[animuchan]

What requires regulating is not the hobby, but instead the 250-billion-dollar market built on predatory practices.

(E.g. we somehow have a lot of bodies regulating sport events, whereas playing football is just a silly hobby rather than something that actually matters. Same logic applies.)

[johnnyanmac]

There's a lot of predatory practices in games, but shutting down an unpopular game is not one of them. We mostly lost the lootbox war, so I don't see this law getting much more sympathy.

[animuchan]

Shutting down a live service game after collecting a generous up-front payment from many a customer is very much a rug pull, NFT style, is it not?

Free-to-play games, or even purely subscription-based games, I kind of agree. But a thing I bought for 60-100 reserve currency shouldn't just poof! and disappear, especially if the company pulling the rug is doing well (hi, Ubisoft).

[johnnyanmac]

Depends on the time active. If it was like the day before (2023) that pretended to be an MMO but couldn't even do that for 3 days, then yes. That should be punished. If it's your average games as a service that stays actively updated for 2 years and then shuts down I don't know if I can call that a "rug pull". That's still 2 years of actively updated entertainment, which isn't something most offline games can muster up.

I guess it comes down to how long is long enough for that 60-100 currency. I'm sure greybeards who stuck with WOW for 20 years wouldn't feel swindled if the game shut down tomorrow. Devestated, but a huge chunk of lifetime entertainment is far from a rug pull. Meanwhile you can feel betrayed by stuff like Babylon's fall that didn't even make a year (even if very few were optimistic to begin with).