California bill would require patches or refunds when online games shut down

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 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.

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 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.

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

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...

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.

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?

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

> 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?

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.

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.

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 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.

> 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.

Wish they'd extend it to all apps, I'm sick of 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 Paul Maddox (Microsoft) and Tom Maddox (AWS) really have no intention of open sourcing or refunding.

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

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.

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?

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.

Dumb law, but I don't care about video games anyway. Let the screaming children have what they want this time, they'll get to reap the outcome.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.