Bill to block publishers from killing online games advances in California

Post by fyredge » Mon, May 18, 2026, 4:12 PM UTC

phendrenad2 wrote: post #370

fyredge wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unintended consequences is the price of progress. The alternative is to continue farming by hand, and carry after from the river for your daily needs. We legislate away unintended consequences, that is the job of government. We put in laws and remove them if they are unsuitable. Analysis paralysis does no one any good.

You can't think of any cases where unintended consequences dominated the equation and made the initiative completely detrimental? I can. The cookie consent popups we all have to click on every website started out with good intentions, wouldn't you agree? And how has that overall turned out? Are we educating people about privacy or are we just producing pointless pixel updates and burning the ozone layer?

Post by furyofantares » Mon, May 18, 2026, 8:52 PM UTC

fluoridation wrote: post #315

furyofantares wrote: post #269

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Ah, I see. Well, the post I was responding to reads to me like a denial of the existence of games like Among Us when it says it wouldn't affect three person dev teams making games on a shoestring budget, and gives off the weird implication that it would only affect big budget games. That said, I don't mind a tangent, and I have built services for large multiplayer games and it really is not that bad.

A simple multiplayer game like Among Us would also have a similarly simple server. There was never any reason not to have included that code in the client to support LAN play from the start. In concept, the gameplay is no different from a deathmatch game in, say, Quake 3 Arena. It's a small group of players sharing a level and interacting with each other in various ways.

Post by account42 » Tue, May 19, 2026, 8:24 AM UTC

mrandish wrote: post #104

georgeecollins wrote: post #40

It 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…

Post by account42 » Tue, May 19, 2026, 8:32 AM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #368

Defletter wrote: post #253

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Different person here, it's probably because they defensively reject anything that forces anyone to do anything, or would increase prices outside of market forces. Every argument that's used against this kind of legislation was also used against putting airbrakes on trains. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Seriously. If you ever want to see a discussion thread that demonstrates the difference between “reasons” and “excuses” (by being full of the latter), just propose a law forcing game companies to do literally anything and watch the replies.

Post by account42 » Tue, May 19, 2026, 8:42 AM UTC

RobotToaster wrote: post #317

hparadiz wrote: post #143

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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.

If they're spun out as an LLC then there's also zero legal risk to to the parent company to dumping the server code to GitHub as open source.