51–60 of 506 posts
> 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?
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…
And yet releasing standalone servers back in the 00s was the norm, rather than the exception. I don't buy the argument.
This is the road of stupid that stop killing games has paved.
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.
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Does it though? Just release the a standalone server once the game is done making money.
Updated my original post to explain why this wouldn't work.
Not a bad idea, but why does this only apply to games? 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.
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
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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.
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 th…
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.
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 "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…
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.
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If you do not care then why did you take the time to share an opinion on the topic?
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.
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.