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Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California

arstechnica.com

41–50 of 506 posts

Re: Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California

#41

[flagged]

What an asinine comment.

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.

Re: Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California

#42

[flagged]

What an asinine comment. 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.

[flagged]

Re: Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What an asinine comment. 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.

[flagged]

Not sure what you're even trying to say, but guess I hit a nerve.

Re: Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California

#45
post #18
post #5

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.

The entertainment industry has a long history of making successful movies appear unprofitable on paper to avoid paying royalties. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting

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.

Re: Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California

#46
post #5

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.

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.

Re: Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California

#47
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.

Re: Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California

#48
> 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?

Re: Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California

#49
post #15
post #3

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.

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.

People did it for World of Warcraft, and continue to do so with each expansion.

I can host and play a WotLK server locally, offline on my desktop with AI player bots with minimal issues thanks to the work of the community

Re: Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California

#50

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 s…

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