[pibaker]

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.

[gwerbin]

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.

[jnovek]

What will the negative impact of this law be, exactly? Hurting live service games which are already cancer?

[Sharlin]

It incentivizes subscription-based games.

[slg]

The natural incentives had already pointed to subscription based games, these companies attempted it, and consumers mostly rejected it. I'm extremely dubious that this regulation would be enough to reverse that. It's a much easier decision for a company to put a small development team on readying the server tools for public release than brute forcing a new business model on a resistant consumer base and all the associated risks that come along with it.

[pibaker]

If by subscription you mean World of Warcraft style continuous subscription then yes, it doesn't work for most games. But I'd argue the modern battle pass model is just another flavor of subscription. And according to the article, free to play games with battle passes and micro transactions also get an exemption from the proposed bill, so companies will just move to that instead.

[slg]

Are we still talking about negative impacts of this regulation? Because I don't follow the argument that games going free-to-play is bad for the consumer. Consumer pressure has pushed most games with battle passes and microtransactions to limit those to optional expansions of the base game, often merely cosmetic. People can and do spend hundreds of hours playing Fortnite without paying a cent and I don't see how that type of outcome is bad for the consumer.

And if the consumer doesn't invest any money into the experience, I have a hard time justifying a requirement for the publisher to provide options to keep the game running in perpetuity, so I'm fine with that exception.

[Akronymus]

Battle passes/mtx would IMO definitely fall under monetary considerations, which would make the excemption not apply. But as is written now, there still needs to be a precedent set for that, to really cement that interpretation

[sowbug]

Not exactly the same thing, but a few years ago the law changed to require a sesame-allergen notice on foods that had sesame. Some manufacturers starting adding sesame to foods that didn't need it, because they concluded that including the notice was easier than guaranteeing that their product was sesame-free. The intent of the law was to protect people with sesame allergies, but the result was fewer choices for them.

Sometimes laws have unintended consequences.

https://apnews.com/article/sesame-allergies-label-b28f8eb3dc...

[setr]

If a manufacturer is unwilling to guarantee/monitor the lack of sesame in their food, and you having a presumably severe sesame allergy… isn’t it correct not to be eating that food?

Like previously you trusted their lack of sesame based on vibes, which you probably shouldn’t have been doing, and now they’re explicitly telling you not to trust them on this; this seems to me strictly better. You’ve lost a choice that never really existed in the first place

An actually unintended consequence would be if they introduced sesame because they were going to have to put the label on it anyways

[watwut]

The result was same choices as before, but more information about it.

Per manufacturers, these were unsafe to eat things - they just wanted to kinda preted there is no danger in them.

[gs17]

If people dislike subscription-based games, companies will adapt by making non-subscription games designed with end-of-service in mind. It only creates an incentive as much as people are willing to pay for the subscription.

[throwaway85825]

The market for subscription games is vastly smaller than the market for offline games. The industry learned that when everyone tried to make a wow killer.

[agoodusername63]

> However, it excludes games provided via subscription services, free-to-play games, and games that are inherently playable offline indefinitely.

Live service games overwhelmingly fall into exactly this category. If anything they're being incentivized over making a game that has an online multiplayer but focus being singleplayer or anything intended to be released and moved on from.

[wilg]

No it will make everything a live service game

[bayarearefugee]

Good luck with that.

The industry already tried to make everything a live service game in the 2020-2022 period and it was financially disastrous because gamers rejected it.

Gamers have made it clear that they don't want a market full of live service games unless they are free to play (and even then, very few will survive).

They'll make rare exceptions for things like GTA6, but these will be unicorns.

[xingped]

That certainly won't stop out of touch CEOs from choosing to do just that anyways. CEOs and making the stupidest possible decisions are also a match made in heaven.

[riffruff24]

sony already cancelled like 5 in development live service games now since concord bombed? Certainly a lesson that is hard to learn.

[NooneAtAll3]

> See also car fuel economy standards that push car makers into killing the wagon market segment in favor of SUVs.

by the way, why wasn't this bug fixed long ago?

[cosmojg]

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).

[Akronymus]

Subscription only games get way less revenue than pay once for the most part. So I don't think moving to subscriptions isn't gonna be as attractive to publishers as you think.

Also, with a subscription the customer has VERY different expectations, compared to a one time purchase. As in, they expect the access to go away once they no longer pay.

[RobotToaster]

I can see them adding a $1 per year subscription at the very least.

[meatmanek]

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.)

[ddtaylor]

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]

Why is this a problem? Quake 3 came out a quarter century ago, yet there are still community host servers available

[hadlock]

After about 2010 companies stopped providing the server binary. Games like Modern Warfare 2, Battlefield 2, etc could be played by communities in perpetuity on private servers. If the next game (MW3, BF3) were terrible, you didn't have to buy the sequel, what you had was "good enough" and you could wait for the next version to be released in 2-3 years.

With the current "closed server" model, you can't get a copy of the server code, can't host truly private servers, and when the sequel MW4, BF4 comes out, those private servers won't survive and it forces everyone to move to the sequel regardless of the quality of the game. You can technically still hire a private server for games like BF3 (circa 2012) but very few people are going to pay the $70/month to host an official one via whatever terms EA has come up with, and you absolutely can't run it with plugins, mods, and especially custom maps or game modes, you have to play it "vanilla".

Quake 3 the server is included with the game, anyone can run it, modify it and it's very plugin friendly, which is largely why it is still around today. Closed servers you can't directly access is a deliberate decision to kill the game when the sequel is released, by not allowing users to extend what they "bought". Otherwise we would still all be playing Battlefield 3 on custom maps with CTF and 128 v 128 player servers and everything else. You can modify a handful of things on the paid private servers but it's extremely limited and there's no community feedback on any of this.

[RandomGerm4n]

> After about 2010 companies stopped providing the server binary. Games like Modern Warfare 2, Battlefield 2, etc could be played by communities in perpetuity on private servers. If the next game (MW3, BF3) were terrible, you didn't have to buy the sequel, what you had was "good enough" and you could wait for the next version to be released in 2-3 years.

That's not true about Modern Warfare 2. Modern Warfare 2 was the first Call of Duty game where you could no longer host your own servers. In its predecessor, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, however, that was still possible. For MW2, unofficial servers created by players only became available later on. However, Activision has taken legal action against many of these projects.

[paradox460]

Amusingly, all Call of Duties are still basically Quake mods. They've ALL ran on heavily modified quake engine, forked off of ioq3

[tadfisher]

Quake 3 can also be played fully offline, for various measures of "play" and "fully".

[fragmede]

Why not $0?

[greenavocado]

$1 refundable subscription