The goal is a good one, but it's too specific. It should not be allowed for a developer or device manufacturer to kill or nerf any product remotely, once it was bought and paid for. This problem is sneaking into other non-game software, and even physical devices! If you buy a thing you shouldn't need to tether that thing to the manufacturer, and it shouldn't be possible to make it useless when they decide to turn down a server.
As a developer or manufacturer, if your software or device absolutely requires a server that costs money to maintain, then your business plan should take that into account: You should be charging customers monthly to keep that service running. You shouldn't promise a one-time payment, take the customer's money and then yank the service away on a whim.
Nobody is asking for free labor to keep services running. I'm asking that you 1. only tether your product to a server if you absolutely need to, and 2. charge for that kind of product monthly so that you can leave it running while you still have customers. That doesn't seem like too much to ask.
"Here's a device we sold you, but when you first turn it on you need to sign this 30 page contract which says you actually don't own the device, if you are mad at us you have to go to our preferred arbitration, and we reserve the right to turn your device off at any time on a whim because you left a bad review somewhere. Sign it or enjoy your worthless brick which we will not refund. Oh, and now every single manufacturer requires the same thing for this device class. So you can either have a washing machine or hand wash your cloths in your bathtub".
Yeah, it's frankly ridiculous that "smart" devices need internet access. Why shouldn't my smart oven behave exactly like my Brother printer? There's no reason my oven needs access to the internet, it can do everything it needs to do on my local network. My phone should be able to connect directly to it via a scan of the local network subnet or using any number of service announcement technologies that already exist.
And it makes these devices worse. I should be able to control my oven using a simple REST api and home assistant. The fact that in order to interact with my oven with a home assistant I first have to reach out to my manufacture servers is just insane. It's an oven. It only has so many sensors and nobs to twist.
About the only grace I give these manufacturers is the fact that google and apple both make it an annoying pain to maintain applications in their app store. A manufacturer can't simply drop "oven app" once and expect it to be available on the store forever. But that too should be solved with the same regulation that says "Ovens, refrigerators, washing machines, thermostats, and doorbells must not connect to the internet". We can teach the world about VPNs if they want remotely access their devices.
>So if I have a game for a year I paid $70 for, that’s fair, if it goes away, I hope I had a few hours of fun with it.
This example is humorously short and this is why there is backlash to game companies shutting down games. What about the people who bought it towards the end? They just get nothing? All that time and money spent just gets thrown in the trash because they don't want a cloud bill? They either need to opensource the games and servers or keep supporting them for a decade or longer.
Not everything is economic value. For gamers, an online game can be a community hub, part of their identity, a hobby. It’s not about whether they got their money’s worth, it’s about destroying a virtual “place” they’re emotionally and socially invested, and the specific skill they posses when they’re there.
So who gets to be the arbiter of how much time $70 is worth?
You?
The companies making the games?
Why should they get to destroy games—gone, forever, with no chance of retrieval or resurrection—that hundreds of people put their time and love into, and millions of people want to play, just because they think it'll make this quarter's stock price numbers look better?
Copyright was created to protect the rights of the creator for a limited time to promote the useful arts. Creations are supposed to become part of the public domain once the creator is no longer getting use out of them. Game companies want to break that bargain, scorched-earth style, and ensure that no one can ever use the things that they create to make anything new.
Good cause, but society has rapidly moved passed them just switching off games after people bought them. Now the hardware production companies for gaming are winding down and not producing gaming computer parts because megacorp datacenter parts have a much higher margin. The future of gaming will unfortunately be renting from the cloud; a context in which these "stop killing games" arguments will have much less leverage.
Then I will simply stop purchasing games and continue to play old ones that I can run on my computer as I please, online server or just do something better with my time.
The whole thing seems absurd when you remember that no one needs video games. This doesn’t need to be legislated. Let them kill video games and then stop buying their video games if they’re just going to kill it off. Why are people still buying games that cash be killed off?
If enough people are still buying these games then clearly the game being killed off is not an important factor. If it was, they wouldn’t buy them.
What does need to be legislated is how these games and services are marketed: it must be made clear latest date the service is guaranteed to be up.
> The future of gaming will unfortunately be renting from the cloud
That might be your future. But as long as there are computing platforms that users can run in their own home there will be games for them.
Nor do I think Nintendo will simply drop their hardware efforts to focus on cloud, and their customers have proven willing to pay higher prices for the types of gaming experience Nintendo will deliver.
Judging by the amount of people saying they've used and enjoyed cloud gaming I'm not as confident as you to make that claim. If cloud keeps making offers good enough such that people pick it instead of building their own PC, the number of personal devices will decrease.
I enjoy low-latency competitive games, and I'd say those are unlikely to get replaced by cloud, because many players notice latency spikes immediately. But I'm a bit skeptical of how much market value can be sustained by people who like the feeling of owning their own hardware, or feel the need to have lower latency in games.
I'm sure if someone built a data center within two blocks of my home and I was able to stream from it, many of these issues would disappear as well.
Consoles already make you pay for online services. They already sunset games so I think even under the new rules they have the ability to stop that service at any time.
>Nor do I think Nintendo will simply drop their hardware efforts to focus on cloud,
Consoles might as well already be cloud for all you control them. But I guess I should've specified PC gaming. I thought it was indicated from the context of "stop killing games". Also, to be clear, I'll never "cloud" game or use consoles. I'll just remain in the past with old hardware and old (and new indie) games. But the "PC gaming industry" as an economic block larger than movies is dying and that's a shame.
This is a phase and data center parts are usable for gaming. (Yes even with all the rasterizer and texture units chopped off, we'll have a wrapper that does that work in compute shaders)
we still got newer companies out of china like moore threads working on gaming gpus, they had to pause new production because of the whole ai shortage but it looks like they might restart. is it usable for any serious gaming right now? no. but its already fighting the nvidia/amd monopoly together with intel.
as long as there is a market the producers will come, even in a super capital intensive industry like this. and it looks like nvidia is partially going back on the whole data center push with rtx spark. its just one high end product but it shows they know a lot of people want local gaming and local inference.
Why California's New Save Our Games Bill Could Kill Indie Studios: https://arkvis.com/blog/2026-05-15_why-californias-new-save-...
The goal is a good one, but it's too specific. It should not be allowed for a developer or device manufacturer to kill or nerf any product remotely, once it was bought and paid for. This problem is sneaking into other non-game software, and even physical devices! If you buy a thing you shouldn't need to tether that thing to the manufacturer, and it shouldn't be possible to make it useless when they decide to turn down a server.
As a developer or manufacturer, if your software or device absolutely requires a server that costs money to maintain, then your business plan should take that into account: You should be charging customers monthly to keep that service running. You shouldn't promise a one-time payment, take the customer's money and then yank the service away on a whim.
Nobody is asking for free labor to keep services running. I'm asking that you 1. only tether your product to a server if you absolutely need to, and 2. charge for that kind of product monthly so that you can leave it running while you still have customers. That doesn't seem like too much to ask.
“Ah, but you didn’t buy a thing, you bought a license to temporarily use a thing in ways we deemed acceptable!” -publishers somewhere
"Here's a device we sold you, but when you first turn it on you need to sign this 30 page contract which says you actually don't own the device, if you are mad at us you have to go to our preferred arbitration, and we reserve the right to turn your device off at any time on a whim because you left a bad review somewhere. Sign it or enjoy your worthless brick which we will not refund. Oh, and now every single manufacturer requires the same thing for this device class. So you can either have a washing machine or hand wash your cloths in your bathtub".
These sorts of EULA should be flat out illegal.
Yeah, it's frankly ridiculous that "smart" devices need internet access. Why shouldn't my smart oven behave exactly like my Brother printer? There's no reason my oven needs access to the internet, it can do everything it needs to do on my local network. My phone should be able to connect directly to it via a scan of the local network subnet or using any number of service announcement technologies that already exist.
And it makes these devices worse. I should be able to control my oven using a simple REST api and home assistant. The fact that in order to interact with my oven with a home assistant I first have to reach out to my manufacture servers is just insane. It's an oven. It only has so many sensors and nobs to twist.
About the only grace I give these manufacturers is the fact that google and apple both make it an annoying pain to maintain applications in their app store. A manufacturer can't simply drop "oven app" once and expect it to be available on the store forever. But that too should be solved with the same regulation that says "Ovens, refrigerators, washing machines, thermostats, and doorbells must not connect to the internet". We can teach the world about VPNs if they want remotely access their devices.
Just don't design the game so that, when the business model stops working, every paid copy becomes a brick
I’m a devils advocate on this argument.
Yes, a big company can take it away, but I think they have to leave it online long enough to get your money’s worth.
So if I have a game for a year I paid $70 for, that’s fair, if it goes away, I hope I had a few hours of fun with it.
>So if I have a game for a year I paid $70 for, that’s fair, if it goes away, I hope I had a few hours of fun with it.
This example is humorously short and this is why there is backlash to game companies shutting down games. What about the people who bought it towards the end? They just get nothing? All that time and money spent just gets thrown in the trash because they don't want a cloud bill? They either need to opensource the games and servers or keep supporting them for a decade or longer.
Counterpoint: UK law gives you six years to sue if goods are faulty or otherwise not as advertised, why should software be any different?
Not everything is economic value. For gamers, an online game can be a community hub, part of their identity, a hobby. It’s not about whether they got their money’s worth, it’s about destroying a virtual “place” they’re emotionally and socially invested, and the specific skill they posses when they’re there.
Certainly we'll just move the fig leaf so the free online component of games are now part of a subscription.
Ideally a free subscription through packed in keys and such but we'll probably end up being nickel and dimed even further.
So who gets to be the arbiter of how much time $70 is worth?
You?
The companies making the games?
Why should they get to destroy games—gone, forever, with no chance of retrieval or resurrection—that hundreds of people put their time and love into, and millions of people want to play, just because they think it'll make this quarter's stock price numbers look better?
Copyright was created to protect the rights of the creator for a limited time to promote the useful arts. Creations are supposed to become part of the public domain once the creator is no longer getting use out of them. Game companies want to break that bargain, scorched-earth style, and ensure that no one can ever use the things that they create to make anything new.
Related on the U.S. development of things:
The California state assembly has passed the 'Protect Our Games Act'
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48328365
Good cause, but society has rapidly moved passed them just switching off games after people bought them. Now the hardware production companies for gaming are winding down and not producing gaming computer parts because megacorp datacenter parts have a much higher margin. The future of gaming will unfortunately be renting from the cloud; a context in which these "stop killing games" arguments will have much less leverage.
Then I will simply stop purchasing games and continue to play old ones that I can run on my computer as I please, online server or just do something better with my time.
The whole thing seems absurd when you remember that no one needs video games. This doesn’t need to be legislated. Let them kill video games and then stop buying their video games if they’re just going to kill it off. Why are people still buying games that cash be killed off?
If enough people are still buying these games then clearly the game being killed off is not an important factor. If it was, they wouldn’t buy them.
What does need to be legislated is how these games and services are marketed: it must be made clear latest date the service is guaranteed to be up.
> The future of gaming will unfortunately be renting from the cloud
That might be your future. But as long as there are computing platforms that users can run in their own home there will be games for them.
Nor do I think Nintendo will simply drop their hardware efforts to focus on cloud, and their customers have proven willing to pay higher prices for the types of gaming experience Nintendo will deliver.
Judging by the amount of people saying they've used and enjoyed cloud gaming I'm not as confident as you to make that claim. If cloud keeps making offers good enough such that people pick it instead of building their own PC, the number of personal devices will decrease.
I enjoy low-latency competitive games, and I'd say those are unlikely to get replaced by cloud, because many players notice latency spikes immediately. But I'm a bit skeptical of how much market value can be sustained by people who like the feeling of owning their own hardware, or feel the need to have lower latency in games.
I'm sure if someone built a data center within two blocks of my home and I was able to stream from it, many of these issues would disappear as well.
Consoles already make you pay for online services. They already sunset games so I think even under the new rules they have the ability to stop that service at any time.
>Nor do I think Nintendo will simply drop their hardware efforts to focus on cloud,
Consoles might as well already be cloud for all you control them. But I guess I should've specified PC gaming. I thought it was indicated from the context of "stop killing games". Also, to be clear, I'll never "cloud" game or use consoles. I'll just remain in the past with old hardware and old (and new indie) games. But the "PC gaming industry" as an economic block larger than movies is dying and that's a shame.
This is a phase and data center parts are usable for gaming. (Yes even with all the rasterizer and texture units chopped off, we'll have a wrapper that does that work in compute shaders)
we still got newer companies out of china like moore threads working on gaming gpus, they had to pause new production because of the whole ai shortage but it looks like they might restart. is it usable for any serious gaming right now? no. but its already fighting the nvidia/amd monopoly together with intel.
as long as there is a market the producers will come, even in a super capital intensive industry like this. and it looks like nvidia is partially going back on the whole data center push with rtx spark. its just one high end product but it shows they know a lot of people want local gaming and local inference.