The California State Assembly Has Passed the 'Protect Our Games Act'
93 points - today at 7:55 PM
SourceThey are going to do what movie industry is already doing: create shell company for release of each game.
Then they will shut down the company when they want, and there will be nobody to come for.
> The bill applies to digitally sold games. However, it excludes games provided via subscription services, free-to-play games, and games that are inherently playable offline indefinitely. It also prohibits the continued sale or distribution of games that have become unusable due to service termination.
I believe this is the key paragraph. I wonder if this will be an incentive towards making more games qualify for those exceptions. I think the previous cases where this act would apply are few but good thing they wouldn't increase under this act.
California and meaningless feel good legislation with massive loopholes? A match made in heaven!
If this is how the bill ends up being enacted, it will only push more big game developers into making their titles subscription only. A win for gamers' rights, I suppose.
It's not meaningless feel-good legislation, it's actively harmful by disincentivizing a bad thing, in favor of an even worse thing. See also car fuel economy standards that push car makers into killing the wagon market segment in favor of SUVs.
I think it's more likely that the big studios will start rolling out trivial offline modes (less risky) rather than overhaul their revenue models (more risky).
RobotToaster
today at 8:30 PM
I can see them adding a $1 per year subscription at the very least.
meatmanek
today at 8:41 PM
At least that somewhat aligns incentives between players and the game studio. If an old game has a long-lasting player base, then a modest subscription makes it more likely that the studio would keep the servers up and running, if not actively patching the game. With a game that you pay for up-front, a long-lived player base can be a liability for the company (ongoing costs without many new purchases.)
It seems similar to operating an arcade or a movie theater and saying that you can have thousands of people enter but then only having space for a couple while still taking everyone's money.
paradox460
today at 8:49 PM
Why is this a problem? Quake 3 came out a quarter century ago, yet there are still community host servers available
tadfisher
today at 9:06 PM
Quake 3 can also be played fully offline, for various measures of "play" and "fully".
Why not $0?
greenavocado
today at 9:13 PM
$1 refundable subscription
incentive towards making more games qualify for those exceptions
Yes, please, produce more "games that are inherently playable offline indefinitely".
MadnessASAP
today at 8:23 PM
Of course its an incentive, however the disincentives to purchasing (subscribing/spending), and thus producing, such games still exist.
ocdtrekkie
today at 8:59 PM
So this only really applies to games you have to purchase once but are online-only? That's... an incredibly narrow law, that only covers a class of games which are particularly stupid by design. (Continuous cost without continuous revenue.)
Paracompact
today at 9:18 PM
I assume you're actually a gamer, and not just an economist speculating on a market you're not exposed to? Because I don't know how to reconcile your comment with my reality. There are tons of live-service single-purchase games, I would even say they are the overwhelmingly default model compared to WoW-style subscription models. If you want an answer to your "Continuous cost without continuous revenue" riddle, the answer is in-game purchases, DLC, attracting new accounts over time, and the unspoken unadvertised promise "we can cut our losses at any time and shut down servers."
idle_zealot
today at 9:07 PM
> Continuous cost without continuous revenue
That would be the case if the publisher had any intent to actually keep the service online. Empirically they do not, hence the law.
Akronymus
today at 9:06 PM
It also covers games with any form of MTX, even if the base game is free. So most live service games.
irishcoffee
today at 9:15 PM
We shall call it the Diablo 4 law.
Releasing server-side code would be a non-starter for lots of companies. For one, many of them don't actually own all of the code they use to implement the game server. There's lots of proprietary middleware in use in online games.
Perhaps a workaround is to just have 1 server online indefinitely. Technically the online services are still functional - the match queue times would just be very, very large.
The reasonable compromise should be to force devs to release server binaries if they are not willing to run the servers themselves.
I don't think forcing a person or business to divulge their intellectual property, simply because they no longer wish to provide downstream products or services, is reasonable. That said, as a consumer I really don't like when something goes away. Overwatch 1 was probably the most brutal experience for me. In the end, I don't think anyone has any kind of special entitlements here.
The server binaries will almost always include other proprietary information that the studio will not want to release. Any sanitation of this binary further condemns this as a silly idea because now you are also compelling the individual or business to do additional (presumably unpaid) work so that arbitrary consumers can use their products or services indefinitely.
If they dont want to release the source then just keep running the servers! I think its ridiculous that people can buy games and the games just stop working and its ok because of some legalese that literally no one reads. Alternatively, why not just align your incentives with the user and charge subscriptions.
Games are interesting because players will sink a lot of time and sometimes money in and so it goes beyond a smart alarm clock or a fitness tracker imo.
circuit10
today at 8:28 PM
If this was about open source software I’d agree about not forcing people to do additional work, but if you’re selling something for money you should be obligated to do the bare minimum of stripping secrets out of a binary so the product you sold can actually work (and this will be barely any work if it’s designed with this in mind in the first place)
We already obligate them to do other basic necessities for consumer protection such as refunding or replacing faulty products
> The server binaries will almost always include other proprietary information that the studio will not want to release.
Or even information that they are contractually forbidden from releasing. A typical scenario would be a game developed as a fork of a proprietary codebase which was licensed from another company. Forcing the licensee to release material would infringe on the rights of the licensor.
There's also scenarios like games that depended on GameSpy being forced out into the cold. Battle for Middle Earth 2 is a good example of this. The LOTR rights expiring isn't what got them. It was another provider going away in a puff of smoke and not enough player base to justify a complete rewrite of the backend.
https://www.ea.com/news/update-on-ea-titles-hosted-on-gamesp...
circuit10
today at 8:32 PM
It would at least be reasonable to expect this for future games, just treat the server binary the same way as the client in terms of what code you include (there way be some more involved if they have to migrate off a reusable codebase but I think it’s worth it)
I don't think it's reasonable for a law to dictate how software must be developed. If a developer wants to create some software by taking some licensed code and modifying it, that's their prerogative - it seems rather overreaching for the law to mandate that any licensed code must be structured as a library. (And in practice it'd be rather limiting for that to be the case.)
Almost every law that exists about software exists to dictate what a consumer is or isn't allowed to do with software on their own computer using their own hardware.
For once, there is a law that actually dictates the responsibilities that a developer has to the customer, and all that responsibility states is that the developer can not revoke the use of software that a customer has already fully paid for under certain narrow circumstances; somehow this is what you find to be unreasonable?
circuit10
today at 8:54 PM
It is of course reasonable to restrict what you can do with a product you’re selling for money. There are plenty of laws and regulations that already do this. Without these kinds of laws intellectual property wouldn’t even exist - copyright was only created to benefit society by providing an incentive for people to create and invent things
It’s no different from mandating that the software can’t be malware that puts a ransom on your data, contain other people’s copyrighted content without permission, or just not work despite you claiming that it does when you sold it
And it’s not mandating that anything is structured in a particular way, just that the game works as the buyer would expect and how they achieve that is up to them
mschuster91
today at 9:03 PM
> Or even information that they are contractually forbidden from releasing.
Laws trump contracts.
singpolyma3
today at 9:06 PM
True. Better would be to eliminate society damage like "intellectual property" and require everything to be available regardless
xboxnolifes
today at 8:45 PM
Company's only exist so far as state law allows them to operate within them. It's not forcing them to do something after some point in time, it's a requirement to be a business at all.
arikrahman
today at 8:58 PM
The binaries can be obfuscated.
jandrewrogers
today at 9:07 PM
Not meaningfully. AI-guided reverse-engineering is very effective.
This also isn't relevant to third-party code obtained under license. It is a de facto restriction on code dependencies, which may significantly increase development costs.
While AI isn't particularly good with obfuscated code, it is true that code obfuscation in most old games can be removed relatively easily. The attack and defense state-of-the-art has moved on from those days.
redsocksfan45
today at 8:29 PM
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Akronymus
today at 9:15 PM
No, the reasonable compromise should be that the game remains playable, how that is achieved is up to the dev. Some will release the binaries, some make the spec open to the public for people to implement their own, some will patch out the online requirement, etc...
The developers may not have licenses for all the components of the server-side code. Lots of proprietary middleware is in use in online games.
It would be enough to guarantee no legal threats against users who reverse-engineer the protocol and implement their own server. (A catchy name for it: "Fair Game Act".)
kristiandupont
today at 9:04 PM
The backend for a game is not just an .exe file. It can be a mess of a system that relies on all kinds of services that need maintenance and that one dev who knows how to reset the cache.
I agree that it's shitty that buyers can lose access to a game they bought, but I really struggle to see how this could function practically.
What if, as a very high number do, the server uses something like a proprietary SQL database?
mschuster91
today at 9:04 PM
So what, dedicated hackers will find a way around that. There's bigger fish to fry.
doctorpangloss
today at 8:15 PM
i don't know, do game developers have a right to sell a Remastered Multiplayer Edition later? in my opinion, yes.
Government forced speech is never reasonable. If you don't like the arrangement, just don't buy the game. Tell them why you didn't buy the game. Hope for a better future where more of the industry is built on open source. That's all anyone can do. That's all anyone should be able to do.
> Government forced speech is never reasonable.
Government forced speech includes food companies needing to add ingredient labels on packaging including allergen info, landlords needing to notify tenants before entering their homes, stores having to post accurate prices for the products they sell, and employers having to provide workers with safety data sheets for the hazardous materials they work with. These are all perfectly reasonable. Thanks to government forced speech we have more freedom/rights and better lives.
There's always someone willing to blame the victim.
The answer to companies committing fraud is not "buyer beware".
What are you proposing then? The government is not allowed to compel speech for good reason.
That’s not a Carte Blanche that forbids the government from everything.
The government can compel speech food and other producers to print content and nutritional labels on their products. The government can compel speech on a yearly basis when we file taxes. The can compel speech such as guidance maps and websites to be accessible to the blind (ADA). They can compel vehicle owners to provide insurance and ownership information, which is a kind of speech.
Welp, better get rid of all nutritional facts, allergy warnings, medical side effect notices and all the other signage mandated by government for your safety.
ppseafield
today at 8:44 PM
This is not just free speech, it's commerce, and the government has the ability to regulate commerce. Warranties and lemon laws are not regulating speech - they're regulating sales and the legal requirements for those sales. Providing a method for playing a game a customer purchased after the company decides to abandon it is putting a legal requirement on the sale of goods.
charcircuit
today at 8:39 PM
So just make every game free to play and then require a paying to unlock the actual game.
idle_zealot
today at 9:08 PM
As ever it will come down to judicial discretion whether trivial word games are allowed to nullify the law or not.
Akronymus
today at 9:13 PM
That'd IMO count as a monetary consideration, and thus not be excempt.
phendrenad2
today at 8:18 PM
I think this will cause a big schism in the Stop Killing Games movement. Game devs who were sympathetic to the movement will expect that this is enough, but a lot of people in the movement will be unsatisfied with the carveouts for MMORPGs and XBOX Game Pass and the like.
Akronymus
today at 9:12 PM
As someone in the movement since basically the beginning, this bill is enough in a lot of areas.
Subscription games already always had a "no pay, no play" expectation, so I don't see any problem with that carveout. The only real problem I can see is that in-game purchases in free to play games are not additionally explicitly named. (Though, "no monetary considerations" shouldn't include ftp + mtx)
Also, most gamepass games are available for purchase as well, so I don't see the problem there either, except the possibility that a game is removed from gamepass so you lose access despite paying, but that's something for the courts to figure out.
A lot of people in the movement think game companies are the root problem when what they actually have a problem with is current copyright law.
redsocksfan45
today at 8:37 PM
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This what California's political machinery is focused on? Rather than the colossal waste that is the high speed rail project, or rampant corrupt use of State and local funds for social welfare projects that go nowhere?
I understand you can focus on two things at the same time, and moonshot projects are worth it. (More NASA funding please.) But as a California taxpayer I can't take our government seriously.
thinkingtoilet
today at 8:56 PM
What's important is you came here, didn't address the article at all, and rambled off some talking points.
So instead of whole products sold at a one time price, there will be more and more subscription based services micro-transaction slop. 10/10 California. Never change.
But right now we have games that you have purchased for a one-time price, the developer revokes your ability to play it years later, and you have no recourse.