51–60 of 294 posts
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.
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.
Subscription games already always had a "no pay, no play" expectation, so I don't see any problem with that carveout. The only real problem I can see is that in-game purchases in free to play games are not additionally explicitly named. (Though, "no monetary considerations" shouldn't include ftp + mtx)
Also, most gamepass games are available for purchase as well, so I don't see the problem there either, except the possibility that a game is removed from gamepass so you lose access despite paying, but that's something for the courts to figure out.
> 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.
So just make every game free to play and then require a paying to unlock the actual game.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.)
Perhaps a workaround is to just have 1 server online indefinitely. Technically the online services are still functional - the match queue times would just be very, very large.
> 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…
So this only really applies to games you have to purchase once but are online-only? That's... an incredibly narrow law, that only covers a class of games which are particularly stupid by design. (Continuous cost without continuous revenue.)
The reasonable compromise should be to force devs to release server binaries if they are not willing to run the servers themselves.
The reasonable compromise should be to force devs to release server binaries if they are not willing to run the servers themselves.