60 days before shutdown, a game company just needs to transition their game to subscription-required. That gets them out from under this law. Then if enough players subscribe, the company could decide to keep the servers going longer than planned.
The California state assembly has passed the 'Protect Our Games Act'
291–294 of 294 posts
Re: The California state assembly has passed the 'Protect Our Games Act'
#292Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps they should just write games in a way where they can actually release server code when they it shuts down?
Perhaps "they" can write games however they want? If you don't like it, don't do business with them? This is a weird thing to be legislating on.
>Perhaps "they" can write games however they want?
No? I don't want any developer to suddenly "want" to write code that bricks my OS for instance. What if they decide to do this after the game was released and I bought it?
Re: The California state assembly has passed the 'Protect Our Games Act'
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's entertainment. It's ok for entertainment to end Sometimes it ends right after you bought it with no way of knowing it would, or before you bought it. Not everyone gets 1000+ hours out of a title, sometimes the day you install they announce that the servers are going down forever.
I'd rather discuss actual problems people had with specific titles. Hypothetical edge cases always turn into corner cases during cross-examination. If we think about people who bought a game closing on day one we need to think about the people who shop at stores with a no-return policy. I'm not sure who's problem that should be.
>I'd rather discuss actual problems people had with specific titles
Here is one - I never got to play The Crew which got closed in 2024. But I would certainly like to do that now and some time later (10, 20 or even 50 years later). The same goes for Diablo 3 and 4, which did not shut down yet but they might. I just want to be sure that I will be able to play a game in the future. I do replay and reevaluate games, so for me it's important to keep them available all the time. Especially if I paid money for them.
Re: The California state assembly has passed the 'Protect Our Games Act'
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Stripping out all the [critical] proprietary components would leave the game in a non-functional state.
Correct. This is why I said that there would be multiple responses depending on the type of component. Many proprietary components are not critical and could easily be stripped out without harming the End–of–life version of the game, like matchmaking. But obviously that still leaves the critical ones. For those the game developer would obviously have to avoid any license agreement that would be unduly burdensome once the game was in the EOL state. Either there are already components without these onerous license terms, the existing components will be relicensed, new ones will be written and made available under less onerous licensing terms, or developers will just write their own. The market will provide.
> So the solution is to just stop developing multiplayer games?
No, not to stop developing multiplayer games but to stop putting networked components into single–player games. Remember that this all started with The Crew, which was purely a single–player game that was killed precisely because it nevertheless wouldn’t run if no server was available. If you don’t choose to make that design decision in the first place then this law has no effect on you at all. Your game is automatically safe from being killed when you stop selling it. You won’t have to do anything extra at all for players to keep playing it as long as they want to.