This bill would likely cause game studios to release games exclusively via subscription plans as an unintended consequence.
Nah, nobody will buy games with subscription plans.
Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California
351–360 of 506 posts
Re: Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
it'll be a lot less with this law
Ok, and why you think that would be? Because games were like this before. Small and big. There are even modern games that are like this.
What does an indie game that's starting to get a little bit of funding from sales do? You know, the way they take off and quit their jobs, deliver excellence, etc.
Do they now have to throw that money into an endowment in case their game starts failing and they can't afford servers? (enough to cover the time to patch in a local update).
Take all the games that started being able to make multiplayer with the steam SDKs. If steam changes their P2P relay (which they've done), what obligations does an indie dev with a defunct game have? Also extend this argument to all the amazing middleware that's helped indies do multiplayer well; are they just back to open source first principles? (side note: Godot stuff is quite nice now, but a law limiting it to that is pretty harsh; I'd much rather have people be able to license their middleware).
Your "games were like this before" comes off ignorant like a "we've always used rocks to make fire" type argument; you can of course ship games without any third party abstractions, with dedicated client server architectures, but I'd rather not have the option to not do so structurally financially kneecapped. Shipping a multiplayer game has gotten WAY easier over the past 10 years
Of course there ARE modern games like this, but not all modern games are like this. Just because it's possible doesn't mean it's easy. There are tradeoffs that I feel aren't being considered.
his bill would create an incentive that I just don't think the juice is worth the squeeze.
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Take among us; what does it do for matchmaking architecture?
If this bill had a carveout for games with under some ~$200k+ of sales, it wouldn't be a problem, but I'm worried about structurally affecting the multiplayer landscape for indie devs. I want them to be able to patch in their multiplayer after they get some sales without having to immediately make some contingency plan, since the time when you're considering this seems to be when indies are pretty vulnerable.
Re: Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you're noticing - that companies suddenly started closed-sourcing their server code, isn't just something that happened for no reason. Internet connections got fast, and it enabled more complex games like MMORPGs and MOBAs which are an order of magnitude more complex than the shooter games you're probably thinking of (Quake III?) A LOT of architectural thinking goes into scaling MMORPGs, and it starts at the dat…
This whole thing doesn't apply to MMORPGs to begin with because they're all already subscription based. If I understand the main grievance correctly, the problem is giving the consumers the wrong impression they're making a normal one-time-payment PURCHASE and then rendering the item they purchased unusable later.
MMORPGs aren't all subscription based anymore.
Guild Wars 2 Amazon New World Black desert elder scrolls online
Re: Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California
#354So what's preventing companies from giving games for free and requiring a subscription or one time membership fee for online play? They'd only be required to refund the full price of the game: $0.
That’s an honest business model, absent in game purchases or user generated content.
Re: Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California
#355[flagged]
Re: Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California
#356"Think of the consumer!". Blatant government overreach is so hot right now.
Re: Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California
#357It 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…
AI today may be able to streamline that process.
Have it read and compare the code with what it knows about open source. Many AI engines can also google that and give a comprehensive list of similarities.
Reduces the list of things to check by maybe orders of magnitude and months to days.
Re: Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California
#358It 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…
When the 6 person startup I worked for shut down, the founders spent a few months of their own time to open source the product because people still liked it, they just didn't wanna pay for it.
So people were allowed to selfhost.
Of course this probably doesn't scale or work for every company but I thought it was nice to see.
Re: Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry to hear about your situation. For the game you're shutting down online services for, forgive my nieve question but how much work is it to expose an environment variable called `GAME_SERVER_URL` and then document the API contract it expects on the other end? Servers have a real cost, nobody is denying that, but I think the people who bought the game should have an option/alternative in case the servers are down.
We looked into it. Hackers got part of the way there so we decided not to make a change. They might be able to do it after the title is fully sunset and the team disbanded. We basically have to get as much done on a 3/4 month timeline as possible and it isn’t a priority like saving content or refunding gift cards is. Shutting down is a lot of work.
> We looked into it. Hackers got part of the way there so we decided not to make a change. They might be able to do it after the title is fully sunset and the team disbanded.
This doesn't actually answer the question about how hard it would be. What's the specific level of effort required, and some amount of why so people can learn from your experience.
> We basically have to get as much done on a 3/4 month timeline as possible and it isn’t a priority like saving content or refunding gift cards is. Shutting down is a lot of work.
I'd rather have a working game then a refund of a gift card. Including if that means I have to stand up my own servers.
Priorities I guess
Re: Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
Remember back in the old days when you could just run your own game server, even though it wasn't open source? That would work too. Or peer to peer LAN gaming, why is that not popular any more? Designing a game to use developer hosted servers is a choice they made. Probably to squeeze money from microtransactions.
because real P2P is hard for realtime stuff. Be it timing or network port forwarding issues.
Timing and scalability are probably the biggest issues with realtime P2P applications. Scalability is becoming a bit less of an issue; with mid-splits becoming the norm on cable internet services and 5G SA rolling out, there's just a lot more bandwidth to go around.
Timing issues can be worked around and GPS modules are cheap.
NAT problems aren't usually that bad. Only a minority of networks use symmetric NAT implementations, with most seeming to be using port-restricted cone NAT (EIM/APDF), which can still communicate with any other NAT implementation using endpoint-independent mapping (EIM). Most CGNAT implementations that I've encountered use EIM, with some also doing endpoint-independent filtering (EIF). Between UDP hole-punching, UPnP, NAT-PMP, and IPv6, it's usually possible to establish a P2P connection between 2 endpoints.
A game could use a hybrid client/server and P2P model, with the option to run entirely P2P while accepting its limitations.