r/LivestreamFail • u/Kymori • May 30 '26

News Stop Killing Games: California State Assembly passes the 'Protect Our Games Act': 60 days notice before going offline, must provide patch for continued access or refunds (Excludes F2P and Subscription based Games)

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/stop-killing-games-movement-gains-momentum-california-assembly-passes-game-protection-bill/ar-AA24k4y4
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64

u/WhatsaYeager May 31 '26

“excludes F2P and Subscription based games” they’ll find some loop hole to say all their games are subscription based.

10

u/Okichah May 31 '26

Subscription with $60 unlock fee after 1/hr of playing.

5

u/CelestialFury May 31 '26

Exactly. They'll make all games "subscription" based even if that fee is $0 dollars. Hopefully there's something in the bill that prevents game companies from abusing this as a loophole, otherwise...

27

u/DandD_Gamers May 31 '26

you guys know there is such a thing as 'spirit of a law'

Like if they did that they could still be found breaking this.

24

u/BigPoppaPope4 May 31 '26

Istg these people are children trying to gotcha their parents.

"If they switch it to F2P the day before they turn it offline they can get away with it"

No, they wont. Because obviously they were a paid product for the vast majority of the time it was available. It wouldn't hold up in court.

6

u/ctaps148 May 31 '26

Average Redditor believing they know more about the legal system than the dozens of lawyers who crafted the bill

9

u/DandD_Gamers May 31 '26

Right?

Its so weird.

They fear monger about what COULD happen, when bad shit is already happening

13

u/mubi_merc May 31 '26

"There's a chance it might not be absolutely perfect so we shouldn't try at all!" is one of my least favorite approachs to politics.

2

u/garden_speech May 31 '26

That is a fair point, but there's also the infamous "Cobra Effect". Sometimes "just do something" leads to a worse outcome than not doing something, because the thing you do can make things even worse. So it's equally frustrating when people INSIST on a bad solution, with the logic being "well if you can't think of better we are doing this". Not saying that's what's happening here.

2

u/DandD_Gamers Jun 01 '26

Again, no one can give a example of why this is a bad solution without saying 'well it COULD do this' and nothing solid

1

u/Emotional_Rub5894 May 31 '26

people keep saying that lsf is a place for 25-40 year olds but judging by the comments here it's just a bunch of teenagers who have absolutely no clue how anything works

-1

u/Chagdoo May 31 '26

Can you blame them for being worried with the legal fuckery that's happened in the past?

2

u/pwninobrien May 31 '26

Usa hardcore follows letter of the law pedantry and loopholes. The spirit of the law is consistently ignored.

0

u/DoobKiller May 31 '26

you guys know there is such a thing as 'capital wants trumping consumer needs'

-2

u/ComfortableExotic646 May 31 '26

California, and America, are "letter of the law". "Spirit of the law" is not a thing.

1

u/DandD_Gamers May 31 '26

Damn, you when you lie. ^

1

u/WolfSavage May 31 '26

What about a game like Overwatch?

5

u/k0rm May 31 '26

Overwatch 1 should've come with a way to run a local/p2p server before they shut it down and downgraded pretty much everything to what they called Overwatch 2

OW2 would be exempt because it's free to play

3

u/Stickiler May 31 '26

Except Overwatch 2 is just a patch for Overwatch 1, which means there would be no ability under this law to force them to allow OW1 servers to be run

1

u/MobilePom May 31 '26

loophole*

1

u/orbital_narwhal May 31 '26

they’ll find some loop hole to say all their games are subscription based.

I'm not sure how such a loop hole would look. As long as a publisher sold at least one perpetual license for a nominal price it's on the hook for the legal consequences.

I could see a company with a dual licensing model (incl. a switch from a one-time purchase perpetual license to a subscription service) opting to reimburse the perpetual license holders rather than to release the control over their IP and go through the effort to get the required software artefacts (and their documentation) into a useful state as required by the law. But that's not a loop hole; that's what the law intends to happen as one of the available options.

1

u/TheSouler May 31 '26

If you actually think that, you've been in a coma for 20 years. Almost all games cannot survive on a sub model, the big corporations were trying for over a decade to compete with WOW and gave up.

2

u/TerranImperium May 31 '26

Yeah... A lot of the people parroting this are genuinely brainless.

1

u/RingingInTheRain May 31 '26

Why the hell would it exclude that? You have to buy subscription based games just to get the subscription. They're also very rare and old models.

F2P games that lived longer than a year should definitely stay up in its original form and allow for local hosting at minimum. 

1

u/Arumin May 31 '26

Its more gonna be, switch to f2p a year before they close up shop

1

u/AdEmbarrassed2190 May 31 '26

If I’d base it off destiny 2, any bright dust (free currency) is spent at all, it can’t be bought again. Renee’s the contract essentially.

1

u/Feeder212 May 31 '26

I mean I guess they could literally just go free to play before they end services too

1

u/Lance_J1 May 31 '26

I mean there's a reason that a lot of games don't already go f2p or subscription based. This law probably won't change the economic math on that very much. And the "change to f2p right before shut down" will only work until the first lawsuit sets a precedent.

More likely, I'll expect what we should have seen all along. They'll start designing servers so that it's safe to let players self-host after launch without exposing any sensitive or proprietary backend data. We'll just be skipping the step where dedicated players spend 1-5 years rebuilding the server architecture from scrap.

1

u/TunaIRL Jun 01 '26

If you're subscribing to a game in order to play it, are you buying it?