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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'

#281

Post by ang_cire »

rafram wrote: post #271
ang_cire wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Some' is a meaningless non-metric. Some people do anything. Actual studies [1] show that the rich are not moving in response to wealth taxes, and in fact when they do move, it's almost never due to taxes. > As we get more data on the post-pandemic period, we increase our knowledge of the major upheavals that took place in New York between 2020 and 2022. Despite the state suffering a deep recession and massive out-mi…

I’m not sure why you’re trying to argue against the idea that people tend to gravitate toward the cheapest option.

Because they don't?

Do you eat at the cheapest restaurant every day? Do you think that every Michelin Star restaurant immediately fails and shutters? Do you think everyone buys the $80 prepaid flip phones, and no one actually buys the $700+ iPhones?

Most people don't gravitate towards the cheapest option (in fact, many people find the cheapest option automatically suspect and won't buy it), but rather want a balance of affordable and desirable. No one living in NYC is doing it because they're gravitating towards the cheapest option in the first place, they're there because it has a high level of desirability comparative to its cost, even as expensive as it is.

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

#282

Post by Manuel_D »

rafram wrote: post #279
Manuel_D wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it? Online services are not terminated. There's no SLA defined in the law: > 60 days before a digital game operator ceases to provide services necessary for the ordinary use of the digital game, the operator shall communicate all of the following information to purchasers and prospective purchasers of the digital game: > (i) The date on which services necessary for the ordinary use of the digital game will ceas…

Laws aren’t interpreted that way. If you realistically can’t use the service, that’s termination.

But again, the players can use the service. The companies scaled back network resources, degrading the experience, but the service is still fundamentally available. Unless they put specific SLAs in the license agreement, the players are still receiving the online services that they advertised.

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

#283

Post by infinite_spin »

Dig1t wrote: post #267
wsve wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blanket dismissal of regulations is about as silly as a blanket dismissal of laws. Some laws are "bad", some are "good", but the point is who do they hurt, and who do they serve? Regulations are tools, like laws, and can be written to serve the needs of the people, for good things.

I'm not even saying this should be dismissed with a blanket dismissal. First example is a reminder that regulation can be bad. Second is an actual concern about this specific regulation. This is a concrete concern about the incentives it creates. There wasn't a single response to this comment about exactly WHY questioning effectiveness of it is irrational.

I think a study of regulatory capture would definitely support your views

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

#284

Post by evanjrowley » 

  Under the bill, companies selling digital games released or resold after January 1, 2027, must provide at least 60 days' notice before terminating service. Furthermore, they must ensure that purchasers can continue to access the game—such as by providing an alternative version or a patch—and must offer refunds if doing so is not possible.
I'm excited about what this could mean for Bethesda games like ESO and Fallout. These franchises have historically been single player. The single-player focus is directly connected to the rich modding communities behind these games.

When online-only ESO and Fallout 76 were released, many longtime players were frustrated at the total lack of control they've enjoyed with prior titles. On top of this, the games are practically impossible to complete when attempting to play them like a single-player game. It makes these games far less immersive compared to their older single-player counterparts.

Looking forward to the far away day when these alternate/patched versions allow Elder Scrolls / Fallout fans the opportunity to fix mistakes made by Bethesda/Zenimax.

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

#285

Post by wsve »

rafram wrote: post #262
wsve wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please reread my initial comment. That's the assumption everyone is making, but WHY would it actually cost so much more? What's so much more expensive? Some games already do this, why would it be so much more expensive for others?

I can only reread your initial comment so many times. You’re still incorrect. Yes, a small subset of games have downloadable server software; the ones that do are able to do so because it’s self-contained and unencumbered by proprietary components that can’t be redistributed. Most games don’t, and they won’t be able to. Licensing restrictions aside, how are you supposed to package a modern microservice-based network…

Consider the infrastructure you're talking about. What parts of the game service would need to be implemented with micro services and/or calls to a cloud computing and storage? It would be matchmaking, storefronts, news updates, etc.

Running a single dedicated server on a home computer to play with whatever community you've curated requires none of these. Any sane game server architecture would already be essentially a single executable since you want performance and synchronicity within a single "match" or "world".

You say most games won't be able to release server software. Can you provide an example of a game which could not possibly be disentangled from its cloud architecture? I'm having trouble thinking of any

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

#286

Post by wsve »

Dig1t wrote: post #267
wsve wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Blanket dismissal of regulations is about as silly as a blanket dismissal of laws. Some laws are "bad", some are "good", but the point is who do they hurt, and who do they serve? Regulations are tools, like laws, and can be written to serve the needs of the people, for good things.

I'm not even saying this should be dismissed with a blanket dismissal. First example is a reminder that regulation can be bad. Second is an actual concern about this specific regulation. This is a concrete concern about the incentives it creates. There wasn't a single response to this comment about exactly WHY questioning effectiveness of it is irrational.

> Second is an actual concern about this specific regulation. This is a concrete concern about the incentives it creates.

Like I said in my OP comment, the problem with saying "this regulation will push devs to subscription-based game models" is that it does not explain why that would happen. It just assumes it would.

This argument to me is like saying "forcing people to wear seatbelts will push them to take the bus instead". Why would this be such a problem that people ditch their whole mode of transit? I see it that way because I can't think of a single case where designing your game server architecture with decommissioning and redistributing to your users in mind would be difficult or costly at all, and I have seen no convincing explanations

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

#287

Post by wsve »

maccard wrote: post #249
RandomGerm4n wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Am I responsible for providing a fallback to EOS, or Steam, or playfab in case their services are decommissioned? In this case, the company offering this service should be responsible for making it possible to host the service independently before discontinuing it. However, games that use such standardized services are actually less problematic in practice. For Steam, for example, there is the Goldberg Steam Emulat…

> In this case, the company offering this service should be responsible for making it possible to host the service independently before discontinuing it So AWS are now contractually required to offer all of their managed services to be self hostable or they can’t be used in games? > For Steam, for example, there is the Goldberg Steam Emulator So open source reverse engineered solutions are ok? Why aren’t they accepta…

The law isn't requiring that all online features of the game be available. Just a minimal viable product to play the base game online. No storefronts, no news prompts, no matchmaking servers, just server lists. You don't need AWS for that.

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

#288

Post by wsve »

phyzix5761 wrote: post #247
wsve wrote: post #142

I'm always shocked by how irrationally anti-regulation this site is. I have yet to see any explanation why this regulation would be, in practice, cost/legally prohibitive in any way. This seems like a consumer protections slam dunk. Yes, you would have to make sure your server application adheres to software licenses before release, just like you do with the client application, or any other piece of software a compan…

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 micro services. A sin…

> A single match might require separate proprietary systems for matchmaking, player inventories, anti cheat, metrics tracking, and database management. Many of those come with licenses that don't allow you to just give away the code for free.

None of those things are required to be supported by this law. It's the minimum viable product to enable multiplayer play.

- Ditch the matchmaking, players can build their own communities and use server lists for discovery - Ditch the anti-cheat if you can't distribute it, it's not necessary for online play - Ditch the metrics, of course - Let the player download their inventory save file or something, idc

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

#289

Post by paradox460 »

RandomGerm4n wrote: post #245
hadlock wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After about 2010 companies stopped providing the server binary. Games like Modern Warfare 2, Battlefield 2, etc could be played by communities in perpetuity on private servers. If the next game (MW3, BF3) were terrible, you didn't have to buy the sequel, what you had was "good enough" and you could wait for the next version to be released in 2-3 years. With the current "closed server" model, you can't get a copy of t…

> After about 2010 companies stopped providing the server binary. Games like Modern Warfare 2, Battlefield 2, etc could be played by communities in perpetuity on private servers. If the next game (MW3, BF3) were terrible, you didn't have to buy the sequel, what you had was "good enough" and you could wait for the next version to be released in 2-3 years. That's not true about Modern Warfare 2. Modern Warfare 2 was th…

Amusingly, all Call of Duties are still basically Quake mods. They've ALL ran on heavily modified quake engine, forked off of ioq3

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

#290

Post by Manuel_D »

db48x wrote: post #272
Manuel_D wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, they'll stop licensing proprietary sever code. But that in turn drives up the cost of game development since they'd have to either purchase redistributable licenses or develop their own networking software. I suspect companies will just scale down the servers to 1 instance with bare minimum support. Technically the online service is still active, thereby eliminating the requirements to distribute source code,…

Why do people keep bringing up source code? It’s just as much a canard as the stupid “nonredistributable middleware” argument. The ideal way for a game company to keep their game alive after they have stopped supporting it is to build it with that in mind from the start. A lot of the server–side components, such as monitoring, authentication, database storage, moderation, anti–cheat, etc, etc can all be made optional…

Middleware isn't just things like matchmaking. Crucial components like client-side prediction, state reconciliation, and other netcode is often part of it. Stripping out all the proprietary components would leave the game in a non-functional state. This isn't just source code, the developers often have to pay license for each server instance that uses the middleware.

> And of course the option remains to simply write a single–player game that runs entirely on the customer’s computer, with no networked components at all.

So the solution is to just stop developing multiplayer games? This is just a laughable response.

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