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The California state assembly has passed the 'Protect Our Games Act'

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Re: The California state assembly has passed the 'Protect Our Games Act'

#21

Post by Y-bar »

ethin wrote: post #10
wredcoll wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's always someone willing to blame the victim. The answer to companies committing fraud is not "buyer beware".

What are you proposing then? The government is not allowed to compel speech for good reason.

That’s not a Carte Blanche that forbids the government from everything.

The government can compel speech from food and other producers to print content and nutritional labels on their products. The government can compel speech on a yearly basis when we file taxes. The can compel speech such as guidance maps and websites to be accessible to the blind (ADA). They can compel vehicle owners to provide insurance and ownership information, which is a kind of speech.

Re: The California state assembly has passed the 'Protect Our Games Act'

#23

Post by redsocksfan45 »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #7

I think this will cause a big schism in the Stop Killing Games movement. Game devs who were sympathetic to the movement will expect that this is enough, but a lot of people in the movement will be unsatisfied with the carveouts for MMORPGs and XBOX Game Pass and the like.

[dead]

Re: The California state assembly has passed the 'Protect Our Games Act'

#24

Post by bob1029 »

duskwuff wrote: post #16
bob1029 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think forcing a person or business to divulge their intellectual property, simply because they no longer wish to provide downstream products or services, is reasonable. That said, as a consumer I really don't like when something goes away. Overwatch 1 was probably the most brutal experience for me. In the end, I don't think anyone has any kind of special entitlements here. The server binaries will almost alwa…

> The server binaries will almost always include other proprietary information that the studio will not want to release. Or even information that they are contractually forbidden from releasing. A typical scenario would be a game developed as a fork of a proprietary codebase which was licensed from another company. Forcing the licensee to release material would infringe on the rights of the licensor.

There's also scenarios like games that depended on GameSpy being forced out into the cold. Battle for Middle Earth 2 is a good example of this. The LOTR rights expiring isn't what got them. It was another provider going away in a puff of smoke and not enough player base to justify a complete rewrite of the backend.

https://www.ea.com/news/update-on-ea-titles-hosted-on-gamesp...

Re: The California state assembly has passed the 'Protect Our Games Act'

#26

Post by fragmede »

RobotToaster wrote: post #17
pibaker wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

California and meaningless feel good legislation with massive loopholes? A match made in heaven! If this is how the bill ends up being enacted, it will only push more big game developers into making their titles subscription only. A win for gamers' rights, I suppose.

I can see them adding a $1 per year subscription at the very least.

Why not $0?

Re: The California state assembly has passed the 'Protect Our Games Act'

#27

Post by cosmojg »

pibaker wrote: post #4
phreack wrote: post #2

> The bill applies to digitally sold games. However, it excludes games provided via subscription services, free-to-play games, and games that are inherently playable offline indefinitely. It also prohibits the continued sale or distribution of games that have become unusable due to service termination. I believe this is the key paragraph. I wonder if this will be an incentive towards making more games qualify for tho…

California and meaningless feel good legislation with massive loopholes? A match made in heaven! If this is how the bill ends up being enacted, it will only push more big game developers into making their titles subscription only. A win for gamers' rights, I suppose.

I think it's more likely that the big studios will start rolling out trivial offline modes (less risky) rather than overhaul their revenue models (more risky).

Re: The California state assembly has passed the 'Protect Our Games Act'

#28

Post by meatmanek »

RobotToaster wrote: post #17
pibaker wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

California and meaningless feel good legislation with massive loopholes? A match made in heaven! If this is how the bill ends up being enacted, it will only push more big game developers into making their titles subscription only. A win for gamers' rights, I suppose.

I can see them adding a $1 per year subscription at the very least.

At least that somewhat aligns incentives between players and the game studio. If an old game has a long-lasting player base, then a modest subscription makes it more likely that the studio would keep the servers up and running, if not actively patching the game. With a game that you pay for up-front, a long-lived player base can be a liability for the company (ongoing costs without many new purchases.)

Re: The California state assembly has passed the 'Protect Our Games Act'

#29

Post by ppseafield »

ethin wrote: post #10
wredcoll wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's always someone willing to blame the victim. The answer to companies committing fraud is not "buyer beware".

What are you proposing then? The government is not allowed to compel speech for good reason.

This is not just free speech, it's commerce, and the government has the ability to regulate commerce. Warranties and lemon laws are not regulating speech - they're regulating sales and the legal requirements for those sales. Providing a method for playing a game a customer purchased after the company decides to abandon it is putting a legal requirement on the sale of goods.

Re: The California state assembly has passed the 'Protect Our Games Act'

#30

Post by xboxnolifes »

bob1029 wrote: post #9
wagwang wrote: post #3

The reasonable compromise should be to force devs to release server binaries if they are not willing to run the servers themselves.

I don't think forcing a person or business to divulge their intellectual property, simply because they no longer wish to provide downstream products or services, is reasonable. That said, as a consumer I really don't like when something goes away. Overwatch 1 was probably the most brutal experience for me. In the end, I don't think anyone has any kind of special entitlements here. The server binaries will almost alwa…

Company's only exist so far as state law allows them to operate within them. It's not forcing them to do something after some point in time, it's a requirement to be a business at all.
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