that required Internet connection, which server got shut down. So yeah.
The required connection and authentication was likely an anti-piracy measure, so kind of doubly yeah.
> > (2) Any digital game that is advertised or offered to a person for no monetary consideration.
I'd argue buying any form of MTX creates a monetary consideration. Though, I guess it is kind of a gray area that's gonna have to be ruled on.
> This solely refers to the game being available for free, not for any additional powerups or cosmetics being available for free.
I didn't intend to mean additional stuff being free. I meant additional stuff you can buy, resulting in the no monetary considerations carveout not applying.
These laws just complicate things, make it more expensive to run a game company and these government people don't get it. This will just result in making it more expensive to make games and keep them running. On top of that, it incentivises subscription based games.
> '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.'
The only winners are lawyers. NOT gamers. The lawyers always like to call their laws "protect X" lol
Disagree. I can see the challenges for games that are really only meant to be played on a centralized server, but what about games that need to connect to a server just to play locally? Demanding consumers be able to do that is not making things particularly hard on the company.
We need to culturally accept things like "zero day law patches" for loopholes and unintended consequences. Legislators, don't just pass a law, see it incentivizing something unintended, and then throw up your hands crying "Well, we tried!" Patch the law as soon as the bad behavior starts!
I mentioned this in a separate thread. It seems like a huge risk to release an online game if you don't do this now. A single bad game can take down a studio. Now there's even more risk because a previously successful game may come with a big bill in the future if you have to do refunds or some late architecture change when you instead want to take a product down to save money.
Well, no. Just like other purpose-built vehicles (like the ones for motion picture productions), they will transfer rights to other entities before shutting down.
right, but what are you going to do? Have strong regulations for anonymous, criminal, businesses which operate as a shadow political class that can multiply at whim and influence global governance?
I’ve thought about how to introduce a bill and find sponsors for extending first sale and related rights to digital goods. I understand the current terms and licensing, but we’ve lost too much to non-transferable contracts and millennials and later will likely have no books, music, or games that can be inherited by their children. It’s crazy that after thousands of years of sharing copies of writings, hundreds of years of sharing recordings, and decades of sharing games, we’re going to give it all up because it’s a license now.
The problem is, where to even start? I would think EFF would be spearheading something like this, but I haven’t come across anything. There have been attempts in the past, but they don’t seem to have ongoing support.
Releasing server-side code would be a non-starter for lots of companies. For one, many of them don't actually own all of the code they use to implement the game server. There's lots of proprietary middleware in use in online games.
Perhaps a workaround is to just have 1 server online indefinitely. Technically the online services are still functional - the match queue times would just be very, very large.
> There's lots of proprietary middleware in use in online games
If bills like this pass, there'd be financial pressure on middleware providers to allow distribution at end-of-life (or for their component to be easily severed) else they'd lose out on all customers selling games in California/EU/etc.
It looks less like a ban on killing games, and more like a road-map for how publishers could change products/marketing/T&Cs to avoid flak and liability.
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 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.
> now you are also compelling the individual or business to do additional (presumably unpaid) work
This is not unpaid work as they had already received payment at the time of purchase of the game. They should take into account the cost associated with this work at the time of sale.
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
> 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.
While AI isn't particularly good with obfuscated code, it is true that code obfuscation in most old games can be removed relatively easily. The attack and defense state-of-the-art has moved on from those days.
No, the reasonable compromise should be that the game remains playable, how that is achieved is up to the dev. Some will release the binaries, some make the spec open to the public for people to implement their own, some will patch out the online requirement, etc...
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.
> It can be a mess of a system that relies on all kinds of services
Nowadays, this is much less of a "can" and more of a "definitely is" :(
Based on what I see as (non-game) security consultant in terms of service complexity, what modern FOSS projects consider a normal container constellation, and on what I see from at least one indie dev whom I personally know. It has been a topic I've brought up since he put so many hours into it and the game is fun and the binary doesn't even run if you don't have a compatible Google Play Services version, much less the various back-ends that it connects to for accounts, levels, level thumbnails, matchmaking, etc. until you even get to the real-time multiplayer server
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. Thanks to government forced speech we have more freedom/rights and better lives.
That’s not a Carte Blanche that forbids the government from everything.
The government can compel speech from 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.
Welp, better get rid of all nutritional facts, allergy warnings, medical side effect notices and all the other signage mandated by government for your safety.
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.
As someone in the movement since basically the beginning, this bill is enough in a lot of areas.
Subscription games already always had a "no pay, no play" expectation, so I don't see any problem with that carveout. The only real problem I can see is that in-game purchases in free to play games are not additionally explicitly named. (Though, "no monetary considerations" shouldn't include ftp + mtx)
Also, most gamepass games are available for purchase as well, so I don't see the problem there either, except the possibility that a game is removed from gamepass so you lose access despite paying, but that's something for the courts to figure out.
You should be able to sell something and then take it away when you're tired of it.
Would you feel the same if your phone permanently bricked itself because the vendor decided it was out of date and they just don't feel like supporting it anymore?
If you sell a product for money, you don't have the right to take that product away and keep the money.
Well, they're not selling you the game. They're licensing you the ability to play their game.
And yes, I think it should be legal for a hardware product (like Spotify's "Car Thing" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_Thing) to stop working because they don't want to support the online component. It's fine to get mad at the company, but I think it should be legal to do.
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.
Why would you be entitled to infinite support? For a game with an online component? Why does the game's purchase price extend to infinity instead of "for as long as the developer supports the game"?
You aren't entitled to infinite support. You are entitled to keep using the thing you paid money for. If the publisher can't support the online service, they're obliged to make the game still playable by either releasing server code or offline modes.
If you sell a product for money, you don't then get to later take the product away and keep the money.
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.
It's not meaningless feel-good legislation, it's actively harmful by disincentivizing a bad thing, in favor of an even worse thing. See also car fuel economy standards that push car makers into killing the wagon market segment in favor of SUVs.
What will the negative impact of this law be, exactly? Hurting live service games which are already cancer?
> However, it excludes games provided via subscription services, free-to-play games, and games that are inherently playable offline indefinitely.
Live service games overwhelmingly fall into exactly this category. If anything they're being incentivized over making a game that has an online multiplayer but focus being singleplayer or anything intended to be released and moved on from.
It incentivizes subscription-based games.
No it will make everything a live service game
Good luck with that.
The industry already tried to make everything a live service game in the 2020-2022 period and it was financially disastrous because gamers rejected it.
Gamers have made it clear that they don't want a market full of live service games unless they are free to play (and even then, very few will survive).
They'll make rare exceptions for things like GTA6, but these will be unicorns.
> See also car fuel economy standards that push car makers into killing the wagon market segment in favor of SUVs.
by the way, why wasn't this bug fixed long ago?
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).
Subscription only games get way less revenue than pay once for the most part. So I don't think moving to subscriptions isn't gonna be as attractive to publishers as you think.
Also, with a subscription the customer has VERY different expectations, compared to a one time purchase. As in, they expect the access to go away once they no longer pay.
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.)
It seems similar to operating an arcade or a movie theater and saying that you can have thousands of people enter but then only having space for a couple while still taking everyone's money.
Why is this a problem? Quake 3 came out a quarter century ago, yet there are still community host servers available
After about 2010 companies stopped providing the server binary. Games like Modern Warfare 2, Battlefield 2, etc could be played by communities in perpetuity on private servers. If the next game (MW3, BF3) were terrible, you didn't have to buy the sequel, what you had was "good enough" and you could wait for the next version to be released in 2-3 years.
With the current "closed server" model, you can't get a copy of the server code, can't host truly private servers, and when the sequel MW4, BF4 comes out, those private servers won't survive and it forces everyone to move to the sequel regardless of the quality of the game. You can technically still hire a private server for games like BF3 (circa 2012) but very few people are going to pay the $70/month to host an official one via whatever terms EA has come up with, and you absolutely can't run it with plugins, mods, and especially custom maps or game modes, you have to play it "vanilla".
Quake 3 the server is included with the game, anyone can run it, modify it and it's very plugin friendly, which is largely why it is still around today. Closed servers you can't directly access is a deliberate decision to kill the game when the sequel is released, by not allowing users to extend what they "bought". Otherwise we would still all be playing Battlefield 3 on custom maps with CTF and 128 v 128 player servers and everything else. You can modify a handful of things on the paid private servers but it's extremely limited and there's no community feedback on any of this.
Quake 3 can also be played fully offline, for various measures of "play" and "fully".
Why not $0?
$1 refundable subscription
>> It also prohibits the continued sale or distribution of games that have become unusable due to service termination.
Does anyone know how this should be interpreted?
Maybe to have a concrete example, let's take Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 (RCT2), with OpenRCT2 as a sort-of mod for it, but imagine that RCT2 was originally a subscription game where you paid per month to play it and that it terminated before OpenRCT2 started. Existing copyright laws already prohibit continued distribution, which OpenRCT2 doesn't do, so does this change anything? Does this law move what used to be civil (copyright) cases into criminal law (so there needs not exist a rights-holder to file suit; the state can just push cases as they see fit)? Could the OpenRCT2 devs still (as I believe they hitherto can) release a 'donation version' with bonus gimmicks if they so wanted, or would that be classified as a sale of something that enables playing the original RCT2 and so illegal?
Of course its an incentive, however the disincentives to purchasing (subscribing/spending), and thus producing, such games still exist.
incentive towards making more games qualify for those exceptions
Yes, please, produce more "games that are inherently playable offline indefinitely".
> However, it excludes games provided via subscription services, free-to-play games, and games that are inherently playable offline indefinitely.
How is that incentivizing offline games? Half of the service game focused industry would be exempt
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 assume you're actually a gamer, and not just an economist speculating on a market you're not exposed to? Because I don't know how to reconcile your comment with my reality. There are tons of live-service single-purchase games, I would even say they the overwhelmingly default model in 2026 compared to WoW-style subscription games.
If you want an answer to your "continuous cost without continuous revenue" riddle, the answer is in-game purchases, DLC, attracting new accounts over time, and the unspoken unadvertised promise "we can cut our losses at any time and shut down servers." This lattermost incentive is what is unhealthy for the market and what should be regulated to no longer be an incentive.
See Diablo 4. One time purchase, live service game. I'm almost certain blizzard makes most of its revenue from it on the cosmetics shop.
also pretty much all first person shooters are in this category
There are a bunch of these, and they are silly/unviable. I see a lot more free-to-play than single-purchase live service games, but the latter is a fun additional exploit in that they get you to pay up front for something that they never have any intention to survive long-term.
Currently I'm heavily playing both a free-to-play with microtransactions title (Heroes of the Storm) and a subscription title (EVE Online), both of which are live service games which would be exempt from this bill by definition, but are both games I would meaningfully like to play even if the companies decided they didn't want to run them anymore. (Yes, I'm aware both games I am playing regularly are old as time itself.)
Meanwhile, yes, there are single purchase games with an online model, and they fail and get shut down because they were never sustainable to begin with. The bill would arguably cover something like the FPS-of-the-years which are intended to grab everyone's attention for a few months and then die off when the company needs you to buy the next version of the title because they get no recurring revenue from you continuing to play the current one. (See Call of Duty, Battlefield, etc.)
> Currently I'm heavily playing both a free-to-play with microtransactions title (Heroes of the Storm) and a subscription title (EVE Online), both of which are live service games which would be exempt from this bill by definition, but are both games I would meaningfully like to play even if the companies decided they didn't want to run them anymore. (Yes, I'm aware both games I am playing regularly are old as time itself.)
[emphasis mine]
AFAICT, the MTX would make HOTS not be eligible for the "no monetary considerations" carveout.
Edit, didn't realize you were the same person I replied to on another comment, sorry for repeating myself.
No worries, I disagree with your read on the text of the bill there, but I can appreciate there being reason for debate. ;)
I can absolutely see how you came to your interpretation. Thanks for being so cordial.
This definitely has to be ruled on to know one way or another for sure.
> That's... an incredibly narrow law, that only covers a class of games which are particularly stupid by design. (Continuous cost without continuous revenue.)
Eh, it sounds unintuitive, but in practice it's extremely common. Almost every first-person shooter (well, you could really expand that to "almost every competitive multiplayer game") made by major studios is either a one-time purchase or entirely free. The ongoing revenue comes from cosmetics and other in-game goodies.
This sort of economy makes sense when you consider consoles (especially back in the day), where it's easy to get people to buy a disc but hard to get people to sign up for a subscription.
This is really about Ubisoft's The Crew, a one-time-paid mostly-singleplayer car race game about infights and revenges in an illegal street racing group, that required Internet connection, which server got shut down. So yeah.
The required connection and authentication was likely an anti-piracy measure, so kind of doubly yeah.
> 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.
I don't read it that way. "Free-to-play" games generally include games with microtransactions, and the bill text does nothing to disagree with that:
> (b) This section does not apply to any of the following:
> (2) Any digital game that is advertised or offered to a person for no monetary consideration.
This solely refers to the game being available for free, not for any additional powerups or cosmetics being available for free.
> > (2) Any digital game that is advertised or offered to a person for no monetary consideration.
I'd argue buying any form of MTX creates a monetary consideration. Though, I guess it is kind of a gray area that's gonna have to be ruled on.
> This solely refers to the game being available for free, not for any additional powerups or cosmetics being available for free.
I didn't intend to mean additional stuff being free. I meant additional stuff you can buy, resulting in the no monetary considerations carveout not applying.
We shall call it the Diablo 4 law.
Don’t a bunch of shooters also follow this model?
They are going to do what movie industry is already doing: create shell company for release of each game.
Then they will shut down the company when they want, and there will be nobody to come for.
These laws just complicate things, make it more expensive to run a game company and these government people don't get it. This will just result in making it more expensive to make games and keep them running. On top of that, it incentivises subscription based games.
> '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.'
The only winners are lawyers. NOT gamers. The lawyers always like to call their laws "protect X" lol
Disagree. I can see the challenges for games that are really only meant to be played on a centralized server, but what about games that need to connect to a server just to play locally? Demanding consumers be able to do that is not making things particularly hard on the company.
So, CA should get rid of those loopholes, too!
We need to culturally accept things like "zero day law patches" for loopholes and unintended consequences. Legislators, don't just pass a law, see it incentivizing something unintended, and then throw up your hands crying "Well, we tried!" Patch the law as soon as the bad behavior starts!
I mentioned this in a separate thread. It seems like a huge risk to release an online game if you don't do this now. A single bad game can take down a studio. Now there's even more risk because a previously successful game may come with a big bill in the future if you have to do refunds or some late architecture change when you instead want to take a product down to save money.
Perhaps they should just write games in a way where they can actually release server code when they it shuts down?
Perhaps "they" can write games however they want? If you don't like it, don't do business with them?
This is a weird thing to be legislating on.
So nobody to come after you for copyright violation if you run a community-patched (a.k.a. cracked) version of the game?
Well, no. Just like other purpose-built vehicles (like the ones for motion picture productions), they will transfer rights to other entities before shutting down.
How is something like that not considered when a law like that is passed?
right, but what are you going to do? Have strong regulations for anonymous, criminal, businesses which operate as a shadow political class that can multiply at whim and influence global governance?
Yah, right!
I’ve thought about how to introduce a bill and find sponsors for extending first sale and related rights to digital goods. I understand the current terms and licensing, but we’ve lost too much to non-transferable contracts and millennials and later will likely have no books, music, or games that can be inherited by their children. It’s crazy that after thousands of years of sharing copies of writings, hundreds of years of sharing recordings, and decades of sharing games, we’re going to give it all up because it’s a license now.
The problem is, where to even start? I would think EFF would be spearheading something like this, but I haven’t come across anything. There have been attempts in the past, but they don’t seem to have ongoing support.
Releasing server-side code would be a non-starter for lots of companies. For one, many of them don't actually own all of the code they use to implement the game server. There's lots of proprietary middleware in use in online games.
Perhaps a workaround is to just have 1 server online indefinitely. Technically the online services are still functional - the match queue times would just be very, very large.
> There's lots of proprietary middleware in use in online games
If bills like this pass, there'd be financial pressure on middleware providers to allow distribution at end-of-life (or for their component to be easily severed) else they'd lose out on all customers selling games in California/EU/etc.
Release a spec. Release a binary distribution. I’m sure they could find a way to make it happen if it was in the studios’ interest.
It looks less like a ban on killing games, and more like a road-map for how publishers could change products/marketing/T&Cs to avoid flak and liability.
(Not an ideal source btw: "This article was originally written in Korean and translated with the help of NC AI." The Bill is tiny can be read at https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm... )
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 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.
> now you are also compelling the individual or business to do additional (presumably unpaid) work
This is not unpaid work as they had already received payment at the time of purchase of the game. They should take into account the cost associated with this work at the time of sale.
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
> 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...
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
> Or even information that they are contractually forbidden from releasing.
Laws trump contracts.
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.
While AI isn't particularly good with obfuscated code, it is true that code obfuscation in most old games can be removed relatively easily. The attack and defense state-of-the-art has moved on from those days.
No, the reasonable compromise should be that the game remains playable, how that is achieved is up to the dev. Some will release the binaries, some make the spec open to the public for people to implement their own, some will patch out the online requirement, etc...
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 developers may not have licenses for all the components of the server-side code. Lots of proprietary middleware is in use in online games.
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.
> It can be a mess of a system that relies on all kinds of services
Nowadays, this is much less of a "can" and more of a "definitely is" :(
Based on what I see as (non-game) security consultant in terms of service complexity, what modern FOSS projects consider a normal container constellation, and on what I see from at least one indie dev whom I personally know. It has been a topic I've brought up since he put so many hours into it and the game is fun and the binary doesn't even run if you don't have a compatible Google Play Services version, much less the various back-ends that it connects to for accounts, levels, level thumbnails, matchmaking, etc. until you even get to the real-time multiplayer server
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. Thanks to government forced speech we have more freedom/rights and better lives.
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 from 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.
Welp, better get rid of all nutritional facts, allergy warnings, medical side effect notices and all the other signage mandated by government for your safety.
Except shutting down a game is not fraud.
So just make every game free to play and then require a paying to unlock the actual game.
As ever it will come down to judicial discretion whether trivial word games are allowed to nullify the law or not.
That'd IMO count as a monetary consideration, and thus not be excempt.
I wonder if making the game free to play before shut down would allow them to skirt the law?
I doubt it, as that'd not nullify the contract established by people who bought the game before it went FTP.
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.
As someone in the movement since basically the beginning, this bill is enough in a lot of areas.
Subscription games already always had a "no pay, no play" expectation, so I don't see any problem with that carveout. The only real problem I can see is that in-game purchases in free to play games are not additionally explicitly named. (Though, "no monetary considerations" shouldn't include ftp + mtx)
Also, most gamepass games are available for purchase as well, so I don't see the problem there either, except the possibility that a game is removed from gamepass so you lose access despite paying, but that's something for the courts to figure out.
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.
This is such a terrible solution to a literal non-problem.
You should be able to make software that has a limited lifespan if you want. I just think that's fine. Games should not be special.
Then communicate that lifespan front and center. One game I can think of that did that, afair, was "the cube" from peter molyneux.
You should be able to sell something and then take it away when you're tired of it.
Would you feel the same if your phone permanently bricked itself because the vendor decided it was out of date and they just don't feel like supporting it anymore?
If you sell a product for money, you don't have the right to take that product away and keep the money.
Well, they're not selling you the game. They're licensing you the ability to play their game.
And yes, I think it should be legal for a hardware product (like Spotify's "Car Thing" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_Thing) to stop working because they don't want to support the online component. It's fine to get mad at the company, but I think it should be legal to do.
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.
Why would you be entitled to infinite support? For a game with an online component? Why does the game's purchase price extend to infinity instead of "for as long as the developer supports the game"?
You aren't entitled to infinite support. You are entitled to keep using the thing you paid money for. If the publisher can't support the online service, they're obliged to make the game still playable by either releasing server code or offline modes.
If you sell a product for money, you don't then get to later take the product away and keep the money.
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 California state budget for 2026-27 is at $248 billions. Life is good for the state politicians.
What's important is you came here, didn't address the article at all, and rambled off some talking points.