> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Would it? Online services are not terminated. There's no SLA defined in the law:
> 60 days before a digital game operator ceases to provide services necessary for the ordinary use of the digital game, the operator shall communicate all of the following information to purchasers and prospective purchasers of the digital game:
> (i) The date on which services necessary for the ordinary use of the digital game will cease.
> (ii) Any services that will no longer be provided by the operator.
> (iii) Any game features that will no longer be available to the purchaser.
> (iv) Any known security risks that may result from the cessation of services.
> (v) How the purchaser can continue to use the digital game, or obtain a refund, pursuant to paragraph (2).
Scaling in the number of game servers isn't termination of service, though, and would not match the conditions laid out above.
Even if this law just caused companies to put into their sales contracts that they will support the servers to a certain date X years in the future and then handling of the online services would pass to a third party that might charge a nominal fee to administer the service, that would be an enormous win for the free market (in that it makes obvious what was ambiguous about a good) and for people both better knowing how a good will function in the future and what future costs there might be. In a way, this could just force companies to provide the equivalent of a warranty for the functioning of the online aspects of the software.
People far too often forget the absolutely vital aspect information plays in the free market, and anything that increases information (for example, how long a good should be expected to continue to function) is a net good, when compared to a complete lack of information about that.
It looks less like a ban on killing games, and more like a road-map for how publishers could change products/marketing/T&Cs to avoid flak and liability.
I’ve thought about how to introduce a bill and find sponsors for extending first sale and related rights to digital goods. I understand the current terms and licensing, but we’ve lost too much to non-transferable contracts and millennials and later will likely have no books, music, or games that can be inherited by their children. It’s crazy that after thousands of years of sharing copies of writings, hundreds of years of sharing recordings, and decades of sharing games, we’re going to give it all up because it’s a license now.
The problem is, where to even start? I would think EFF would be spearheading something like this, but I haven’t come across anything. There have been attempts in the past, but they don’t seem to have ongoing support.
Writing is on the wall for more subscriptions. California will never learn - killed hollywood with most production being moved overseas, and now gaming.
I wonder if they will do something similar for software
I'm always shocked by how irrationally anti-regulation this site is. I have yet to see any explanation why this regulation would be, in practice, cost/legally prohibitive in any way. This seems like a consumer protections slam dunk.
Yes, you would have to make sure your server application adheres to software licenses before release, just like you do with the client application, or any other piece of software a company may use or release. What popular libraries are we concerned about no longer being usable because of this? Remember, this is server architecture. Networking libraries? ENet is distributable, so is Valve's GameNetworkingSockets.
Yes, it'd ask developers to write their servers with this possible/inevitable transition in mind. Developers will plan ahead for that, and I have a very hard time imagining the server architecture would change much at all. A dedicated company-owned server is just a beefier home computer with load balancers and matchmaking. Drop those two, slap a server list on the client, and you're golden.
There's so many renditions of these style bills that it's hard to keep track what's in this specific one.
From what I can tell this one doesn't include provisions to protect indie shops/solo devs. The entire time spent developing a game is a net loss until release (and probability wise, probably still a loss then). So this is adding more upfront cost to devs.
The bill text I found is also one of the more generic versions I've seen. Specifically this line
>the ordinary use of the game
This is quite broad. I've seen some supporters of this style bill push for 'offline play' being a requirement. For instance, an mmo raid may require 20 players. If after the death of the game getting 20 players is impossible, I have seen people push for ai (just the game version) so it would be possible, or a patch to make the content possible for 1. Each of which are development time that serves no benefit to making money.
There's also the likelihood of the server architecture requiring many moving pieces. Think if fortnite died tomorrow how many different servers it would take to host. Could an argument be made that an end user couldn't be expected to launch a dozen aws services? More dev time, more costs.
Now the day 1 proponents would probably focus on the obvious provide the server exe cases, but these are concerns down the line.
Also at least this one doesn't do the 'development bond' idea I've seen to protect against the entity going bankrupt, essentially requiring every dev to pay for some sort of insurance before releasing the game (more costs for indie devs).
What is irrational in pointing out that this particular law, as it is written, gives the game developers a perverse incentive to further embrace more exploitive revenue models such as free to play and subscription based services? The technical implementation is irrelevant. It is the business side of things that you should actually worry about.
If anything, some people seem to have this weird faith in regulation that makes them think if some politician is promising to fix something via legislation, then it will get fixed, regardless of how the law is actually written or how it will work out in practice. California in particular is full of regulations that feel good but are either ineffective or has unintended consequences. See prop 65 which litters the state with vaguely worded warning messages that provide next to zero useful information, or prop 13 which massively disincentivizes home building and effectively makes new homeowners subsidize the property taxes of those who bought before them.
You can be supportive of regulations. I am supportive of many regulations. But I don't just support a regulation because it is great news that makes me feel warm and fluffy. I want well thought out regulations that don't neuter themselves with exemptions and don't easily lead to undesirable consequences. If this makes me an irrational anti regulation crusader, then off to Antioch, CA I shall go.
Here’s a few, as someone who has worked in games for 12 years.
Most games have code and design decisions that hark back 25+ years. Every single unreal engine game for example is based code written in the mid 2000s and some parts of the engine really feel like it. Online components are developed the same way. If you made a multiplayer game 10 years ago and it was successful, your next game is going to be built on top of that. I’ve seen places that use stored procedures in Oracle DB for gameplay logic, others that rely on any number of SQL server specific tricks. Closed source dotnet frameworks, proprietary AWS services, if you can think of it there’s probably a game shipped on it. You’re also making the assumption that the server is a neatly coupled thing.
Am I responsible for providing a fallback to EOS, or Steam, or playfab in case their services are decommissioned?
What about the licenses for the code that affects other areas - we have a GPL’ed library here that we can use but now all of a sudden the vitality of the license means we have to replace it?
Who defines “ordinary use of the game”?. If the game has a multiplayer component, to some large number of users that can construe “ordinary use”. call of Duty is the best example of this (although COD is probably one of the games with the best track record here).
This is going to result in games moving more towards the Hollywood studio model - start up a company, launch a game and wind down the company for the next project. People who rely on that already unstable industry will be given even less stability due to this.
> I have a hard time imagining the server architecture would change much
That’s great - I’m sure if it’s that little work you’re willing to do it for all of those games companies.
> A dedicated company-owned server is just a beefier home computer with load balancers and matchmaking. Drop those two, slap a server list on the client, and you're golden
Game backends are just like
Other backends. Some use event queues, microservices, third party APIs, licensed components. This adds a burden that no other software is expected to carry - it’s perfectly fine for Google to drop support for their devices but a 25 person company needs to go back and fix all their old games if they want to keep selling them?
> I'm always shocked by how irrationally anti-regulation this site is.
If you wanted to trigger a HN rant, topics should always include regulation, particularly in regard to nuclear power, guns, freedom of speech or taxation.
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 micro services.
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 proprietary third party 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.
> 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.
None of those things are required to be supported by this law. It's the minimum viable product to enable multiplayer play.
- Ditch the matchmaking, players can build their own communities and use server lists for discovery
- Ditch the anti-cheat if you can't distribute it, it's not necessary for online play
- Ditch the metrics, of course
- Let the player download their inventory save file or something, idc
Companies tend to comply with laws in the dumbest possible way just to be jackasses. If you want a company to release the server, write a law that says that. Otherwise, companies will find a way to comply with the law in the worst way possible. An easy one here is to make the game subscription based, but only for californians. When you go to shut down the server, just don't renew the subscriptions. And if anyone complains? "Nothing we can do, california made us do it!" (nevermind that an alternative form of compliance existed)
I wish subscription games could be preserved too, but this is probably about as good as it's going to get.
I doubt companies are going to go all in on subscription games, since that's more or less been tried and failed, and only WoW and a few others are left standing from that. Or maybe they'll try and fail, since the temptation is just too great (think Sony and Concord trying their luck with hero shooters, even though everyone with threw or more brain cells knew it would never make back what it cost).
This isn't really about ownership in the abstract, it's about honest labeling. Owning a copy has never meant you can duplicate it. You can't run off copies of a book you bought, but nobody thinks that means the publisher can take it off your shelf when they stop printing it. The ESA conflates the copyright they keep with the copy you bought.
The real difference with live-service games is server dependency, and that's where the dishonesty lives. If a game can't run without an online service the publisher controls, people deserve that caveat before they pay. Don't sell it with the word "Buy" and a one-time price and then treat it like a subscription you can end. This bill just forces that honesty: notice, an offline patch, or a refund.
So if I'm a game dev that lives in the US outside of California, do I have to care about this? Or do I have to explicitly block Californians from buying my game if I don't want to be affected by it?
Wow, this comment section is terrible, lets cut through the noise. The "you're buying a license, not a game" argument is the industry writing its own rules and then citing those rules as if they came from somewhere neutral. EULAs are not negotiated contracts; you cannot counter-offer, you cannot opt out, and there is no competing storefront with better terms. The moment you frame a unilateral "take it or leave it" clause as a legal shield against consumer protection law, you've already lost the moral argument. More importantly, that same "license" framework is what justifies their copyright protection, their anti-piracy enforcement, their DMCA claims. You don't get to invoke ownership-level legal protections against consumers while delivering zero ownership to them. Pick a lane. Also, also, for "technically impossible to preserve", the bill doesn't ask for eternal servers. It asks for an offline patch or a refund. Fan communities do the patch part for free, on weekends with no legal team, for Pete's sake! If a volunteer modder can strip authentication from a dead MMO, a company with actual engineers can do it too. And if they truly can't? Then refund the customer. The "complexity" argument was always a misdirection, the bill already hands them an exit door for genuine edge cases. They're not opposing it because it's unworkable. They're opposing it because it closes a very profitable loophole.
It seems like one reasonable response from game companies is to include a service agreement with all games that explicitly limits the guaranteed server uptime. Ie “buying this game only guarantees operation until Dec 31 2028”
No clue if the market will go for that but it would meet the issue head on. “Companies will provide server binaries” on the other hand feels like pure fantasy.
Overall I’m glad folks are trying to do something about this.
> 'AB 1921' is one of the first instances of bringing these demands into the institutional fold. Under the bill, companies selling digital games released or resold after January 1, 2027, must provide at least 60 days' notice before terminating service. Furthermore, they must ensure that purchasers can continue to access the game—such as by providing an alternative version or a patch—and must offer refunds if doing so is not possible.
I get that some developers are going to be irked by this, and I get that there will now be some perverse incentive to move to a 'subscription-only' model.
Now that the Stop Killing Games movement has overcome the major hurdle of landing actual legislative change from zero, its not much of a step from this point to extend these protections to anti-consumer practices around subscription-based games too, if they prove abusive.
It's not just about consumer rights, it is also about preserving and promoting arts and culture that can and are passed down through the next generation, which, ironically, helps keep growing and sustaining the industry.
Imagine what arts and culture might be like, seemingly everlasting copyright lifetimes notwithstanding, if Nintendo yanked Super Mario World from everyone because the online services to keep running the game simply costed too much or because the Mario franchise wasn't 'meeting profit expectations'. [Yes, I realise Super Mario World didn't have an 'online' component in the 90s, but imagine if it did...]
Remember that not too long ago it was very common place to self-host servers for games, and for quite a few this is still possible (such as DayZ and Minecraft). Thanks to community efforts, it is also still possible to play long abandoned online games that were once locked behind authentication and server listing providers, such as Battlefield 2 (previously fronted by GameSpy) that has been revived with BF2Hub (bf2hub.com).
Some games[1][2] even have a resurgence after long being forgotten. The revival of Dark Ages wouldn't have happened, and old friendships rekindled, if it was switched off because 'profit'.
Yes, Battlefield 2 had an offline component and could be still played sans GameSpy and BF2Hub, though a big part of the experience and culture around the game was the online community and gameplay against other real humans that made it so successful.
Relatively speaking (and legal/licencing complications aside) it is really not that difficult, especially for games publishers that cash in multiple millions of dollars in raw profits, to patch out authentication server mechanisms controlled by the publisher, and/or release the authentication/game server software binaries or source freely but unsupported after their deprecation date.
The legislation is designed to make these pro-consumer ethics at the forefront of game design. Video games are a big contributor to culture and human connection, and permitting companies to both freely yank a product that someone rightly paid for without compensation - you will own nothing and be happy about it - and kill off parts of our culture, is a horrible place to be as a society.
42 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 59.2 ms ] threadI 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.
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.
That would violate the law.
> 60 days before a digital game operator ceases to provide services necessary for the ordinary use of the digital game, the operator shall communicate all of the following information to purchasers and prospective purchasers of the digital game:
> (i) The date on which services necessary for the ordinary use of the digital game will cease.
> (ii) Any services that will no longer be provided by the operator.
> (iii) Any game features that will no longer be available to the purchaser.
> (iv) Any known security risks that may result from the cessation of services.
> (v) How the purchaser can continue to use the digital game, or obtain a refund, pursuant to paragraph (2).
Scaling in the number of game servers isn't termination of service, though, and would not match the conditions laid out above.
People far too often forget the absolutely vital aspect information plays in the free market, and anything that increases information (for example, how long a good should be expected to continue to function) is a net good, when compared to a complete lack of information about that.
Then they will shut down the company when they want, and there will be nobody to come for.
(Not an ideal source btw: "This article was originally written in Korean and translated with the help of NC AI." The Bill is tiny can be read at https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm... )
The problem is, where to even start? I would think EFF would be spearheading something like this, but I haven’t come across anything. There have been attempts in the past, but they don’t seem to have ongoing support.
You should be able to make software that has a limited lifespan if you want. I just think that's fine. Games should not be special.
I do wish this had been around when Firefall [1] shutdown, haven't really bothered with live service games since then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firefall_(video_game)
I wonder if they will do something similar for software
Yes, you would have to make sure your server application adheres to software licenses before release, just like you do with the client application, or any other piece of software a company may use or release. What popular libraries are we concerned about no longer being usable because of this? Remember, this is server architecture. Networking libraries? ENet is distributable, so is Valve's GameNetworkingSockets.
Yes, it'd ask developers to write their servers with this possible/inevitable transition in mind. Developers will plan ahead for that, and I have a very hard time imagining the server architecture would change much at all. A dedicated company-owned server is just a beefier home computer with load balancers and matchmaking. Drop those two, slap a server list on the client, and you're golden.
This is great news!
From what I can tell this one doesn't include provisions to protect indie shops/solo devs. The entire time spent developing a game is a net loss until release (and probability wise, probably still a loss then). So this is adding more upfront cost to devs.
The bill text I found is also one of the more generic versions I've seen. Specifically this line
>the ordinary use of the game
This is quite broad. I've seen some supporters of this style bill push for 'offline play' being a requirement. For instance, an mmo raid may require 20 players. If after the death of the game getting 20 players is impossible, I have seen people push for ai (just the game version) so it would be possible, or a patch to make the content possible for 1. Each of which are development time that serves no benefit to making money.
There's also the likelihood of the server architecture requiring many moving pieces. Think if fortnite died tomorrow how many different servers it would take to host. Could an argument be made that an end user couldn't be expected to launch a dozen aws services? More dev time, more costs.
Now the day 1 proponents would probably focus on the obvious provide the server exe cases, but these are concerns down the line.
Also at least this one doesn't do the 'development bond' idea I've seen to protect against the entity going bankrupt, essentially requiring every dev to pay for some sort of insurance before releasing the game (more costs for indie devs).
If anything, some people seem to have this weird faith in regulation that makes them think if some politician is promising to fix something via legislation, then it will get fixed, regardless of how the law is actually written or how it will work out in practice. California in particular is full of regulations that feel good but are either ineffective or has unintended consequences. See prop 65 which litters the state with vaguely worded warning messages that provide next to zero useful information, or prop 13 which massively disincentivizes home building and effectively makes new homeowners subsidize the property taxes of those who bought before them.
You can be supportive of regulations. I am supportive of many regulations. But I don't just support a regulation because it is great news that makes me feel warm and fluffy. I want well thought out regulations that don't neuter themselves with exemptions and don't easily lead to undesirable consequences. If this makes me an irrational anti regulation crusader, then off to Antioch, CA I shall go.
Most games have code and design decisions that hark back 25+ years. Every single unreal engine game for example is based code written in the mid 2000s and some parts of the engine really feel like it. Online components are developed the same way. If you made a multiplayer game 10 years ago and it was successful, your next game is going to be built on top of that. I’ve seen places that use stored procedures in Oracle DB for gameplay logic, others that rely on any number of SQL server specific tricks. Closed source dotnet frameworks, proprietary AWS services, if you can think of it there’s probably a game shipped on it. You’re also making the assumption that the server is a neatly coupled thing.
Am I responsible for providing a fallback to EOS, or Steam, or playfab in case their services are decommissioned?
What about the licenses for the code that affects other areas - we have a GPL’ed library here that we can use but now all of a sudden the vitality of the license means we have to replace it?
Who defines “ordinary use of the game”?. If the game has a multiplayer component, to some large number of users that can construe “ordinary use”. call of Duty is the best example of this (although COD is probably one of the games with the best track record here).
This is going to result in games moving more towards the Hollywood studio model - start up a company, launch a game and wind down the company for the next project. People who rely on that already unstable industry will be given even less stability due to this.
> I have a hard time imagining the server architecture would change much
That’s great - I’m sure if it’s that little work you’re willing to do it for all of those games companies.
> A dedicated company-owned server is just a beefier home computer with load balancers and matchmaking. Drop those two, slap a server list on the client, and you're golden
Game backends are just like Other backends. Some use event queues, microservices, third party APIs, licensed components. This adds a burden that no other software is expected to carry - it’s perfectly fine for Google to drop support for their devices but a 25 person company needs to go back and fix all their old games if they want to keep selling them?
If you wanted to trigger a HN rant, topics should always include regulation, particularly in regard to nuclear power, guns, freedom of speech or taxation.
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 micro services.
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 proprietary third party 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.
None of those things are required to be supported by this law. It's the minimum viable product to enable multiplayer play.
- Ditch the matchmaking, players can build their own communities and use server lists for discovery - Ditch the anti-cheat if you can't distribute it, it's not necessary for online play - Ditch the metrics, of course - Let the player download their inventory save file or something, idc
I doubt companies are going to go all in on subscription games, since that's more or less been tried and failed, and only WoW and a few others are left standing from that. Or maybe they'll try and fail, since the temptation is just too great (think Sony and Concord trying their luck with hero shooters, even though everyone with threw or more brain cells knew it would never make back what it cost).
According to the bill text I can find, notice does not matter. The exceptions are subscriptions, f2p, or simply already offline games.
Edit: If this was just about local games it’d be simple
No clue if the market will go for that but it would meet the issue head on. “Companies will provide server binaries” on the other hand feels like pure fantasy.
Overall I’m glad folks are trying to do something about this.
> 'AB 1921' is one of the first instances of bringing these demands into the institutional fold. Under the bill, companies selling digital games released or resold after January 1, 2027, must provide at least 60 days' notice before terminating service. Furthermore, they must ensure that purchasers can continue to access the game—such as by providing an alternative version or a patch—and must offer refunds if doing so is not possible.
I get that some developers are going to be irked by this, and I get that there will now be some perverse incentive to move to a 'subscription-only' model.
Now that the Stop Killing Games movement has overcome the major hurdle of landing actual legislative change from zero, its not much of a step from this point to extend these protections to anti-consumer practices around subscription-based games too, if they prove abusive.
It's not just about consumer rights, it is also about preserving and promoting arts and culture that can and are passed down through the next generation, which, ironically, helps keep growing and sustaining the industry.
Imagine what arts and culture might be like, seemingly everlasting copyright lifetimes notwithstanding, if Nintendo yanked Super Mario World from everyone because the online services to keep running the game simply costed too much or because the Mario franchise wasn't 'meeting profit expectations'. [Yes, I realise Super Mario World didn't have an 'online' component in the 90s, but imagine if it did...]
Remember that not too long ago it was very common place to self-host servers for games, and for quite a few this is still possible (such as DayZ and Minecraft). Thanks to community efforts, it is also still possible to play long abandoned online games that were once locked behind authentication and server listing providers, such as Battlefield 2 (previously fronted by GameSpy) that has been revived with BF2Hub (bf2hub.com).
Some games[1][2] even have a resurgence after long being forgotten. The revival of Dark Ages wouldn't have happened, and old friendships rekindled, if it was switched off because 'profit'.
Yes, Battlefield 2 had an offline component and could be still played sans GameSpy and BF2Hub, though a big part of the experience and culture around the game was the online community and gameplay against other real humans that made it so successful.
Relatively speaking (and legal/licencing complications aside) it is really not that difficult, especially for games publishers that cash in multiple millions of dollars in raw profits, to patch out authentication server mechanisms controlled by the publisher, and/or release the authentication/game server software binaries or source freely but unsupported after their deprecation date.
The legislation is designed to make these pro-consumer ethics at the forefront of game design. Video games are a big contributor to culture and human connection, and permitting companies to both freely yank a product that someone rightly paid for without compensation - you will own nothing and be happy about it - and kill off parts of our culture, is a horrible place to be as a society.
[1] https://youtu.be/FIFty-O4rOE [2] https://youtu.be/0zNtATsb5eg