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 think a lot about how to do that operation. It's not simple, because if people think a game is going away their behavior changes. And nothing sucks like buying online content for a game right before it shuts down. No matter what you do people will tell you they didn't know the game was shutting down. And if you give away content that you previously sold that also sometimes angers the community.

The problem is when companies know a game isn't working they tend to want to shut it down right away because the money they spend keeping it up is never coming back. And maybe the company is going to die too. So I do support a law for a 60 day notice.

I happen to be shutting down an online game right now.

https://www.tyleo.com/blog/sunsetting-rec-room-how-to-give-a...

The sad truth is that these things have high operating costs, especially if they need moderation. I would guess this bill just makes it more risky to make the games in the first place. It’s already brutally hard to make money on games.

I feel like the effect of this might just be that shutting an online game makes it more likely to take a whole company down if you have to issue refunds. Alternatively, it might push multiplayer games towards other business models like ads, free-to-play, or subscription.

I doubt it's possible for legislation to mandate meaningful compliance regarding something as dynamic and rapidly evolving as online games. Despite good intentions, such legislation often results in unintended consequences including distorting the market, creating perverse incentives or even making the problem worse.

Serious problems are already apparent. Games offered “solely for the duration of [a] subscription." aren't regulated, which will greatly accelerate the death of perpetual licensing. A world where no games are available for outright purchase and offline use would be disastrous for players and historical preservation.

It would be better if they'd focus on narrower problems where they can make a positive difference. For example, mandating a freely distributable end-of-life patch to remove online activation from DRMed games. Creating a patch and uploading it once to the Internet Archive isn't a big enough burden to make companies modify their biz model or deploy armies of lawyers and MBAs to circumvent. When it comes to rapidly evolving technology, the best regulations are clearly defined, narrowly scoped and cheaper to comply with than avoid or game.

I appreciate the sentiment, but this law looks counter-productive if I'm reading it right. This is OBVIOUSLY going to push companies to make games into a subscription service to bypass the law even if they wouldn't have normally:

> (b) This section does not apply to any of the following:

> (1) Any subscription-based service that advertises or offers for sale access to any digital game solely for the duration of the subscription.

This exemption NEEDS to be removed. If a game's official servers are taken down, the community needs to be given the ability to keep running it themselves. Full stop. No exceptions.

This appears to treat subscription style games and free to play with in game purchases differently than other games.

I would assume if that law passed the simplest compliance would just be to charge subscriptions and stop selling games directly. It seems like doing that would comply with that law without requiring much to change?

I think it's the right moment to acknowledge that Epic Games handled discontinuation of Unreal series well and responsibly [0] and how standalone servers were good for community.

* When GameSpy announced shutdown, patches were released to use Epic released the "post-GameSpy" patch, replacing the GameSpy servers with Epic's master servers for Unreal Tournament 3 [1] * Older Unreal series games later were transferred for maintenance to OldUnreal [2], and also made free.

At the same time, they are not open source, nor source available. So, there is an entity, that owns the code and maintains it, without the hassle of opensourcing it.

This is because the series have a strong community, which was in large part formed because the standalone servers, prior to algorithmic matchmaking, allowed people to gather there and learn to be social to each other and learn gaming etiquette. You had to play strategies for repeated games and be civil to others. Modern matchmaking strips us of that - you play with others once and go separate ways, so you don't have to deal with consequences and can use one-time game strategies, which leads to poor behavior and less enjoyment. Yes, you had players of drastically different skill levels on the same servers, and that was a good thing. Skilled players could teach newbies, newbies could learn the gaming etiquette and see what's possible, instead of boiling in the same pot with others playing completely different games than on the other skill levels. You had the core game and the social game on top of it, now we are all alone in our rooms interacting with strangers we will never see or play again with nor against.

Maybe Epic is not the best or the most loved company (compared to Valve) but I respect, that they understood that "this cow has gave us enough milk already", and could part ways with it, leaving existing community satisfied.

[0]: https://www.epicgames.com/unrealtournament

[1]: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/13210/view/291772582...

[2]: https://oldunreal.com/

The article is really vague and a bit misleading, but the bill text appears to be surprisingly readable, and honestly not much longer than the article.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...

This happened to me back in 2024 when Supercell abruptly shut down the game “Clash Mini”. Lost $100+ in in-game purchases.

They did offer to transfer things to other Supercell games, but that had no value to me as I didn’t play those.

I complained to the App Store, but Apple refused to refund purchases made more than 60 days ago (IIRC).

I know things don’t necessarily last forever, especially digital assets, but to spend a lot of money on something only to have it shut down and made unusable within months really stings.

I'm on the treadmill so this may appear jumbled.

Bought PGA Tour 2k21 for $50. In October the servers shut down completely neutering the game. I think you're allowed to play a few courses still. But the career mode, which is why I originally bought the game, was completely turned off. Mind you that career mode had zero Internet needed features. It's like a sports franchise mode.

So good on this bill. 2K should rot for deprecating a game I bought for $50 only 5 years ago.

Do they need to put some funds in escrow? Or will they just shut down the entire company and let the players sue for it. (I know that big publishers won't do that, but I'm sure the lawyers could create shell corporations to solve that problem.)

Or they could just demonstrate that they have an offline play capability right from the moment they sell it.

Most "gamers" don't want to pay $5 for a game you spent 10,000 hours slaving to make. They will complain the game was too short when Steam shows they spent 10+ hours playing it.

Now they want more.

This bill would likely cause game studios to release games exclusively via subscription plans as an unintended consequence.

One thing i think is missing from this discussion is that the problem is larger than just games, and I wish legislation was wider. It's good that games are used as an example and flag bearer due to wide appeal, but what about other software that requires online services, like the old programs that talk to activation servers?

All this will do is move all games to a subscription model with an N-day subscription waver packed in the box.

If the government funds it I'd love to do maintenance on baldur's gate v1 for the rest of my life.

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?

Note, this law would affect less than 1% of all games _released_. Just that those happens to be the games that a sizeable part of the population plays. And even then, you spend more tying your game to a online service than not doing so in the first place.

California is really trying to become Europe with regulation as their primary GDP.

> the act would not apply to completely free games and games offered “solely for the duration of [a] subscription. Any other game offered for sale in California on or

Well, I predict we'll start seeing more games offered "solely for the duration of a subscription". And also games spun out into their own subsidiary that will just go bankrupt and not comply.

So 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.

Found this quote from the game industry interesting and depressing:

> Consumers receive a license to access and use a game, not an unrestricted ownership interest in the underlying work

Could the game industry just side step this legislation by moving games entirely to a subscription model, with no upfront purchase? When they stop offering the subscription, you lose access to the game. Similar to how various online SaaS businesses work.

I'd rather have legislation to give immunity from infringement to hackers who are either reverse engineering or cloning the game that has been shut down instead.

Look, patches would be nice. I don't want a refund, I want to continue playing the game.

What I'd prefer is modders not getting sued when they try to implement the online aspect for free, heck or paid at that stage.

If the game is popular enough, the community tends to take care of it. Maybe some legal form of officially abandoning the game?

> As currently amended, the act would not apply to completely free games and games offered “solely for the duration of [a] subscription. Any other game offered for sale in California on or after January 1, 2027, would be subject to the law if it passes.

So they just make their game free two months before they want to close?

I love California for these laws because even though their jurisdiction is technically limited, it makes no sense for the companies to not make the changes available nation wide.

If this law comes, why would games not just go full-subscription and circumvent this?

Seems to me like this will incentivize upgrades in a game being very limited time, tied to an event or season (though many games already do this)

Not a bad idea, but why does this only apply to games?

I prime example of other software this would have benefited is AutoCAD.

People who refused the conversion to a subscription, and maintained their "lifetime" licenses, where shut down after a couple of years.

Wish they'd extend it to all apps, I'm over paying money to developers who cut and run while using it as a way to land jobs at Microsoft and AWS

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46768909

JuiceSSH have since shut their site down after that last round of attention so I guess they really have no intention of open sourcing or refunding.

https://web.archive.org/web/20260116112028/https://juicessh....

Games?! can we also include infrastructure-critical software

This makes the Minecraft model look all that much better than it already was, users pay for an account, the servers are self hosted by the community, as far as I can tell on the surface level Minecraft would already comply with this legislation.

Looks like it will just push game publishers to a subscription model.

> The ESA also said the bill would impose unreasonable expectations on publishers regarding licensing rights for music or IP rights, which are often negotiated on a time-limited basis. “A legal requirement to keep games playable indefinitely could place publishers in an impossible position—forcing them to renegotiate licenses indefinitely or alter games in ways that may not be legally or technically feasible,” they wrote.

Wah wah munchie wah.

This would kick in next year. You have time to make contingency plans including a kill switch to put in shitty royalty free music if you need to.

> “Consumers receive a license to access and use a game, not an unrestricted ownership interest in the underlying work,” the ESA wrote. The eventual shutdown of outdated or obsolete games is “a natural feature of modern software,” the group added, especially when that software requires online infrastructure maintenance.

Go fuck yourselves.

My principles on this are:

1. If a game no longer works then the publisher loses copyright protections. This would often apply to online-only games. There are other games that are a mix of online and offline play that should be treated slightly differently;

2. If the hardware to run a game is no longer sold (eg legacy consoles), then there should be copyright protections for anyone making emulators to make the game work;

3. After a certain period of the underlying hardware and game not being sold, the game itself loses copyright protections. Say... 5 years? Maybe even less;

4. Loss of any online services sold with a game should mean that there is no copyright claim against third-parties making their own servers.

Making a game server isn't necessarily that hard. Forcing companies to open source their servers is problematic and may not even be possible if, say, the studio shuts down. Gamers are a resourceful lot however. I mean, just look at emulators. They can make their own servers if they need them. Just make the law indemnify them against copyright claims if the studio/publisher has switched off those online services and the problem will largely take care of itself.

The rest is just treating games like orphan works. There was a time when identifying a copyright holder was hard and extending copyright had to be actively done or it just expired. If they abandon a game this way, they should effectively just lose copyright (IMHO).

I expect this to be somewhat of a forcing function. If a studio really wants to maintain copyright to a game they no longer sell for a console that nobody makes anymore, then porting it to Steam and continuing to sell it is their path to maintaining copyright. And that should make it playable still.

I mean, if government overreach (IP, DMCA 1201) is preventing us from using the things we pay money for in any way we might, might as well add more government overreach on top to claw some rights back?

The classic 'it's sold as pro-consumer legislation therefore it must be good' we in Europe are very, very used to.

Commiserations, California (and likely the rest of the US) - all your games will now be subscriptions.

I guess they will organize these games as separate companies now and let them go bankrupt instead?

In the case of companies or individuals that have no money, employees or assets left, how can they possibly issue refunds? It seems bill is eliminating/forcing out the little guy in favor of the more established, wealthier competitors. California laws and their legislators keep on getting stricter and weirder.

Thank you for letting me in! Sol Roth PS: Hope you like the décor. I’m redecorating your thoughts permanently.

Laws like this superficially seem good because it's not nice when online games shut down without a patch but they have the harmful effect of eliminating the long tail of — you could say — low quality offerings, that don't offer these features

It's better to have more offerings on the market, even low quality ones, than fewer. Limiting the low quality offerings does not result in high quality ones naturally emerging to substitute them. It just leads to fewer offerings.

There are two things I think that low quality offerings are good at doing. First, they're good at experimenting with new features. If it's very cheap to try a new feature, because the cost of deploying a new game is quite low and you're basically pumping out a bunch of marginally valuable games, then new features get iterated on more quickly. That eventually flows back up to the better quality games. The second benefit is that it meets some niche needs, where a certain player wants something that's very unusual or otherwise non-existent on the market. And this 5x9 half-baked game provides it. Again, it's very few people who want this feature, but there are a huge number of features like that. It's a very long tail.

I moderate an online community and we introduced democratic rulemaking and people kept proposing and then voting in rules to restrict this or that kind of post because it was low quality or distracted people or whatever and eventually the forum became so much less usable because of the cumulative effect of all these small restrictions. That effect of making the forum less usable was most pronounced on newcomers, who didn't know all the rules and basically couldn't break in because of the barrier to understanding how to generate content that complied with the morass of restrictions.

I don't see any world in which these "stop killing games" laws result in anything close to what the proponents are asking for, for multiple reasons, one of the biggest being that the proponents don't have a clear, coherent, cohesive vision that takes into account all of the side-effects, and everyone you talk to in this space has a slightly different idea of what they want, and even the main proponent, Ross Scott, has a vague vision that changes from month to month, and shifts in mututally-exclusive ways depending on what objection is currently being responded to. I think what will happen is we'll get (A) a law that doesn't work due to some glaring loophole (such as being able to skirt the law by simply giving the community the server binary with no documentation) or (B) a law that DOES work but is so impossible to ahere to that companies simply accept that they'll be sued and bake it into the price of the game.

This is some remnant of the stop killing games initiative no doubt. Bad for the industry as a whole, and piratesoftware didn’t deserve to be dragged for being against it, in spite of his other flaws.

"Think of the consumer!". Blatant government overreach is so hot right now.

This is the main reason I never bother playing new MMOs or online-only games, after a few that I liked shut down after barely 1 year.

Hellgate London, Paragon...

The law should go further: If an IP isn't revived within N (say 5) years, release the source code for the servers.

Can't say I support this. Legislative bodies should be dealing with actual problems in the world that meaningfully make the lives of regular people worse, not gamer entitlement.

California seems to be a leading grounds for online law as well for the technology itself.

Lots of clearly needed specific laws. Europe is fine too, but they err on the side of caution and smother actual innovation.

Which is interesting because the Silicon Valley companies themselves incorporate in DW anyways, so it seems to be a separate consumer led legal trend.

Dumb. Just make it legal to reverse engineer the software, the community will take care of the rest, in a way the community actually wants, instead of getting just the bare minimum compliance from the original company, if they even still exist.

The "final boss" of bad legislation. Often, Government intrusion into the markets is worth the side effects.

But in this case, even the best-case outcome is extremely dumb. Companies are forced to expend resources just so a few niche hobbyists are not inconvenienced. And there will be side effects, ultimately including geo-fencing of games to exclude California. It's a big market, but you can't make up for a net loss with volume.

This is the road of stupid that stop killing games has paved.

So 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 microservices.

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.

Disentangling the actual game logic from these third party platforms like AWS or Epic Online Services requires months of rewriting code. At that point you're basically re-inventing the wheel on so many technologies that your costs go up exponentially.

Games are rarely built entirely from scratch by a single company and are usually packed with licensed third party software like proprietary network code, commercial physics engines, or specific anti cheat software. Because the studio doesn't own the rights to distribute these proprietary tools to the public for free then releasing a standalone server forces them to spend extensive legal and development hours stripping out the restricted code and replacing it with open source alternatives.

Releasing server code also exposes the inner workings of the company's technology. If a studio uses the same proprietary engine or backend framework for their active money making games then releasing the server code for a dead game essentially hands hackers and competitors a roadmap to exploit their current profitable titles.