This is the road of stupid that stop killing games has paved.
Are you by chance the first second-generation Blizzard employee?
Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California
191–200 of 506 posts
Re: Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are the insurmountable obstacles to releasing the server code for the community to run?
As I understand it, the obstacles are mostly legal. Our development team would love to just throw the code on GitHub.
Sounds like if it was mandatory to make a server release, legal would mostly shut up and it would be low cost. In other words, minimal change in risk.
The refund thing is just there to force action by putting a dollar value on inaction. Pretty much no company is expected to actually choose refunds.
> Alternatively, it might push multiplayer games towards free-to-play if in-app-purchases are excluded.
Good point, the law had better not exclude those.
Re: Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California
#193Look, patches would be nice. I don't want a refund, I want to continue playing the game.
What I'd prefer is modders not getting sued when they try to implement the online aspect for free, heck or paid at that stage.
If the game is popular enough, the community tends to take care of it. Maybe some legal form of officially abandoning the game?
Re: Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California
#194It 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…
> open source server code if you are going to cease support When I was a senior exec at a big public tech company, there was a product we decided to discontinue and we thought would be nice to just open source. Somehow I ended up in charge of managing that process and was shocked at how complex, time-consuming and expensive it was in a multi-billion dollar, publicly-traded corp vs some code my friends and I wrote. Le…
To be fair, it was in a time and age where BOM was not that common. I am assuming nowadays, with BOMs being in place, the process should be much easier.
Re: Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
Game engines/code aren't all open source. The game developer might not have the legal rights to release the source. Also, does this stop at games? Why not any online service ever? Why not any program at all?
Gaming might be unique in the sense that it's the only industry where 1) consumers make a one-time purchase of a product, but then 2) the manufacturer remains responsible for the online component.. forever? I can't think of any other examples in real life where this happens across an industry (maybe a few niche products). Maybe this is the reason MS has been pushing Game Pass so hard, to get rid of the "purchase" par…
Any company that willfully chains a device to their cloud platform in such a way should get the same treatment, whether the cloud offering is free as in beer or paid. It's happening a lot more than you might think.
Re: Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California
#196> 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
Well, I predict we'll start seeing more games offered "solely for the duration of a subscription". And also games spun out into their own subsidiary that will just go bankrupt and not comply.
Re: Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California
#197[flagged]
Re: Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every game released whose developers have chosen to complicate its design with a client-server architecture . It's not like this is going to hurt the little three-man teams making games on shoe-string budgets. Yeah, it's going to make big budget games a little more expensive, just like how cars with seatbelts are a little more expensive to build, and like how it's a little more expensive to do proper waste management…
What? This a mandate in law that requires a company to do work in order to comply. Studios will spin out LLCs for a game so that if it fails it doesn't end up as a liability. Unintended consequence: more dead games.
Really the parent company should be held accountable for that. But that is a more general problem with LLCs that is already causing significant harm.
Re: Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
> open source server code if you are going to cease support When I was a senior exec at a big public tech company, there was a product we decided to discontinue and we thought would be nice to just open source. Somehow I ended up in charge of managing that process and was shocked at how complex, time-consuming and expensive it was in a multi-billion dollar, publicly-traded corp vs some code my friends and I wrote. Le…
If the bill is properly worded open sourcing the code shouldn't imply that all 3rd party libraries also have to be open sourced.
> shouldn't imply that all 3rd party libraries also have to be open sourced.
That's a very reasonable way to address the issue of 3rd party licensed IP. I expect something like that will get incorporated into the legislation. In fact, I'm confident it will because well-funded lobbyists will ensure that common sense concern and its very reasonable solution are heard.
Then Electronic Arts and Microsoft will sell their existing server code to newly formed companies (which they happen to own). Then their captive game studios will start releasing new versions where the publicly released "server source code" is five pages of #IfDefs followed by a call to "Start_Totally_3rd_Party_GameServer" in the new library that's not required to be included in the mandated release.
For extra credit, the newly formed 3rd party entity will be incorporated and domiciled in Ireland, Malta or whatever country is currently most tax and currency exchange advantaged. Then the license fees their captive studios have to pay to use the 3rd party library get offshored and tax sheltered - while being large enough amounts to prove this definitely isn't a sham transaction!
To be clear, I don't approve of this myself. In fact, I hate it. But I worked at a high level in a top ten publicly traded tech giant long enough to see how the armies of soul-eating MBAs, lawyers, consultants and lobbyists can subvert anything. Fortunately, only half my soul was eaten and some of it has regrown.
Re: Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California
#200So 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?
it'll be a lot less with this law