Gesetzentwurf soll Verlage daran hindern, Fortschritte bei Online-Spielen in Kalifornien zu verhindern | Herausgeber müssten „unabhängige“ Spielpatches oder Rückerstattungen nach Serverabschaltungen anbieten.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2026/05/bill-to-keep-online-games-playable-clears-key-hurdle-in-california/
26 Kommentare
Please yes this is my wet dream.
This is right. Can we make it the law of the land?
lol refunds after shutdown isn’t happening under capitalism.
This will never pass. You can’t force staff to work for free. It’s not just developers that are needed to keep content going, server infrastructure, customer service, people, it’s all needed to maintain the service. And then to punish devs for moving on because a project is no longer making revenue? That’s absolutely insane.
“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 not subscription or free games, but the games where you buy the game and then are forced online? Am I understanding that correctly?
Yes, keep going
I understand this for games like The Crew and Anthem. Are we also saying the Destiny 1 needs to be updated to a state that can be played offline in the future?
Holy consumer protection, batman!!
I wonder how this would handle games that utilize server-side generated content (eg like a ai generated dungeon layout or npc personality). Seems like a good idea on paper, but not sure how future-compatible the law would be
Does the bill contain provisions where if the game vendor doesn’t already have the mechanism to allow the players to play independently of the operator, that the vendor would be required to put into escrow the funds necessary to give the refunds? Otherwise, as someone else has mentioned, the game just gets published by some subsidiary which immediately goes bankrupt when they need to end the game, and that subsidiary has no money to do refunds.
Such a bad idea. It would absolutely reduce the types of games that can be made.
I can only imagine games like Earth and Beyond being playable still.
What about games where the vast majority of the data is on online servers, like MMORPGS?
And let’s say the publisher is in China, Korea, or Japan.
how the hell would California be able to enforce anything?
refunds ? even I don’t agree with that. That’s pretty extreme for an online game that may be years old
Honestly we should reform the US copyright laws to allow an infinite copyright provided the work is available for consumption by the average user. If the company doesn’t have that ability, it reverts to the public domain. That way the general public gets to consume the content and when the monetary value disappears, the preservationists and hobbyists can keep the content alive.
It’s not even that hard, they basically just need to dump all the patches online and remove any „always online“ or „login“ requirements, then people can just make their own servers or play offline.
[removed]
The monkeys paw begins to tremble.
this will make every online game require a subscription
Related(ish?); The Entertainment Software Association had opinions about this bill and Ross Scott had his own comments about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjUaH1NK8uA
This is the kind of shit we have to go through just because game companies took away peer to peer and LAN multiplayer. If you were able to make a server for any new game the same way you did for Unreal Tournament none of this would be a problem. Maybe the core company servers go down because the company winds up and they can’t pay for it anymore, but that’s not a problem because anyone out there in the community can run their own servers and play with their friends.
But companies don’t give a shit, they themselves don’t look at it as art but as junk products they’re peddling to you for a time and they’ll take it away when it doesn’t make that much money for them anymore. Which is again absurd given the above reasoning, if they had multiplayer like it was in 2000 they wouldn’t have to give a shit and people could be buying their game for all eternity specifically because of that. So many games are now completely gone because of this, and not even MMOs but just regular games.
lol that independent play patch gonna be really top notch when it’s written by the skeleton crew who haven’t gotten their pay check in 8 weeks and just got told they’re shutting down. lol, this is one of those sounds good until you think about the context of where this happens in a company’s journey.
Ya, just allowing independent servers like CS did would be OK by me.
finally someone said it. been thinking this for ages but couldn’t put it into words
Ubisoft is sweating like a staredown with james bond right now, this bill could actively shut them down they dont have money to keep their games up.
this is exactly what the stop killing games campaign has been pushing for. you paid $60 for a product, you should be able to use it after they decide to stop supporting it.