alt Hacker NewsThe California state assembly has passed the 'Protect Our Games Act'
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I'm always shocked by how irrationally anti-regulation this site is. I have yet to see any explanation why this regulation would be, in practice, cost/legally prohibitive in any way. This seems like a consumer protections slam dunk.
Yes, you would have to make sure your server application adheres to software licenses before release, just like you do with the client application, or any other piece of software a company may use or release. What popular libraries are we concerned about no longer being usable because of this? Remember, this is server architecture. Networking libraries? ENet is distributable, so is Valve's GameNetworkingSockets.
Yes, it'd ask developers to write their servers with this possible/inevitable transition in mind. Developers will plan ahead for that, and I have a very hard time imagining the server architecture would change much at all. A dedicated company-owned server is just a beefier home computer with load balancers and matchmaking. Drop those two, slap a server list on the client, and you're golden.
This is great news!
> 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.
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.
Be interesting to see what this does to the online aspect of GTA 6.
I do wish this had been around when Firefall [1] shutdown, haven't really bothered with live service games since then.
So if I'm a game dev that lives in the US outside of California, do I have to care about this? Or do I have to explicitly block Californians from buying my game if I don't want to be affected by it?
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.
I wish subscription games could be preserved too, but this is probably about as good as it's going to get.
I doubt companies are going to go all in on subscription games, since that's more or less been tried and failed, and only WoW and a few others are left standing from that. Or maybe they'll try and fail, since the temptation is just too great (think Sony and Concord trying their luck with hero shooters, even though everyone with threw or more brain cells knew it would never make back what it cost).
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.
The reasonable compromise should be to force devs to release server binaries if they are not willing to run the servers themselves.
Seeing this headline I thought it was about AB Hernandez. Guess I should have realized the assembly would not have passed such a bill.
Writing is on the wall for more subscriptions. California will never learn - killed hollywood with most production being moved overseas, and now gaming.
I wonder if they will do something similar for software
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... )
So just make every game free to play and then require a paying to unlock the actual game.
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.
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This isn't really about ownership in the abstract, it's about honest labeling. Owning a copy has never meant you can duplicate it. You can't run off copies of a book you bought, but nobody thinks that means the publisher can take it off your shelf when they stop printing it. The ESA conflates the copyright they keep with the copy you bought. The real difference with live-service games is server dependency, and that's where the dishonesty lives. If a game can't run without an online service the publisher controls, people deserve that caveat before they pay. Don't sell it with the word "Buy" and a one-time price and then treat it like a subscription you can end. This bill just forces that honesty: notice, an offline patch, or a refund.
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.
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.
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.
For a brief moment, I thought maybe the headline was referring to legislation that would protect women's sports, but I knew that was impossible because this came from California.
I'd love to read the details of the bill because it's not an easy problem to solve without infringing one some party's rights. Mandating a gaming company to continue running servers at a loss would not stand. Mandating a gaming company to open their protocols and allow third-party servers could be seen as an infringement on the IP rights of the gaming company. (I'm not taking sides here.) Other solutions such as mandating an offline mode would also be an overreach.