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.
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.
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.
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.
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..
..things they'd be doing anyway as they developed the game??
currently there's a huge risk Marathon might get shut down like high guard or concord because of player numbers. If they shut it down, nobody could play it anymore.
If there's a system in place for us to be able to host our own servers, or... I don't know? OWN the game we bought and play it because we OWN it because we PAID for it. Then yeah, that's good and it's a good movement and I fully support it.
I genuinely don't understand the other side of this argument because it just feels like no for the sake of no.
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.
I find this argument quite bad. It was done in the past and it's still being done today. There's nothing preventing any company from doing it except for a combination of laziness and greed.
What do you do for, say, a failing MMO built on a proprietary game engine you're trying to make a sequel for?
And yet releasing standalone servers back in the 00s was the norm, rather than the exception. I don't buy the argument.
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.
This has been happening unofficially for decades, on a volunteer basis.
I play games that are 20+ years old all the time. I play Quake and Doom online pretty frequently.
You can still use Windows XP if you really want. You're not artificially locked out of it. You can also use your Nexus 5 if you want. I had one plugged in
yes
> For 20 years you need to support, patch, keep people and infrastructure.
No, you should just not make it impossible for people to do so. (via stuff like online activation and such). Most 20 year old games you can still run via a VM or something like that. If it requires online activation and the server for that are shut down, you can't.
> Why the tech industry does not do it? I still want to use windows XP. Why my Nexus 5 does not work anymore ect..
You can still use windows xp and a nexus 5.
This was also the excuse people gave for GDPR and California's privacy law and everybody got forced into complying after the date of validity. Simply having an "excuse" of money loss due to engineering your game user-hostile in the first place (especially after the law became valid) isn't a good argument. It will have some preparation time and if you didn't plan for it, it is your fault.
Also, your example doesn't really make sense. First, no one is arguing that companies should right now go revive all past MMOs. This is something that would affect future products.
Additionally, why are you making a sequel to a product that already failed?
Maplestory 2 fails; they now have to release server software that could compromise Maplestory 1?
Guild Wars 2 Amazon New World Black desert elder scrolls online
Do they now have to throw that money into an endowment in case their game starts failing and they can't afford servers? (enough to cover the time to patch in a local update).
Take all the games that started being able to make multiplayer with the steam SDKs. If steam changes their P2P relay (which they've done), what obligations does an indie dev with a defunct game have? Also extend this argument to all the amazing middleware that's helped indies do multiplayer well; are they just back to open source first principles? (side note: Godot stuff is quite nice now, but a law limiting it to that is pretty harsh; I'd much rather have people be able to license their middleware).
Your "games were like this before" comes off ignorant like a "we've always used rocks to make fire" type argument; you can of course ship games without any third party abstractions, with dedicated client server architectures, but I'd rather not have the option to not do so structurally financially kneecapped. Shipping a multiplayer game has gotten WAY easier over the past 10 years
Of course there ARE modern games like this, but not all modern games are like this. Just because it's possible doesn't mean it's easy. There are tradeoffs that I feel aren't being considered.
his bill would create an incentive that I just don't think the juice is worth the squeeze.
-----------------------------------
Take among us; what does it do for matchmaking architecture?
If this bill had a carveout for games with under some ~$200k+ of sales, it wouldn't be a problem, but I'm worried about structurally affecting the multiplayer landscape for indie devs. I want them to be able to patch in their multiplayer after they get some sales without having to immediately make some contingency plan, since the time when you're considering this seems to be when indies are pretty vulnerable.
Thank you for letting me in! Sol Roth PS: Hope you like the décor. I’m redecorating your thoughts permanently.
> 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.
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.
So openly admitting that your game is a subscription will be quite bad marketing for your company.
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?
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.
Commiserations, California (and likely the rest of the US) - all your games will now be subscriptions.
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 :(
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.
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....
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
I think your analogy is a great one. I had a plan to pour a pillar that wouldn't exist without me somewhere (lets say this is online matchmaking), and you come and tell me I cant do my plan anymore, or if I do, I have to pour a second/different one (self hosted servers or p2p) or give away the pillar I make for free.
Games take money to maintain, if you make a law that forces people to maintain them for longer (or forever), that increases the costs. Higher costs -> less games. Most game makers are not Electronic Arts or Rockstar. Those companies will be 100% fine and will pass any costs onto you.
It just seems crazy that a company should be forced to give a refund to all players or spend 1000s of person-hours implementing outdated multiplayer features becasue only 50 people are playing their game once a month.
I won't enjoy it, and things aren't perfect as they are, but I will think back to this thread when the articles of layoffs, price hikes, ads, dark patterns, and "lack of quality games" become more and more prevalent because this law will have directly influenced it.
Theres no free lunch.
> coming across an old DVD years after creation
This isn’t remotely the same thing so I don’t know why you brought it up
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.
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.
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.
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.
(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)
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.
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.
Your company did not tracked libraries licenses in the first place?
> 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
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also, does this stop at games? Why not any online service ever? Why not any program at all?
Maybe this is the reason MS has been pushing Game Pass so hard, to get rid of the "purchase" part entirely.
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.
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.
The specifics can be hammered out, but something middle ground seems sensible.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Servers have a real cost, nobody is denying that, but I think the people who bought the game should have an option/alternative in case the servers are down.
We 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.
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.
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?
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
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,
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
* 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...
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.
You lost the money the moment you made in-game purchases.
Or they could just demonstrate that they have an offline play capability right from the moment they sell it.
Now they want more.
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.
Also if you advertise "lifetime license," that should mean lifetime.
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.
[1] https://www.practical-tips.com/games/play-minecraft-offline-...
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.
> (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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Exactly.
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!
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...
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.
Oh, and it's even an example in that Wiki article you linked lol
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.
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.
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.
Escrow or demonstration upfront will raise the bar before releasing new games in California.
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.
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.
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.
Lots of games are written in C++ to this day for example so they can eek out every bit of possible performance no matter the trickery required. I would presume this extends to server side of MMOs etc too. C++ has no standard build system even, it's sort of settled on CMake mostly, which has minimal native (working) support for dependencies even, let alone lock files and/or BOMs.
If game-specific logic is not public, information needed for reverse engineering could be completely missing, but if game-specific logic is available plus the names of the missing libraries, reconstruction of the game should be possible eventually.
[1] https://drewdevault.com/blog/Open-sourcing-video-games/ (See "What if I don’t completely own my game?")
An outcome so common they invented a word for it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malicious_compliance
Sure, in some cases you can roll your own server, but often it's impossible.
That's a very reasonable way to address the issue of 3rd party licensed IP. I expect something like that will get incorporated into the legislation. In fact, I'm confident it will because well-funded lobbyists will ensure that common sense concern and its very reasonable solution are heard.
Then Electronic Arts and Microsoft will sell their existing server code to newly formed companies (which they happen to own). Then their captive game studios will start releasing new versions where the publicly released "server source code" is five pages of #IfDefs followed by a call to "Start_Totally_3rd_Party_GameServer" in the new library that's not required to be included in the mandated release.
For extra credit, the newly formed 3rd party entity will be incorporated and domiciled in Ireland, Malta or whatever country is currently most tax and currency exchange advantaged. Then the license fees their captive studios have to pay to use the 3rd party library get offshored and tax sheltered - while being large enough amounts to prove this definitely isn't a sham transaction!
To be clear, I don't approve of this myself. In fact, I hate it. But I worked at a high level in a top ten publicly traded tech giant long enough to see how the armies of soul-eating MBAs, lawyers, consultants and lobbyists can subvert anything. Fortunately, only half my soul was eaten and some of it has regrown.
There is basically zero chance that when given the choice between "structure billing as a service" vs "rewrite everything and open source it" that they will choose open source.
Take I’d for example. They released source code for genre defining extremely popular games and were fine.
And how often is code reused anyway? Every online game seem to either use mostly stock server code that comes with the engine or build anew every time.
The contracts that celebrities get on adjusted gross (adjusted is doing 100x the work of the word gross in this context) have no specific entity revenue in mind. If costs show up later after some cash has been distributed, people absolutely freak out to give money back, so you need an arrangement that works such that that doesn’t happen.
Plenty of agents over the years sold celebrities the idea of gross on first dollar and couldn’t be bothered to read the proposed contract which led to many publicized lawsuits.
It still requires an initial authentication.
If a game says clearly a constant internet connection is required, I don’t see how you would expect it to work when their servers are down. It would indeed be nicer if they would provide a local experience, but is it really something that should be enforced through regulations? That feels very wrong to me. I personally dislike EA business model and wouldn’t engage with it, I think it’s a pretty shitty corporation. But when buying diablo games where a connection is required, even if I always only play them solo, at no point do I have expectations I will be able to continue playing if servers are shut down. The deal is clear from the get go, I can decide to engage or not. There a lots of other games to play if I care more about local experience.
The arguments to “stop killing games” feel very entitled to me and the slogans disingenuous
If your company has issue achieving this, then it was simply not complying with those licenses.
You can go through all licenses just by checking their list in maven. None of that is hard or expensive.
Open source is a pretty broad umbrella. I doubt a company would say Slay The Spire 2 was poisoned by Godot and that there's no IP value.
Vehicles? Maybe not necessarily forever, but I'd expect the large car manufacturers to all still have some level of support for a 20-year-old car...
The issue is nobody gets that option if the ability to run a server is made unavailable to the public.
Micro transactions should be covered tho. If you buy an epic skin for your player in a F2P game and suddenly you no longer can use the skin - money back!
Or what's likely cheaper is budgeting for that patch in the game.
You may bemoan "oh they just don't want to release the auth service", but it functionally shuffles the cost math.
I'd personally rather the 5% cheaper games than trying to play a multiplayer only game 20 years later wtih 6 people on the server.
They don't need to keep services running perpetually. strags's objection seemed to be that it could be infeasible to release services like authentication that they're still running, to which I'm saying they don't really need to consider any of this until they stop running it.
> You may bemoan "oh they just don't want to release the auth service", but it functionally shuffles the cost math.
Releasing or patching it out is largely just fulfilling their side of the deal.
If I sell you a lawnmower that depends on some authentication server to start up, then shut down the server the next day (I got your money, why would I keep the cost?), and don't release the server code or a patch to work without it, then would you not say I've scammed you?
The resource cost of everyone I've sold to losing access to their lawnmowers would be far greater than what it'd cost me to release a patch, just that the former is not a cost borne by me if the law allows me to ignore it.
> I'd personally rather the 5% cheaper games than trying to play a multiplayer only game 20 years later wtih 6 people on the server.
Allowing a company to cut people off of their software (large cost) just to save having to push out a patch (small cost) will, on net, result on more expensive products - since on net you're wasting more resources.
Particularly when it comes to authentication checks, this doesn't just apply to multiplayer games. Imagine if this applied to other forms of media (already kind of happening with DRM), like if we couldn't read books from over 20 years ago.
A lawnmower isn't a piece of software. It's not licensed. There's an expectation it should continue working. The lawnmower is a single player game.
I think it's understood that online games are a license (read multiplayer ones, not the Crew).
If I sell you an IoT lawnmower, and you get 20 years out of it, do I owe you a full refund if I shut down my server? imo, any refund should be prorated.
I get your externalities argument, but I think multiplayer games should be treated differently if there's not an easy solution.
>Allowing a company to cut people off of their software (large cost) just to save having to push out a patch (small cost) will, on net, result on more expensive products - since on net you're wasting more resources.
I don't think all the patches are small costs when you factor in licensing, etc. Also keep in mind if you use a library for networking and the API changes, do you have to then roll it on your own? I'm skeptical of the middleware that's made life easier
>Allowing a company to cut people off of their software (large cost) just to save having to push out a patch (small cost) will, on net, result on more expensive products - since on net you're wasting more resources.
This doesn't logically follow. Mandating you need to put out a patch creates a legal obligation that would sit on your books. Cutting the 12 people off your multiplayer game after 20 years isn't a large cost, and it's not going to make your next game more expensive. It was an externality that made consumers sad, not one making products more expensive.
>Particularly when it comes to authentication checks, this doesn't just apply to multiplayer games. Imagine if this applied to other forms of media (already kind of happening with DRM), like if we couldn't read books from over 20 years ago.
I think the DRM thing is a separate issue from the mandate for recoding games to be usable post server shutdown. I'd like it to be legislated separately as well. The books are analogous to single player games.
I think it's a slippery slope to turn that entitlement onto multiplayer games; if not that, then why not all software that you buy? Everyone should get a full refund when any software EoL's and companies go bankrupt whenever an online product stops being profitable.
You don't get a full refund in other sectors when they kill the consumable after a long while. Printer cartridges can stop being made and you don't get a refund for your printer. We didn't give HP the option "make your competitors ink work on your printer, give full refunds, support indefinitely, or open up your ink manufacturing line blueprints".
This legislation might be more persuasive if it were tied to a reasonable time limit, but I don't see anything of that nature in the text. An obligation to support or refund customers that lasts for a fair timespan (ie. preventing rugpulls) is far less onerous than an obligation to release your code to satisfy someone's nostalgia.
Of course that is regrettable and could be changed, but it would require a significant change in incentives.
The original server binaries were left on the original CDROM by a programmer.
Then PriitK, a creator of Kazaa and then Skype and Joost!, went on to re-create the client due to cheating/hacking, naming it Continuum.
Years later the server is reimplemented as A Small Subspace Server (ASSS), making it a complete fan remake of the original game (sans graphics). This is also when we finally got server side mods, everything before that was client only or a hack.
We even got on Stream Greenlight.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/352700/Subspace_Continuum...
We're lucky we got Priit to release the encryption/security module so Continuum clients could connect to ASSS servers without the security warning. I doubt it'll ever be updated, someone will have to take up the mantle.
No need to imagine. Pretty much all of that (minus the last part) happened in Amazon’s New World MMO in the first few weeks.
Though I wouldn’t be surprised if the last part did happen and we just didn’t know about it.
Either way, the point is that the difference between open-source vs close-source transfers is pretty significant.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/28/gamers-are-fixing-a-video-...
We all agree there is a foolproof method to fixing all bugs - delete all the code.
We also all probably agree that isn't the optimal balance.
Larger game studios would likely adjust as you say. However they too could adjust in such a way that they only offer subscriptions within California as that appears to exempt them from this rule. Many outcomes are possible beyond simply adjusting to the legislation in the way you are suggesting.
This doesn't actually answer the question about how hard it would be. What's the specific level of effort required, and some amount of why so people can learn from your experience.
> 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.
I'd rather have a working game then a refund of a gift card. Including if that means I have to stand up my own servers.
Priorities I guess
To each their own on what they want. We obviously can't give everyone everything. Players don't want the game to go away at all. We still talk to players every day and have confidence we are doing the right thing with our limited time.
I believe we should be able to have the same expectation of software, at least where not specifically sold as "X months of access".
> If I sell you an IoT lawnmower, and you get 20 years out of it, do I owe you a full refund if I shut down my server?
Ideally, to avoid unnecessary e-waste, you should patch out the requirement or release the server-side code so I can continue using my lawnmower. Buying it off me might also work, if you're offering approximately what I'd get out of having it continue to work, but I'm not sure if that scales well.
> I don't think all the patches are small costs when you factor in licensing
If bills like this pass, middleware providers would need to license under terms that allow distribution at end-of-life, or lose out on all customers selling software in California/EU/etc. Should also help clear obstacles for developers who already want to distribute their server/source code even before this law but are held back from doing so.
> Mandating you need to put out a patch creates a legal obligation that would sit on your books
There's no issue with creating the patch/releasing the server-side software early, just that I assume they'd want to maintain exclusivity to milk profit for as long as possible.
> It was an externality that made consumers sad, not one making products more expensive
If you expend resources to create some media/software/product, then brick that product while customers would've otherwise still extracted value in excess of the patch's resource cost (developer time, not licensing price), then you're on net wasting resources and thus making products in general more expensive.
Issue is that because the cost of patch is borne by the company, whereas they get to ignore the cost to the customers of bricking the products, the latter is often preferred even though it's typically the more expensive option by a significant margin. A bill like this should fix that.
> I think it's a slippery slope to turn that entitlement onto multiplayer games; if not that, then why not all software that you buy?
I believe it should, and that for a lot of software the case is even stronger.
> Everyone should get a full refund when any software EoL's and companies go bankrupt whenever an online product stops being profitable.
If you take someone's money to buy a CAD package, then no longer want to provide some service it relies on (usually just for authentication reasons), then you should release the server software or patch out the authentication check.
> We didn't give HP the option "make your competitors ink work on your printer, give full refunds, support indefinitely, or open up your ink manufacturing line blueprints"
I'd 100% support doing that!
How did you gain access to my Steam library statistics?
Evidence is strong that people follow the content they want, and then secondarily choose the least friction delivery model.
You're describing the reality, and the difference after adding these additional rule, they'd have to be honest about what you're paying for and for how long you are allowed to use it.
Additional, if it is a subscription, it's more likely ongoing revenue could possibly fund providing the service indefinitely. Will that always happen, obviously not, but then game studios won't be as likely to do the same exact thing that catalysed the stop killing games project.
The refund thing is just there to force action by putting a dollar value on inaction. Pretty much no company is expected to actually choose refunds.
> Alternatively, it might push multiplayer games towards free-to-play if in-app-purchases are excluded.
Good point, the law had better not exclude those.
It's the same as GPL and similar licenses. If you don't want to publish your source that contains trade secrets then don't incorporate GPL licensed code.
There are also already various laws which compel certain types of speech. Consider things like nutrient labels or ingredient lists.
If you still choose to license something you can't release later, and it's critical to the game's operation, then that's a deliberate liability and you'll need to replace it.
This case illustrates this point fully:
https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/blog/2019/08/settlemen...
Huh? Client-server architecture does make things more complicated to implement but it's not THAT bad. And you (usually[1]) do it in service of multiplayer, not because you're big budget or just want to complicate things.
Among Us was literally a three-person team.
[1] I find there are some major benefits to it, especially in post-LLM-world, and have been strongly considering it for some of my solo-dev single-player projects.
When the library vendor licenses some proprietary crap to a game server vendor, they take on the risk that their library may fall under the open source requirement when the game server shuts down.
At shutdown, criminal law says the library vendor must open source. Since criminal law preempts contract law, no amount of weasel words in the software license change that.
Even if the upstream vendor is out of business or something and did not provide source, surely, the binaries fall under the the open source clause.
Problem completely solved, and no lawyers need to be paid after the fact. (Library vendors might want to pay lawyers to tell them not to license to game servers, or not. Either way, that's not the customers' problem.)
Or it could make it a lot cheaper, if the server were developed entirely on open-source infrastructure from the start. Hopefully the actual game logic would be developed entirely in-house, making it easier to audit before releasing.
Unfortunately, it is not you define whether it deserves. It's a court, ultimately SCOTUS.
And it's not expensive for Photon to do that, so I don't see why they wouldn't add that feature for a modest price or even free. (And that's assuming the license doesn't already allow it.)
It might make a community rewrite of the server code easier, but that would likely only be attempted for very few games.
Designing a game to use developer hosted servers is a choice they made. Probably to squeeze money from microtransactions.
This. I mean, modern game companies could setup a common (for every game) Headscale or similar solution, let group of friends create their own private VPN between them punching through any NAT and host their own distributed multiplayer game. Yes there is still some involvement server aide from the company but it could be easily shared between games. And if support ends, you still leave players with the option to use their own LAN/VPN system.
Centralised servers allow for subscriptions and other stuff.
Timing issues can be worked around and GPS modules are cheap.
NAT problems aren't usually that bad. Only a minority of networks use symmetric NAT implementations, with most seeming to be using port-restricted cone NAT (EIM/APDF), which can still communicate with any other NAT implementation using endpoint-independent mapping (EIM). Most CGNAT implementations that I've encountered use EIM, with some also doing endpoint-independent filtering (EIF). Between UDP hole-punching, UPnP, NAT-PMP, and IPv6, it's usually possible to establish a P2P connection between 2 endpoints.
A game could use a hybrid client/server and P2P model, with the option to run entirely P2P while accepting its limitations.
Didn't stop it from being a fun, successful game but there's no comparison to the work and complexity involved in larger games.
Recap:
> Client-server architecture does make things more complicated to implement but it's not THAT bad. Among Us was literally a three-person team.
The scope of the discussion extends beyond simple games like Among Us and some games require highly complex networked architectures that would be non-trivial to open up.
It's now a lot more tractable to build a multiplayer game, on the other hand balancing it is a whole other kettle of fish
That said, I don't mind a tangent, and I have built services for large multiplayer games and it really is not that bad.
Untangling the entire lot to make the game available upon closure would be a nightmare in some cases.
I've also contributed to game server emulation (pre-professionally) to keep them alive, so preserving games is a cause I support, even if I don't think it's necessarily always going to be trivial.
This is only true if the game wasn't architected with open-sourcing in mind. Which affects how this kind of law should be structured.
For example, it makes sense to require the server code to be submitted to an escrow service from the beginning. Part of that process would be a license evaluation, which acts as a forcing function already during the development process.