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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 p

• ai_fry_ur_brain 4mo ago
  Its because people are brainwashed by techno capitalists propganada and think they're going be in the "startup" founder position one day and thus defend the people currently in those positions no matter what, thinking their protecting their own interests (and its almost always the opposite). There's nothing wrong with having an ambitious attitude, but why not be ambitious seek to build a better tech-biz ecosystem that is actually pro consumer and pro human.. People seem to think there's only one way, and that way is letting capital owners behave however they want incase they're also in that position one day.
  • ApolloFortyNine 4mo ago
    >think they're going be in the "startup" founder position Can't wait for the posts 10 years from now asking what happened to indie devs. This bill alone won't do it, but as you pass regulations it gets harder and harder for a regular person to participate. The worst rendition I've seen of this bill for Europe requires basically a development bond/retainer to 'ensure' there's dev time available to develop offline features. I.e, extra costs for devs who already by the numbers lose money releasing a game.
    • hananova 4mo ago
      This is absolute fearmongering. Indie devs aren’t the ones releasing this always-online quadruple A garbage in the first place. They will be affected the least, since their games already would work just fine if the company ever goes belly up.
• Dig1t 4mo ago
  It’s not irrational, the comments literally explain in great detail the downsides of the regulation. For example one commenter in this thread said: >See also car fuel economy standards that push car makers into killing the wagon market segment in favor of SUVs. This is an objectively true and prove-able statement. What is irrational about that? WRT regulation the only thing that matters is the incentives that it creates. >If this is how the bill ends up being enacted, it will only push more big game developers into making their titles subscription only. This is a valid concern and a real incentive if that’s how the law works. What is irrational about this argument?
  • Telaneo 4mo ago
    Bad regulation should't be reperesentaive or regulation as a whole. If you don't get it right the first time, you're allowed to try again, and that's what should be done with regulations providing bad incentives. Gaming has already gone though a period of pushing subscription games, and most died, since people generally didn't want to pay a fee per game they played. That only left the big players in that space, while everybkdy else went back to releasing games the normal way. I fail to see why things would go a different way this time around.
    • infinite_spin 4mo ago
      The legal system is kind of like an evolutionary process. We try things, see if they work, and adjust over time. So far I think this has indeed led to a better legal system, but I can see why the set backs and injustices of the world make that difficult to assess. Regulation also creates jobs, even bad regulation, so there's almost a Keynesian argument to be had about its relationship to our economic system.
    • Ferret7446 4mo ago
      Bad regulation is representative of regulation as a whole, because most of it is bad, or at least ineffectual, particularly in California.
      • wsve 4mo ago
• dtdynasty 4mo ago
  I would describe them as pessimistic rather than irrational. They just believe that instead of going with an option like you proposed, companies will push toward unregulated options. Since I don't know their backgrounds and don't have any background working with video game company executives it's hard to tell which options are more likely.
• ApolloFortyNine 4mo ago
  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).
  • stubish 4mo ago
    It adds costs if you built it that way. I don't think many games are built that way. Developers need to be able to test their games in isolation, and it takes effort to remove that scaffolding from release versions (so people can't use it and bypass your monetization). The real reasons to not just toss your backend over to the community and make it their problem are business reasons like 'it will dilute our brand' or 'it is a violation of licensed IP'. Or embarrassing reasons like 'we have lost the source code' or 'we can no longer build new executables'.
  • wsve 4mo ago
    > I've seen some supporters of this style bill push for 'offline play' being a requirement. That seems a bit silly to my eyes, self-hosting a server seems sufficient. But not included in this bill, so not an issue here > 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. In this specific case, it's not so hard to imagine a single home computer handling the traffic of 100 connected users for a game of battle royale, the server compute for those kinds (baked-in world, low physics) games can be cheaper than running an instance of the game. Just some physics calculations, networking, and game state. The main point would be if you start development from the premise that your server executable will be released to the users, the architecture/performance considerations are not that different at all.
• pibaker 4mo ago
  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.
  • wsve 4mo ago
    > gives the game developers a perverse incentive to further embrace more exploitive revenue models such as free to play and subscription based services? This is what I fail to see an explanation of anywhere in these comments. WHY would this law make a subscriber-based revenue model so much more enticing? WHY would this law make single-purchase games with multiplayer servers suddenly so non-viable from a business perspective? The latent assumption I keep seeing is that the mere existence of a regulation in an area will drive people away from that model, but that's simply not how businesses operate. It's a cost/benefit analysis. So what is the cost?
    • ang_cire 4mo ago
      Yep, this is the "higher taxes will drive new yorkers to florida!" fear-mongering (sometime, sadly, even by people who don't actually know better but automatically shill for companies). There are so many games (like Hitman: WoA, which I love btw) that "require" online access in order to provide the same functions that previous games by the same devs provided fully offline (e.g. keeping track of your weapon unlocks). This is just clawing back some of the consumer protections that the "we're not selling you a product, we're selling you a temporary and arbitrary license that we reserve all rights over" BS snuck around.
• maccard 4mo ago
  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?
  • deleted 4mo ago
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  • bigfishrunning 4mo ago
    > 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? The "we're not distributing it" loophole is why the AGPL exists. So yeah, even though you can technically not violate the gpl by not distributing the server, don't do that, it's scummy. Better to just not use gpl code at all.
• lostlogin 4mo ago
  > 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.
• phyzix5761 4mo ago
  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.
  • tancop 4mo ago
    i mean its perfectly valid to create a new exception to copyright laws. in fact it might already exist because if you are legally required to release something that beats all the contracts you signed in any reasonable jurisdiction. weaker ip means giving a head start to new devs and bankrupting commercial engine vendors. and im all for making epic and unity go out of business
  • wsve 4mo ago
    > 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
• f33d5173 4mo ago
  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)