It seems like the fair solution to this problem is to open source server code if you are going to cease support for an online game. That way the community has the opportunity to run their own servers if they want to.
I also really support giving 60 day notice if an online game is going to shut down. Places I have worked have had policies like that for games they are sun setting and I think the best game publishers think a lot about how to do that operation. It's not simple, because if people think a game is going away their behavior changes. And nothing sucks like buying online content for a game right before it shuts down. No matter what you do people will tell you they didn't know the game was shutting down. And if you give away content that you previously sold that also sometimes angers the community.
The problem is when companies know a game isn't working they tend to want to shut it down right away because the money they spend keeping it up is never coming back. And maybe the company is going to die too. So I do support a law for a 60 day notice.
It doesn't need to be open source, you only need to provide server binaries to download. This was the standard until circa 2010. People were able to host dedicated servers themselves.
> It seems like the fair solution to this problem is to open source server code if you are going to cease support for an online game. That way the community has the opportunity to run their own servers if they want to.
It's nice in theory, but in practice many (most?) games are using middleware they don't have the rights to redistribute as open source. IIRC when the source code for Doom, the first major commercial game that went open source, originally came out, it had all of the sound code removed because it was dependent on a third party library. Not that you're going to have sound code in a server, but you may be using third party libraries for networking, replays, anti-cheat, etc.
If bills like this pass there'd be financial pressure for middleware providers to either license under terms that allow distribution at the game's end-of-life, or allow their middleware to be easily severed while still leaving the game playable - else they'd lose out on all customers selling games in California/EU/etc.
Which is also a nice side effect to reduce intellectual property barriers for developers that do already want to distribute their server or source code.
The article is really vague and a bit misleading, but the bill text appears to be surprisingly readable, and honestly not much longer than the article.
Do they need to put some funds in escrow? Or will they just shut down the entire company and let the players sue for it. (I know that big publishers won't do that, but I'm sure the lawyers could create shell corporations to solve that problem.)
Or they could just demonstrate that they have an offline play capability right from the moment they sell it.
My favorite example of this is when Warner Brothers said that Malibu’s Most Wanted wasn’t profitable because they spent so much money marketing Harry Potter that year.
Just make the punishment the seizure and full release of the game assets (all source code, version control history, tooling, and release of copyright/trademarks).
It's always going to be a wild goose chase trying to take money when there isn't any (actually or by design), just take the product and let the public update it as a last resort.
It doesn't really matter how they comply, so long as the punishment for bon-compliance is serious enough to motivate a good-faith attempt. I'm wary of jumping right into encoding specifics into legislation. That said, I'll be surprised if this actually has the necessary teeth.
Bankruptcy is a universal get-out-of-punishment free card. At least, if you're a corporation large enough and foresighted enough to shove your liabilities off onto a fictional subsidiary before starting.
If the bankruptcy process already involves identifying and administering the company's assets, I feel releasing the server software (as-is) to owners of the game could be part of that.
> As currently amended, the act would not apply to completely free games and games offered “solely for the duration of [a] subscription. Any other game offered for sale in California on or after January 1, 2027, would be subject to the law if it passes.
So they just make their game free two months before they want to close?
This appears to treat subscription style games and free to play with in game purchases differently than other games.
I would assume if that law passed the simplest compliance would just be to charge subscriptions and stop selling games directly. It seems like doing that would comply with that law without requiring much to change?
AFAIK the issue is with one time purchase games, where is not clear if you will be able to play forever or whenever they want to pull the plug, if they change to subscription based model or free to play, then it will be clear for the players what they are paying for.
The distinction makes sense, but I wonder if the bill will inadvertently incentivize games to move to subscription based models, which would be ultimately be a worse experience for consumers.
Note, this law would affect less than 1% of all games _released_. Just that those happens to be the games that a sizeable part of the population plays. And even then, you spend more tying your game to a online service than not doing so in the first place.
Agreed! Far too many companies selling software as lifetime license and their renegade on that deal. A refund should be allowed. Or simply make the software offline without drm
To be fair, B2B sales have typically existed in a different world, even for physical goods. Take the Sale of Goods Act in the UK, offering consumer protections. A business simply can’t take advantage of many of its protections as it’s aimed specifically at B2C sales.
Dumb. Just make it legal to reverse engineer the software, the community will take care of the rest, in a way the community actually wants, instead of getting just the bare minimum compliance from the original company, if they even still exist.
I tend to agree with you that allowing the community to keep games running would be a more desirable outcome, but I don't believe California could make such a law. As I understand it, reverse engineering is already illegal federally because of things like the DMCA. California can't just make the DMCA not apply in this case because its not a California law. However they can pass consumer protection laws making there be consequences for abandoning a game when the consumers are in California. Given the alternative is probably do nothing this does seem good.
I don't know about California, but AFAIK reverse engineering is legal, but breaking DRM protection isn't, so what companies did was to put DRM in their software, hence the reverse engineering became illegal.
You want the "community" to reverse engineer the game server, where all the game logic lives, from the game client? This is the state of many online only games.
Of course it should be legal to reverse engineer software you own, but you have to actually have access to the software to reverse engineer it.
We can do both! This seems more viable for the moment, unfortunately. Challenging copyright gets much more pushback than even pro-consumer obligations like these.
Gamers are competitive, but so are lawyers, and you're playing on their turf. As with a boss fight, they stand a good chance of winning, especially the first time.
(I would note that being called "racist, mysoginistic, rape apologists" does seem to bother you enough to bring it up in an unrelated context.)
I care about the topic from a legal and technical standpoint and am interested to see the outcome, just have no skin in the game and no sympathy for the industry or a bunch of children (both literal and figurative) who will whine whichever way it goes.
Imagine buying a TV. The TV works perfectly, but some of its features depend on the manufacturer’s servers.
Years later, the company decides those servers are no longer profitable to maintain. Instead of allowing users to keep using the product in a limited form, releasing server software, enabling community maintenance, or transferring support to another party, they remotely disable the functionality entirely.
Now imagine they could physically come to your house and take the TV back because they no longer want to support it. Most people would immediately recognize how unreasonable that sounds.
That is the core concern behind Stop Killing Games: consumers pay for a product, yet publishers can make it unusable after sale even when there are technically feasible alternatives that would preserve access without obligating indefinite support.
The argument is not “force companies to run servers forever.” It is: when official support ends, there should be a reasonable end-of-life path that leaves what people purchased in a functional state.
The answer is I wouldn't buy a TV that depends on online services. Just like I already wouldn't buy a video game like that, at least not an expensive one.
Can't say I support this. Legislative bodies should be dealing with actual problems in the world that meaningfully make the lives of regular people worse, not gamer entitlement.
Not being able to use a product that was purchased is an “actual problem” that “makes the lives of regular people worse.” This is going to blow your mind, but this kind of stuff is EXACTLY what people elect governments to do.
The "final boss" of bad legislation. Often, Government intrusion into the markets is worth the side effects.
But in this case, even the best-case outcome is extremely dumb. Companies are forced to expend resources just so a few niche hobbyists are not inconvenienced. And there will be side effects, ultimately including geo-fencing of games to exclude California. It's a big market, but you can't make up for a net loss with volume.
> Companies are forced to expend resources just so a few niche hobbyists are not inconvenienced.
Yeah those poor companies. They should just be allowed to take our money and then stop providing a service we paid for. Won't someone please think of the corporations????
What kind of weird argument is this? If I pay for a game then I, you know, want to be able to play the game. You know what I don't care about? Whether or not it's profitable for Ubisoft to keep a cheap signing server online.
it seems like it would be good programming to parameterize the details of how to connect to a server, so really all the game developer would need to do is document the requirements for the server/make the server software.
..things they'd be doing anyway as they developed the game??
So now it becomes way more expensive for small studios to come out with games that have online features. This is a huge win for big studios who will suck up all that market share.
Handing over a standalone server to the public is a massive engineering, financial, and legal headache. Modern multiplayer games rarely run on a single isolated program. They rely on a huge network of interconnected cloud microservices.
A single match might require separate proprietary systems for matchmaking, player inventories, anti cheat, metrics tracking, and database management. Many of those come with licenses that don't allow you to just give away the code for free.
Disentangling the actual game logic from these third party platforms like AWS or Epic Online Services requires months of rewriting code. At that point you're basically re-inventing the wheel on so many technologies that your costs go up exponentially.
Games are rarely built entirely from scratch by a single company and are usually packed with licensed third party software like proprietary network code, commercial physics engines, or specific anti cheat software. Because the studio doesn't own the rights to distribute these proprietary tools to the public for free then releasing a standalone server forces them to spend extensive legal and development hours stripping out the restricted code and replacing it with open source alternatives.
Releasing server code also exposes the inner workings of the company's technology. If a studio uses the same proprietary engine or backend framework for their active money making games then releasing the server code for a dead game essentially hands hackers and competitors a roadmap to exploit their current profitable titles.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive was a game running all of these things (matchmaking, skins, anticheat ...). After Counter-Strike 2 was released, the servers for CS:GO were shut down. Yet, the game remains mostly playable. Sure, the skins no longer work and there's no official matchmaking, but third parties have stepped up. That's because Valve released (and have always released) server software.
I find this argument quite bad. It was done in the past and it's still being done today. There's nothing preventing any company from doing it except for a combination of laziness and greed.
Your argument still doesn't hold, sorry. The law won't apply retroactively so the existing games can be killed. However, if the law passes, the EOL plan just becomes another product requirement you have to plan for. So you won't "rewrite" the server code, you write it to comply in the first place.
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.
Somehow I highly doubt that a small game company is going to run a "huge network of interconnected cloud services".
I've also yet to find a small game company running their own big online multiplayer game.
And most of the indie publishers usually comply with the law by not fucking over their customers by providing independent server executables or not releasing a server-tied game. AAA studios are the biggest offenders and they deserve to be fucked.
Most "gamers" don't want to pay $5 for a game you spent 10,000 hours slaving to make. They will complain the game was too short when Steam shows they spent 10+ hours playing it.
The same is true for TV, movies, books. It's an insanely competitive market for people's time and attention. There are more games on Steam with 10,000 hours of dev time put into them than you can play in a lifetime. Standards for what's worth your limited time and money are therefore extremely high.
If you're passionate about making games chances are you're not going to succeed financially. Set your sights on personal success in the artistic sense. Can you communicate what you wanted, can you enrich some people's lives a bit with your work? It doesn't pay the bills, and that's not really fair, but it's also not unique. Lots of valuable labor receives no reward.
None of this is really relevant to the law in question though, which is itself pretty basic consumer protection against a company yanking back something it sold.
Minecraft, GTA are still some of the largest media franchises of any kind in the world. By players and by expense. They'll continue to make it worth it.
I don't see a problem? As a hacker and HN poster, I believe the free market will determine the value of a game. If it's not economically feasible anymore to make games for under $5, the market will adjust.
I'm old enough to remember a time when you bought a copy of a game and played it locally. Most games were around $60 and we paid it. It is only more recently that someone decided that viewing ads was a better way to pay for games - you got what you wanted and no one values games anymore.
Even back in the day, if I paid 60 bucks and spent less then 40 hours solving the game I was disappointed and felt like I paid too much. I invested in the hardware and software and I expect something out it.
Happy to pay for your game but don't hobble it or subject me to ads.
There are a half dozen games in my catalog that I've played for 10,000 hours for free.
Sure, I'll spend $5 on a game I play for 10 hours, but it's still a bad value for me comparatively. When I do it, it's usually because I like what the developer did and want them to get some financial support. This is also why there are hundreds of unplayed games in my Steam account. It's then also a charity, not a business.
Your $5 game is competing with every game I have available to me and the market is _saturated_. A lot of game development is just bad investment. Like Ubisoft spending $500 million to develop Beyond Good and Evil 2. If that ever even releases, but why would you spend half a billion dollars following up a flop. A beloved flop but a flop.
Consumers of creative works generally are paying for the result, not the process.
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.
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.
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.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
Or they could just demonstrate that they have an offline play capability right from the moment they sell it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
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.
So they just make their game free two months before they want to close?
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?
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.
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.
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
(I would note that being called "racist, mysoginistic, rape apologists" does seem to bother you enough to bring it up in an unrelated context.)
Years later, the company decides those servers are no longer profitable to maintain. Instead of allowing users to keep using the product in a limited form, releasing server software, enabling community maintenance, or transferring support to another party, they remotely disable the functionality entirely.
Now imagine they could physically come to your house and take the TV back because they no longer want to support it. Most people would immediately recognize how unreasonable that sounds.
That is the core concern behind Stop Killing Games: consumers pay for a product, yet publishers can make it unusable after sale even when there are technically feasible alternatives that would preserve access without obligating indefinite support.
The argument is not “force companies to run servers forever.” It is: when official support ends, there should be a reasonable end-of-life path that leaves what people purchased in a functional state.
Gaming companies rendering games you paid for unusable is a real problem, just as much as planned obsolescence occuring in everyday items.
Screaming children? Really? Most gamers are over 18 and there's billions of them.
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.
..things they'd be doing anyway as they developed the game??
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.
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.
And yet releasing standalone servers back in the 00s was the norm, rather than the exception. I don't buy the argument.
Now they want more.
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.
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.