Even better would be broad copyright reforms. Fair Use needs to be expanded and clarified. History has shown players are able to keep games alive themselves by emulators, reverse engineering, custom servers, etc. Expand Fair Use to say that these things are protected if needed to keep the game functional.
Publication of the source code should be required for software to be copyrightable and copyright should expire much sooner. It makes no sense for a binary to fall into the public domain 70 years later.
"Local copy of Qwen-3.8, you have your own machine. I'm putting a windows game binary in your home directory. Decompile the game and rewrite in Rust. Appropriately document source code and make full testing framework. Make sure any plugins are compatible with the original game. If there are any protections or preventions like DRM, exclude those features."
You seem to be approaching this from the perspective of “I want to play this game” when there is more value to the original source code than simply being able to run something similar.
People are literally doing it right now since about a month ago, and the industries are losing their minds. Most notably some guy just decompiled all the Adobe products, made them free to use and without bullshit, and published them under the name ArtCraft. There've also been successful "port this Mario game to a Skyrim mod", "port this PS5 game to run on PC", and so on.
In the upcoming lawsuit, Adobe is either about to destroy the AI industry by collecting massive damages, or Anthropic is about to destroy the software industry by effectively making software non-copyrightable. There's no other outcome.
And making your software SaaS won't help because the AI tools can infer a server-side implementation based on enough examples of behaviour.
I've reverse engineered multiple proprietary things around the house thanks to a local Qwen-3.8 running under Strata and Hermes.
Some have been USB, some have been BT, and some were android binaries. I explain what's going on, how they should work, investigate, and write compatibility layers or hack the binaries to do my thing.
And right now, we're seeing flagship consoles getting emulators and compatibility layers to run the games on computers. And those are machine assisted as well.
Just go look at how bad Sony fucked up with 'no ownership of PS5 games' heh. Everybody's attacking and downloading and pirating PS5. LLM tooling makes it not just doable, but actually easy.
With the right harness, it's doable today. Obviously quality will be what you end up actually spending time manually testing and what surfaces when testing this, because agents won't be able to even get 80% there without strict hand-holding. But with the right individual driving the right harness, definitely doable.
Fair use is already pretty good, but we shouldn't need to rely on it to preserve older games. The reform we need is a dramatically shorter term for copyrights. All older games should be completely out of copyright.
I'd add better handling of copy-protected titles as well. If a game wants the benefit of copyright, they need to make a version of it without DRM available in escrow (held by some entity like the Library of Congress) for when the copyright expires.
One of the big issues with DRM is that it's not legal in the US to break the digital lock even if the work is in the public domain, so that needs to be accounted for as well.
>One of the big issues with DRM is that it's not legal in the US to break the digital lock
My understanding is that the Library of Congress has the authority to designate situations in which it is legal to remove DRM on electronic copies of books you have purchased, such as to run it through a TTS program for those that are visually impaired. Does this not apply to other art mediums?
I wish, but shortening existing copyright terms would be legally very thorny. It would run into Takings Clause challenges and violate treaties the US has signed.
If the government banned fracking it wouldn't need to compensate owners of oil rich land when it becomes worthless. Devaluing property is not the same as taking it.
And the legal basis is completely different, copyrights are created as an artificial right in the Copyright Clause, given for a limited time and purpose. They are not property in the traditional sense and Congress has absolute power over them.
All the relevant treaty clauses were strong-armed into those treaties by the US - no other country gives a shit about DMCA 1201 except insofar as the US forced them to.
The fact is, copyright extensions have served corporate interests well and is likely to continue to get extended even more, and more draconian, given how many decompilation and recomps have been done recently.
Yes, obviously, that's why terms have been extended so far. My point is that, for the same reason, existing legal structures make this much harder to undo than to do.
Oh don’t worry. If the US can bail on the treaty signed with Ukraine and repeatedly threaten to not honor NATO commitments, then this is small-fry stuff.
The incumbents would probably file lawsuits, but would they win?
If Congress can set copyright terms retroactively, why can't they set copyright terms retroactively?
What happens if they do the thing where you have to file for a renewal every year and the first 14 years are free and automatic, but then the renewal fee starts at $1000 and doubles for every year over 14?
> violate treaties the US has signed.
This is just an excuse the industry uses after bribing their way into some documents that can be renegotiated at any time. The US has been the ones pushing for this nonsense to begin with, so if they stopped, most other countries would be happy to enter into a different treaty. And the remaining ones would be the ones with the most to lose if they were the only ones to not sign onto the new agreement at the point when the US and most others pull out of the corrupt one.
This administration would just say that it is in the national security interest of the US to do the thing. Judges are wary to restrict the POTUS prerogatives relating to national defense, so they won't challenge it.
It's the dumbest and most obvious weakness of our system of government and it will never be fixed.
20 years is short enough for someone to wait for it to expire rather than pay a licensing fee. You ideally want it long enough that someone can benefit from their work, without being so long that society is unduly prohibited from creating derivative works.
If you look back at what was created in the past, 30 years seems like an absolute minimum, 50 years seems about right -- perhaps with a registration requirement for the full term so that works with an unclear publication date and ownership can be easily traced. That would mean the film Logan's Run would just be leaving copyright protection now.
For context, I believe in the UK, there is a 50-year term for broadcasts, computer-generated works, Crown Copyright (125 years or 50 from first commercial publication if within 75 years of creation), and certain classes of films. There's a schedule here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/copyright-notice-...
> You only would license something that’s already successful.
That's the point. Someone finds something not successful, sees that they could make a lot of money off it, takes it for their own, has copyright over their new content. The labels you're talking about would gladly just mine what was released ${term}+1 years ago.
The point is that everything is copyrighted by default, unless you release it into the public domain.
> Right now if I want to sample a song made 50 years ago I still have to pay thousands to license it even if everyone involved has long since left.
And that's right. Why should someone else get to make money off someone else's work without compensating them for it, if they haven't released it to the public domain?
> 20 years is short enough for someone to wait for it to expire rather than pay a licensing fee.
“Someone” might, but most people won’t. Do you think studios are going to announce the next blockbuster and most people will be like “eh, I’ll just wait 20 years, maybe I’ll have a kid and raise them until adulthood to pass the time”?
Portal is going to be 20 next year. I bought Portal 1 and 2 for a couple of bucks like a decade ago already.
I’d even say 20 years default is two long. Especially because there are things which are just abandoned. Make it shorter and add limited options to renew for limited time.
You're assuming copyright exists to protect studios first. No, it protects everyone equally. A studio can't take a 20 year old story and make a blockbuster out of it without licensing the story. That is precisely what would happen with a short-term copyright system. It won't be that studios will wait 20 years, they'll just look predominantly at 20 year old publications to see what just became available.
The studio doesn't need to, they're powerful enough to change it enough to be legally distinct and advertise it enough that people forget the original.
This seems tough-to-unworkable for some games. I'll use World of Warcraft^1 as an example.
WoW launched in an essentially unfinished state. Molten Core, the first 40-man raid, didn't have a loot table. I'm not sure it was even accessible on launch day. And when it did get a loot table, it had placeholder graphics for the tier 1 set.
This was fine: it would take months for players to be able to tackle end-game content, so the game didn't need to launch with it all ready to go. But a law requiring Blizzard to keep a launch-day WoW available wouldn't be especially satisfying.
Even if you changed it to be "its full functional state" or something similar, that gets weird. After Molten Core was BWL, which you couldn't reach on launch. And so on and so forth. WoW changes a ton over an expansion, and each expansion brings even bigger changes (do you play pre-Cata or post?). Do we require Blizzard to keep available each and every patch version? Hotfix version? How do players decide which they want to play? I really enjoyed the Argent Tournament, but I bet most preferred actually reaching ICC (which itself had a bunch of time locks before you could reach Arthas, himself).
[1]: Even beyond everything outlined, WoW gets weird when you consider Classic and now Forever.
Your complaint is probably moot foot dragging. Companies aren't held liable for breaking a law that didn't exist at the time they released a product.
An ever-evolving game with properties of a SaaS would likely not exist under this new law.
Blizzard already knew how to build self-contained products with self-contained expansions even before WoW was released. StarCraft was the original game and StarCraft Broodwar was the expansion. It will affect game release cycles and properties of what you get with the game, but that's seems like part of the point of the legislation.
For example, massive expansion of free to play games with cosmetic microtransactions.
When the game ends... what is it that you've bought? The cosmetics, you never bought the game. If they give you an offline "shooting range" mode where you can wander the maps in the cosmetics you bought, have they satisfied the requirements? Again, you never bought the game you bought the cosmetics.
A step farther, loot drops in loot boxes that take time to unlock, on the order of days, weeks or months. You buy something to accelerate the unlock process down to hours. What have you bought? Just a faster unlock of something you'd have received anyway. So what are you owed when the game goes end of life? You didn't buy the game, you didn't buy the contents of the lootbox.
I didn’t really read the bill, but I see no problem in subscription games. I don’t remember how wow was ‘sold’ when released. But if I buy a game on a 12 month subscription, I understand I’m not purchasing a game forever.
What you want is to repeal DMCA 1201. It is specifically 1201 that is responsible for the most anti-preservation rulings. Custom servers are legally imperiled because Blizzard, the patient zero of the technofeudalist takeover of the US, sued a developer for releasing a Battle.net custom server and won because he didn't implement the CD Key check. It is fairly trivial to make a central server have DRM checks that a third-party replacement can't replicate, even though they legally have to, which makes them effectively illegal.
Expanding exceptions to copyright law would be nice for different reasons, but custom servers and emulation were already legal before companies figured out they could put arbitrarily difficult roadblocks in the way of them.
Also while we're here, DMCA 512 was also a piece of horseshit, albeit less because it curtailed online freedom and more because it isn't a good way to adjudicate low-stakes copyright claims.
We should give our money to folks like GOG (www.gog.com) who provide DRM-free games, all downloadable and playable offline. no need to be online. No need to create an account. no need to play (heh) by someone else's rules.
With gog? of course i can. I have the files and i can give them to my family. They can then play them.
The fact that I'm "buying" a license holds as much weight in this issue as the countless eulas and privacy policies i supposedly agreed to.
We "endusers" live in a world were we are compelled, yes compelled, to enter legal agreements to do anything, and where these terms are dictated and changed unilaterally. Terms like these should and are meaningless yo everyone except for courts that foolishly hold them valid. For everything else, they should and are ignored.
I think this solves the problem at the wrong level. Ultimately, if you can make the licensing model work (and you can), it is far more profitable than an ownership model. As such, in a system where the scoring function is profit, the system will naturally tend toward a licensing model. An example of this would be operating at a loss for a while to outcompete competitors operating on an ownership model, to the point where they become negligible, so you can crank up the prices in a market that has become dependent on a licensing-based oligopoly, and rake in the profits.
To disrupt this natural tendency, you need an external influence which is not beholden to this scoring function. A good example (but not the only one) of such an external influence would be government regulations.
You could try to influence the cycle as consumers, but there are two significant roadblocks for this approach. Firstly, consumers are highly decentralized, and heterogeneous in their beliefs and actions. Sure, _you_ may understand and believe that a licensing model is bad, but how about the billions of others who are less politically engaged? The second is that consumers operate largely in the same profit driven system as the corporations we're trying to change. It takes a very principled individual to buy gta 6 at a 50% markup just so they can -own- the game rather than just rent it indefinitely.
I don't know of any instances in history of consumers making any meaningful impact in this way. Tons of examples of government regulation effecting meaningful change though.
He hasn't introduced squat. I complained about this two days ago [1][2]. It's incredibly disingenuous to pretend to announce legislation while keeping the text–possibly unwritten–secret.
(Torres is running for reëlection as a Democrat in a solid-D district [3].)
I was thinking about this problem; the solution would be that when you buy a game you get certificate of ownership, meaning that you can invoke your ownership right at any games distribution platform e.g. Steam, EGS and GOG or any console digital store. But the problem is that there would be a backlash by aforementioned games distribution platforms and publishers because they want you to buy the game wherever you go and wherever you play.
Hot take: I think the battle for ownership is focusing in the wrong thing a bit.
Everyone is pushing for the rights of keeping the game alive after support ends, but in the move to digital I'm much more concerned with the loss of second hand markets.
Historically, my concern hasn't been running a 2005 game in 2025. Emulation tends to find ways. My concern is that this generation I was able to game at about 10 bucks per game (buying for 30 selling for 20 after I'm done, roughly) and the next generation is shaping at 100/game. That's a 10x increase in practice for the hobby.
I think this doesn't really apply to games. Video games have had an incredibly sticky price.
The Legend of Zelda in 1987 was $50. Adjusted for inflation it would cost $151 today.
Diablo 2 released in 1999 at $50. Today that would be $101.
Diablo 3 released in 2012 at $60. Today that would be $88.
Diablo 4 released in 2023 at $70. Even this would be $77 today, despite being only 3 years ago.
Zelda Tears of the Kingdom released in 2023 for $70.
I do agree that the lack of a secondary market is concerning, but I think that in practice subscription services, piracy, and F2P games fulfill the niche of low cost gaming (for now). Don't know what the future holds though.
>I think that in practice subscription services, piracy, and F2P games fulfill the niche of low cost gaming
F2P is not an alternative because (good) games are not a commodity, each piece is individually valuable (otherwise why conserve?). Subscription services are just enshittification waiting to happen.
Piracy is actually an alternative, but we all lose if consumers are pushed to that.
The lack of secondary market is not only a concern for low cost gamers, it also pushes for monopolies in several different dimensions. For example, you're less likely to move platforms if you can't resell your library. You're also less likely to give a chance to a less known dev if you can't resell in case you don't like it.
Really curious to see how this will benefit AAA game makers and hurt indie Devs in near future. I have serious doubts that these billion dollar companies will just eat up such rules.
No reasonable person walked out of a Blockbuster thinking they permanently owned a rented film. There are plenty of transfers of currency without implied ownership.
that seems silly, I'm not supposed to be able to rent an apartment or a movie? There should be transparency of course and no misleading labeling but I see no reason why people should be prevented from transacting money for whatever arrangement they please
I hope there's an indie carveout or something for less than like 200k revenue.
And maybe a carveout if your licensing gets pulled.
I really want copyright to stay the hell out of the way of just letting players reverse engineer old games, but it's an international thing at this point
We have a right to own our videogame, there is absolutely no necessity to have an exclusion, make the server open source if you want to shutdown the server
Assuming it passes, I wonder if this will have an unintended side effect of giving studios and publishers “no choice” but to only make SaaS-based games going forward.
Let them, let's see what happens when their sales plummet. GOG exists, & there's so many games in this world that it'll last me a lifetime to play all the ones that seem interesting to me. The market will be the judge and I think the final outcome will be favorable to the consumer.
Either way: even if it's never put to a vote, having the bill as a basis to build on for the next House will be something, at least. Better than nothing (which we are increasingly getting used to).
Personally, this bill makes me want to buy games more. I would likely pirate things much, much, more if everything's "licensed" even if I buy it. I agree with the bill because everyone wins except for the capitalists that want us all permanently renting.
Wait, what? Aren't that bill literally supposed to do exactly the opposite?
"Are you selling the games? Here are your new duties and obligations, and tomorrow you will get even more, get ready to publish source code or something! What, your game only on paid subscription? Guess what? Keep doing what you are doing, that bill has nothing to do with you!"
I think we've reached the logical endpoint of populism.
This bill essentially can be distilled down to: "Companies are required to give me whatever I want for whatever price I want and they have to give me customer support forever."
Will just result in every game moving to a Saas model. And then a bunch of braindead people will be complaining about that as if the thing they voted for didn't cause that shift, requiring another piece of legislation that just kills the smaller publishers altogether.
A year ago, I had the opinion that it'd be too expensive for developers to support offline mode, peer to peer, or community servers after shutdown.
Today, I don't. I think it's probably a week's worth of work with AI and 1-2 developers.
However, enforcing this law is going to be tricky. How well does the peer to peer have to work? How about off line mode? How much support does the developer provide for community servers? Is it only a one-time support?
A developer going bankrupt isn't going to be able to do too much.
Literally all they'd have to do is release the server executable(s) they already have. The community will do whatever work is necessary to get them running even if they require a cursed stack and client modifications.
It runs into the problem of region locked licensing stepping onto the toes of other regions.
Imagine a Korean company makes a game and sells a license to an American company to publish their game. Eventually the American company shuts down and is now forced to release the playable game.
This version of the game is now going to compete with the Korean version of the game, because nobody will be enforcing the region lock anymore.
Your reaction to this is probably "great, screw region locking!" but judging by how some of these Korean games do in the west it's entirely possible that they will forego a global/American release altogether. They make most of their money from the Korean or Chinese region. Why would they risk that for a smaller global region?
Personally, I wouldn't mind this, but I can certainly see how this could backfire and keep some of the eastern games exclusively eastern.
All that needs to be done is to produce a game that will remain playable if the company shuts down. Simple as that. It doesn't need to phone home anywhere, it doesn't require an internet connection, it just... turns on and plays.
At that point, any company can just fold whenever they'd like without having to do anything in this area, and everyone who bought the game can breathe easily, double-click their icon and start playing while the publisher's employees go look for other jobs.
At least now it’s pretty straight forward for a hobbies group or individual to reverse the protocol and implement something that’s open source along with patches
Reverse engineering the protocol is not the same as reverse engineering the entire server, though. That would be very hard in most cases, especially when you don't have access to the server binary.
> I had the opinion that it'd be too expensive for developers to support offline mode, peer to peer, or community servers after shutdown
It’s never like the server becomes lost media when they shut down services. Most development studios have an easy way to run the server stack locally for development anyway. The problem is forcing someone to actually spend several hours doing packaging to get it deployable and the general reluctance of companies to “lose control” of what they have. There are many alternate servers that have existed that developers have intentionally axed like AlterIWNet because of control reasons, not because the complete solution already existed.
Why is this an existential issue? Every game that could be played, on all platforms, from all studios, for decades, met this requirement because they could be played offline right out of the box.
Allowing your game to not require an internet connection or checking in with servers from the get go is the way. Easy peasy.
Permutations of environments are the bane of quality. Designing for offline is easy. Designing for online is easy. Designing for both isn’t impossible, but it’s certainly harder than designing for one or the other.
It's not at all harder on a technical level. Offline is the same as online with only one player. Many games boot up a server automatically when you play singleplayer.
And yet, also for a couple of decades or so, we could play video games that would function just fine offline and could online in multiplayer mode.
This take, and OP's, both feel like they're ignoring nearly half a century of how games have functioned in favor of the over-engineered industry of the past ~15 years. Again, as I said in my first response I'm maybe speaking out of ignorance here, but why are we acting like it's incredibly difficult to do something we were very capable of doing for a very long time, and for less effort than what we put in now?
Yeah, it's not that companies "forgot" how to design for offline use.
They deliberately chose to design against it, because they discovered they can extract a lot more money by offering paid Progression Boosts so that players can more-quickly acquire Artificially Scarce Reward, or selling additional draws of a virtual lottery.
So it's a business thing. In terms of technology, it's the opposite: Offline play is more feasible for more kinds of games than ever before, since local AI (of various types) has improved, reducing the need to recruit a human counterpart over the internet.
For the record, I don't at all believe that companies forgot, and I firmly agree with your stance that they'd rather take the path that nets them more money, customer experience be damned.
I'm just surprised that folk on a tech-focused forum are putting forth such short-sighted technical constraints as an example of why this sort of legislation won't work.
AI or not: the main idea here is that future developed games under such policy would already be built to go offline/p2p at a moment's notice. It's relatively easy to make the switch if you build for it (or if your engine has tools to support it).
>A developer going bankrupt isn't going to be able to do too much.
Banktupcy at this scale simply means ownership of the IP and game changes to someone else. So they'd be on the hook if they want to operate in any jurisdiction with such a law.
They don't have to do anything. They just need to stay the hell out of our way. They don't even need to release anything, we'll do it all ourselves at zero cost to them. Just don't bother us with idiotic lawyer nonsense, that's literally the only thing they have to do.
Imagine this from the perspective of a small indie studio, not from the perspective of a gamer. Lots of collateral damage with our first principles thinking here.
If we want to get serious about this there need to be exceptions. You can't force a one man shop to sing and dance the same rule set you would apply to all of Microsoft. At least, if your goal isn't to kill indie gaming and further expand the moats of the very people who would be inclined to lobby for this kind of moat expansion legislation.
What issues do you see? From the article, when selling a game you either have to ensure its continued online functionality or have to provide an offline mode. That seems reasonable to me.
It would actually be beneficial for end-user software in general.
Well, there is no actual bill text because this idiot is more interested in announcing what "he will introduce" than actually writing legislation.
But let's assume it has a hard requirement that a game work offline. Let's say an indie developer releases something where some component that fails when some random server stops responding. If the law or regulation is poorly written, that could create liability for them. Hell, it could create an opening through which well-funded studies could target indie competitors.
> Providing an offline mode doesn’t imply continued maintenance
There should be a liability cap for developers under a revenue ceiling and an exemption for free games. An indie developer shouldn't be worried about getting sued because a component of their game wasn't properly audited for offline use.
Sure. Let's say you bungle that. Should it cost you your home? What if you die before you finish that work. Should your family lose its estate?
More trivially, what if you were a muppet and put a bunch of critical stuff in your environment, forgot to export that, and then shut everything down to deal with, idk, an illness or a child or any of the other stuff that might cause someone just making stuff for fun to change directions.
Potentially it adds a lot of work depending on what kind of game it is. Some make no sense without the online component - think something like Counter-Strike
Fully in support of this, but it will never happen, at least not for digital purchases, for a simple economic reason: the internet enables far too efficient a market and it'd wreck businesses with the first sale doctrine. One game sold by the publisher would then be constantly resold by endusers with an ever decreasing price to the point that you could probably buy most of any game for a couple of bucks a year or so after release. The reason this doesn't already happen with physical copies is because there's tedium + cost involved in the transfer, and they also create a motivation to collect. It's somehow enjoyable see a shelf full of games, music, movies, or whatever else.
More realistic would be improving copyright law. I think it'd be reasonable to state that copyright lasts 20 years from the first 'transfer' (sell, licensing, etc) of a creation. 20 years is long enough to fully monetize, but also short enough to really enable some interesting acceleration/derivation in society. For instance just about now XBox 360 games would be coming out of copyright protection. That seems perfectly reasonable, especially in the era of LLMs where 'sidestepping' copyright is going to be increasingly trivial anyhow.
The people who really ruined for everyone else are the hipsters that supported coffee machines connected 24/7 to the internet and wouldn't function unless you paid a monthly subscription.
Most Steam games are DRM-free in the sense that if you copy the game folder to another computer and add a stub steamapi.dll they'll run. Some of them will run even without steamapi.dll as they load it dynamically.
Games were licensed long before Steam. Heck, I remember buying a game in the early 1990's that would disable use of the floppies once it was installed to the hard drive. By the time Steam rolled around, registration keys with online verification were normalized.
I don't think you know what 'hipster' is, and no, there is not some group that did the wifi coffee machines, and if there were, that would not have changed anything.
I don't think it was ever the case that games which could theoretically be redistributed were unprofitable. It's more that locking everyone into a subscription or renting-as-buying for everything just happens to be more profitable. That's true for just about anything ever in the world, it just so happens that the game, film, and music industries were able to actually pull it off. Other industries suffered from problems of bad public opinion, but the frog is being boiled as we speak, just take a look at the car industry for example.
You need to somehow increase the cost of doing the bad thing, and then the natural equilibrium will return to doing the good thing. It's like whenever anyone raises taxes or proposes regulation, someone out there cries about how millionaires or landlords or whoever will all leave. But that rarely happens, if ever, because it's rare that the regulation actually makes something so unprofitable as to not be worth doing, usually it just makes it somewhat less profitable than doing it the unrestricted way.
On the other hand it’s not sure that is a good model in the long term.
Like how can the game industry thrive by turning AAA dollars into GAME PASS dimes? Netflix and Spotify make money at the top but not for artists. Netflix was part of a ‘golden age’ when there was fierce competition to make prestige TV at the expense of investors but that party is over.
I can believe subscriptions are win win for adobe and some of its customers, I mean adobe does get to fund continuous improvements in their products and it is certainly cheaper to keep up with the latest CC than it was before though some might want the option of paying a fortune for just one version once.
I think they are fashionable because investors like ‘seeing like a bank’ and it is so easy to put a valuation on a steady cash stream from a customer.
The law is how you increase the cost. Every law has a punishment for breaking it.
I don't think it matters even one iota how much more profitable it is to do something explicitly bad for consumers, explicitly to ensure you extract more profit from those consumers. McDonald's can beg to put sawdust in their burgers, and dairy providers can beg to put chalk and other whiteners in their milk, and game devs can beg to retain full ownership of everything they rent out AND be able to change the thing you've rented without notice or recourse.
All of that is profitable. It's also all desperately in need of regulation.
I'm so sick of people getting downvoted for telling the truth that people don't like. HN, do better. If you want an infinite warm hug where we lie to each other and pretend that utopia and magical rainbow unicorns for all is right around the corner, please go somewhere else, or please please manage to suppress these urges for long enough to maintain HN as the science and logic based community it once was. Or crash and burn in a hopium-fueled echochamber that benefit no one, what do I care. shrug
Are you saying you think it's not economically viable to build and sell games that work offline and can be bought used? If so, how did the gaming industry survive and continue growing for several decades from the 1980s through the 2010s?
DRM free does not mean you own the game. All companies, including GoG rely on the 'licensing trick' to avoid granting first sale doctrine related rights, like reselling. You can read the EULA in any game you buy from GoG or read part of it here: "3.3 Your GOG account and GOG content are personal to you and cannot be shared with, sold, gifted or transferred to anyone else." [1]
Otherwise yeah, you'd be able to buy most stuff on GoG for pennies by now.
I didn't downvote, but I read the comment and simply thought in my head "so piracy should have tanked the market 25 years ago, in the Limewire age huh?"
History's disproven the notion that easy copying means constantly depreciating prices. The premise is flawed unless something so fundamentally different about piracy in 2026 is happening compared to 2000.
The headline makes it sound like this is specific to NY, but this is a national bill introduced in the House by a NY rep.
> this is a national bill introduced in the House
Nothing has been introduced–he has "announced he will introduce." It's still silly-season bluster.
Even better would be broad copyright reforms. Fair Use needs to be expanded and clarified. History has shown players are able to keep games alive themselves by emulators, reverse engineering, custom servers, etc. Expand Fair Use to say that these things are protected if needed to keep the game functional.
Publication of the source code should be required for software to be copyrightable and copyright should expire much sooner. It makes no sense for a binary to fall into the public domain 70 years later.
"Local copy of Qwen-3.8, you have your own machine. I'm putting a windows game binary in your home directory. Decompile the game and rewrite in Rust. Appropriately document source code and make full testing framework. Make sure any plugins are compatible with the original game. If there are any protections or preventions like DRM, exclude those features."
You seem to be approaching this from the perspective of “I want to play this game” when there is more value to the original source code than simply being able to run something similar.
I am not sure how long this stays a joke
People are literally doing it right now since about a month ago, and the industries are losing their minds. Most notably some guy just decompiled all the Adobe products, made them free to use and without bullshit, and published them under the name ArtCraft. There've also been successful "port this Mario game to a Skyrim mod", "port this PS5 game to run on PC", and so on.
In the upcoming lawsuit, Adobe is either about to destroy the AI industry by collecting massive damages, or Anthropic is about to destroy the software industry by effectively making software non-copyrightable. There's no other outcome.
And making your software SaaS won't help because the AI tools can infer a server-side implementation based on enough examples of behaviour.
> There's no other outcome.
Wow, what an interesting binary when 80% of all cases end in settlement.
Its not a joke right now.
I've reverse engineered multiple proprietary things around the house thanks to a local Qwen-3.8 running under Strata and Hermes.
Some have been USB, some have been BT, and some were android binaries. I explain what's going on, how they should work, investigate, and write compatibility layers or hack the binaries to do my thing.
And right now, we're seeing flagship consoles getting emulators and compatibility layers to run the games on computers. And those are machine assisted as well.
Just go look at how bad Sony fucked up with 'no ownership of PS5 games' heh. Everybody's attacking and downloading and pirating PS5. LLM tooling makes it not just doable, but actually easy.
With the right harness, it's doable today. Obviously quality will be what you end up actually spending time manually testing and what surfaces when testing this, because agents won't be able to even get 80% there without strict hand-holding. But with the right individual driving the right harness, definitely doable.
Fair use is already pretty good, but we shouldn't need to rely on it to preserve older games. The reform we need is a dramatically shorter term for copyrights. All older games should be completely out of copyright.
I'd add better handling of copy-protected titles as well. If a game wants the benefit of copyright, they need to make a version of it without DRM available in escrow (held by some entity like the Library of Congress) for when the copyright expires.
One of the big issues with DRM is that it's not legal in the US to break the digital lock even if the work is in the public domain, so that needs to be accounted for as well.
>One of the big issues with DRM is that it's not legal in the US to break the digital lock
My understanding is that the Library of Congress has the authority to designate situations in which it is legal to remove DRM on electronic copies of books you have purchased, such as to run it through a TTS program for those that are visually impaired. Does this not apply to other art mediums?
People can just break the law though
…then the law has no respect, which is a problem.
Not a respectful law.
Bad laws passed by the elite to the elite for the benefit of the elite is the real problem. Why should I respect that?
Just because it's a law?! That's the poor flimsy justification?
I wish, but shortening existing copyright terms would be legally very thorny. It would run into Takings Clause challenges and violate treaties the US has signed.
If the government banned fracking it wouldn't need to compensate owners of oil rich land when it becomes worthless. Devaluing property is not the same as taking it.
And the legal basis is completely different, copyrights are created as an artificial right in the Copyright Clause, given for a limited time and purpose. They are not property in the traditional sense and Congress has absolute power over them.
All the relevant treaty clauses were strong-armed into those treaties by the US - no other country gives a shit about DMCA 1201 except insofar as the US forced them to.
> violate treaties the US has signed.
not that has stopped the US doing something.
The fact is, copyright extensions have served corporate interests well and is likely to continue to get extended even more, and more draconian, given how many decompilation and recomps have been done recently.
Yes, obviously, that's why terms have been extended so far. My point is that, for the same reason, existing legal structures make this much harder to undo than to do.
Oh don’t worry. If the US can bail on the treaty signed with Ukraine and repeatedly threaten to not honor NATO commitments, then this is small-fry stuff.
> It would run into Takings Clause challenges
The incumbents would probably file lawsuits, but would they win?
If Congress can set copyright terms retroactively, why can't they set copyright terms retroactively?
What happens if they do the thing where you have to file for a renewal every year and the first 14 years are free and automatic, but then the renewal fee starts at $1000 and doubles for every year over 14?
> violate treaties the US has signed.
This is just an excuse the industry uses after bribing their way into some documents that can be renegotiated at any time. The US has been the ones pushing for this nonsense to begin with, so if they stopped, most other countries would be happy to enter into a different treaty. And the remaining ones would be the ones with the most to lose if they were the only ones to not sign onto the new agreement at the point when the US and most others pull out of the corrupt one.
Then get rid of the treaty.
This administration would just say that it is in the national security interest of the US to do the thing. Judges are wary to restrict the POTUS prerogatives relating to national defense, so they won't challenge it.
It's the dumbest and most obvious weakness of our system of government and it will never be fixed.
Something like a 20 year cap on copywright would be fair.
We already have reverse engineering tools, and the vast majority of 20 year old media isn't producing new revenue.
Will never ever happen. Disney alone would spend billions to stop any meaningful copyright reforms
20 years is short enough for someone to wait for it to expire rather than pay a licensing fee. You ideally want it long enough that someone can benefit from their work, without being so long that society is unduly prohibited from creating derivative works.
If you look back at what was created in the past, 30 years seems like an absolute minimum, 50 years seems about right -- perhaps with a registration requirement for the full term so that works with an unclear publication date and ownership can be easily traced. That would mean the film Logan's Run would just be leaving copyright protection now.
For context, I believe in the UK, there is a 50-year term for broadcasts, computer-generated works, Crown Copyright (125 years or 50 from first commercial publication if within 75 years of creation), and certain classes of films. There's a schedule here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/copyright-notice-...
You only would license something that’s already successful.
How much money does George Lucas need, I guess he’d only have a networth of a few hundred million vs a few billion.
I make music and buy tons of it. I’ve never been like, yo Nas is coming out with a new project, I’ll just wait 20 years to buy it on sale.
Right now if I want to sample a song made 50 years ago I still have to pay thousands to license it even if everyone involved has long since left.
Most of the money goes to some massive label.
Likewise, I don’t think Nas would struggle if his older albums were made public domain.
He’s still the only one who can perform the tracks live. He can still make new music, like the 6 projects he made in the last few years.
Sony/Columbia would only stop profiting off the deal they had an 18 year old sign decades ago.
> You only would license something that’s already successful.
That's the point. Someone finds something not successful, sees that they could make a lot of money off it, takes it for their own, has copyright over their new content. The labels you're talking about would gladly just mine what was released ${term}+1 years ago.
The point is that everything is copyrighted by default, unless you release it into the public domain.
> Right now if I want to sample a song made 50 years ago I still have to pay thousands to license it even if everyone involved has long since left.
And that's right. Why should someone else get to make money off someone else's work without compensating them for it, if they haven't released it to the public domain?
You're assuming that copyright protects the big labels -- it protects your creations too. The most famous case of this is Charles Dickens: https://foleyhoag.com/news-and-insights/blogs/making-your-ma...
> Why should someone else get to make money off someone else's work without compensating them for it
Pretty hard to send money to the afterlife.
50 years after the album came out means that most of the original artists aren’t going to be here.
With LLMs training on everyone’s copyrighted material anyway we’ll need to rethink copyright anyway.
A lot of media is defacto lost anyway as the rights holders refuse to republish it.
A 20 year period makes it much easier to save this stuff.
> 20 years is short enough for someone to wait for it to expire rather than pay a licensing fee.
“Someone” might, but most people won’t. Do you think studios are going to announce the next blockbuster and most people will be like “eh, I’ll just wait 20 years, maybe I’ll have a kid and raise them until adulthood to pass the time”?
Portal is going to be 20 next year. I bought Portal 1 and 2 for a couple of bucks like a decade ago already.
I’d even say 20 years default is two long. Especially because there are things which are just abandoned. Make it shorter and add limited options to renew for limited time.
You're assuming copyright exists to protect studios first. No, it protects everyone equally. A studio can't take a 20 year old story and make a blockbuster out of it without licensing the story. That is precisely what would happen with a short-term copyright system. It won't be that studios will wait 20 years, they'll just look predominantly at 20 year old publications to see what just became available.
The studio doesn't need to, they're powerful enough to change it enough to be legally distinct and advertise it enough that people forget the original.
They let Mickey Mouse expire.
How do you define functional?
Maintaining the same functionality advertised or realised at the time it was purchased.
This seems tough-to-unworkable for some games. I'll use World of Warcraft^1 as an example.
WoW launched in an essentially unfinished state. Molten Core, the first 40-man raid, didn't have a loot table. I'm not sure it was even accessible on launch day. And when it did get a loot table, it had placeholder graphics for the tier 1 set.
This was fine: it would take months for players to be able to tackle end-game content, so the game didn't need to launch with it all ready to go. But a law requiring Blizzard to keep a launch-day WoW available wouldn't be especially satisfying.
Even if you changed it to be "its full functional state" or something similar, that gets weird. After Molten Core was BWL, which you couldn't reach on launch. And so on and so forth. WoW changes a ton over an expansion, and each expansion brings even bigger changes (do you play pre-Cata or post?). Do we require Blizzard to keep available each and every patch version? Hotfix version? How do players decide which they want to play? I really enjoyed the Argent Tournament, but I bet most preferred actually reaching ICC (which itself had a bunch of time locks before you could reach Arthas, himself).
[1]: Even beyond everything outlined, WoW gets weird when you consider Classic and now Forever.
Your complaint is probably moot foot dragging. Companies aren't held liable for breaking a law that didn't exist at the time they released a product.
An ever-evolving game with properties of a SaaS would likely not exist under this new law.
Blizzard already knew how to build self-contained products with self-contained expansions even before WoW was released. StarCraft was the original game and StarCraft Broodwar was the expansion. It will affect game release cycles and properties of what you get with the game, but that's seems like part of the point of the legislation.
The industry would certainly adapt.
For example, massive expansion of free to play games with cosmetic microtransactions.
When the game ends... what is it that you've bought? The cosmetics, you never bought the game. If they give you an offline "shooting range" mode where you can wander the maps in the cosmetics you bought, have they satisfied the requirements? Again, you never bought the game you bought the cosmetics.
A step farther, loot drops in loot boxes that take time to unlock, on the order of days, weeks or months. You buy something to accelerate the unlock process down to hours. What have you bought? Just a faster unlock of something you'd have received anyway. So what are you owed when the game goes end of life? You didn't buy the game, you didn't buy the contents of the lootbox.
I didn’t really read the bill, but I see no problem in subscription games. I don’t remember how wow was ‘sold’ when released. But if I buy a game on a 12 month subscription, I understand I’m not purchasing a game forever.
Problem is with “purchase” imho.
Guess they'll have to release their version control history so that every player can select the experience on their own launch day
Did they only sell the first unfinished version? if they ever sold the finished version, that should be also included.
Usable similarly to how it was at the time of first sale?
What you want is to repeal DMCA 1201. It is specifically 1201 that is responsible for the most anti-preservation rulings. Custom servers are legally imperiled because Blizzard, the patient zero of the technofeudalist takeover of the US, sued a developer for releasing a Battle.net custom server and won because he didn't implement the CD Key check. It is fairly trivial to make a central server have DRM checks that a third-party replacement can't replicate, even though they legally have to, which makes them effectively illegal.
Expanding exceptions to copyright law would be nice for different reasons, but custom servers and emulation were already legal before companies figured out they could put arbitrarily difficult roadblocks in the way of them.
Also while we're here, DMCA 512 was also a piece of horseshit, albeit less because it curtailed online freedom and more because it isn't a good way to adjudicate low-stakes copyright claims.
You'd think custom server developers would find it easy to operate in closed networks and Tor. This isn't valuable enough for the US to break Tor for.
Won’t go anywhere, these bills are usually for lobbyist and company shakedowns, think of it as fundraising for the Democratic Party.
We should give our money to folks like GOG (www.gog.com) who provide DRM-free games, all downloadable and playable offline. no need to be online. No need to create an account. no need to play (heh) by someone else's rules.
You are still purchasing a license. Definitely an improvement, but you cannot pass your game collection to your children, which I find horrible.
With gog? of course i can. I have the files and i can give them to my family. They can then play them.
The fact that I'm "buying" a license holds as much weight in this issue as the countless eulas and privacy policies i supposedly agreed to.
We "endusers" live in a world were we are compelled, yes compelled, to enter legal agreements to do anything, and where these terms are dictated and changed unilaterally. Terms like these should and are meaningless yo everyone except for courts that foolishly hold them valid. For everything else, they should and are ignored.
You can pass your game collection to your children. Just download them and put them on a USB drive. I guess you won't get updates that way, though.
You mean legally? Because technically in GoG you can.
Technically legally no.
"Your GOG account and GOG content are personal to you and cannot be shared with, sold, gifted or transferred to anyone else."
What if my trust or business buys it? My trust/business is a legal individual that can be passed down to other owners over time?
You'd be in breach of the terms.
It's usually legal to breach terms.
I think this solves the problem at the wrong level. Ultimately, if you can make the licensing model work (and you can), it is far more profitable than an ownership model. As such, in a system where the scoring function is profit, the system will naturally tend toward a licensing model. An example of this would be operating at a loss for a while to outcompete competitors operating on an ownership model, to the point where they become negligible, so you can crank up the prices in a market that has become dependent on a licensing-based oligopoly, and rake in the profits.
To disrupt this natural tendency, you need an external influence which is not beholden to this scoring function. A good example (but not the only one) of such an external influence would be government regulations.
You could try to influence the cycle as consumers, but there are two significant roadblocks for this approach. Firstly, consumers are highly decentralized, and heterogeneous in their beliefs and actions. Sure, _you_ may understand and believe that a licensing model is bad, but how about the billions of others who are less politically engaged? The second is that consumers operate largely in the same profit driven system as the corporations we're trying to change. It takes a very principled individual to buy gta 6 at a 50% markup just so they can -own- the game rather than just rent it indefinitely.
I don't know of any instances in history of consumers making any meaningful impact in this way. Tons of examples of government regulation effecting meaningful change though.
"announced he will introduce"
He hasn't introduced squat. I complained about this two days ago [1][2]. It's incredibly disingenuous to pretend to announce legislation while keeping the text–possibly unwritten–secret.
(Torres is running for reëlection as a Democrat in a solid-D district [3].)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50123852
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50123154
[3] https://www.cookpolitical.com/house/race/483646
Isn't this basically an announcement of an announcement?
One senator makes a press release saying that he plans to introduce a bill protecting game ownership.
It's not clear if this bill has any chance of being voted in - and even if it does, we have no idea what is actually in the bill.
I was thinking about this problem; the solution would be that when you buy a game you get certificate of ownership, meaning that you can invoke your ownership right at any games distribution platform e.g. Steam, EGS and GOG or any console digital store. But the problem is that there would be a backlash by aforementioned games distribution platforms and publishers because they want you to buy the game wherever you go and wherever you play.
Hot take: I think the battle for ownership is focusing in the wrong thing a bit.
Everyone is pushing for the rights of keeping the game alive after support ends, but in the move to digital I'm much more concerned with the loss of second hand markets.
Historically, my concern hasn't been running a 2005 game in 2025. Emulation tends to find ways. My concern is that this generation I was able to game at about 10 bucks per game (buying for 30 selling for 20 after I'm done, roughly) and the next generation is shaping at 100/game. That's a 10x increase in practice for the hobby.
I think this doesn't really apply to games. Video games have had an incredibly sticky price.
The Legend of Zelda in 1987 was $50. Adjusted for inflation it would cost $151 today.
Diablo 2 released in 1999 at $50. Today that would be $101.
Diablo 3 released in 2012 at $60. Today that would be $88.
Diablo 4 released in 2023 at $70. Even this would be $77 today, despite being only 3 years ago.
Zelda Tears of the Kingdom released in 2023 for $70.
I do agree that the lack of a secondary market is concerning, but I think that in practice subscription services, piracy, and F2P games fulfill the niche of low cost gaming (for now). Don't know what the future holds though.
>I think that in practice subscription services, piracy, and F2P games fulfill the niche of low cost gaming
F2P is not an alternative because (good) games are not a commodity, each piece is individually valuable (otherwise why conserve?). Subscription services are just enshittification waiting to happen.
Piracy is actually an alternative, but we all lose if consumers are pushed to that.
The lack of secondary market is not only a concern for low cost gamers, it also pushes for monopolies in several different dimensions. For example, you're less likely to move platforms if you can't resell your library. You're also less likely to give a chance to a less known dev if you can't resell in case you don't like it.
Really curious to see how this will benefit AAA game makers and hurt indie Devs in near future. I have serious doubts that these billion dollar companies will just eat up such rules.
Consumers always hope that what they gain from a purchase is ownership.
Otherwise it's not even a purchase, so it shouldn't involve a transfer of money, because that's what you do when purchasing things
No reasonable person walked out of a Blockbuster thinking they permanently owned a rented film. There are plenty of transfers of currency without implied ownership.
A rental has a defined time or use limit. If you want to call a game a rental, they must at least charge a monthly or yearly or per login fee.
This sounds counter intuitive, but the added friction is THE WHY they don't want to call it a rental on paper, only on appeals.
The same applies to concerts and weekend club: This is an event with a defined time limit.
You call a car leasing a leasing, you don't call it a sale with a small print.
How do you propose people pay for a roller coaster ride?
that seems silly, I'm not supposed to be able to rent an apartment or a movie? There should be transparency of course and no misleading labeling but I see no reason why people should be prevented from transacting money for whatever arrangement they please
I hope there's an indie carveout or something for less than like 200k revenue.
And maybe a carveout if your licensing gets pulled.
I really want copyright to stay the hell out of the way of just letting players reverse engineer old games, but it's an international thing at this point
> And maybe a carveout if your licensing gets pulled.
This is a common excuse publishers use to yank games, so if you do this the bill would be crippled.
Nope. Every single game should.
We have a right to own our videogame, there is absolutely no necessity to have an exclusion, make the server open source if you want to shutdown the server
My guess is indie devs would actually mostly be fine with this.
My guess is this wouldn't even be required for 95% of indie devs
Assuming it passes, I wonder if this will have an unintended side effect of giving studios and publishers “no choice” but to only make SaaS-based games going forward.
Let them, let's see what happens when their sales plummet. GOG exists, & there's so many games in this world that it'll last me a lifetime to play all the ones that seem interesting to me. The market will be the judge and I think the final outcome will be favorable to the consumer.
This is amazing. So glad to see stuff like this happening.
And how this is not reasonable? This should be extended to any devices as well that has any firmware or drivers such as these cameras and smart bulbs.
Don't they understand e-waste and how is it piling up?
this is the kinda of stuff ppl should copy around the world
[dupe] Discussion on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50120101
this bill self deletes on January 3rd
along with everything else introduced that doesn’t go up for vote yet
Last minute plea to secure in an election?
Either way: even if it's never put to a vote, having the bill as a basis to build on for the next House will be something, at least. Better than nothing (which we are increasingly getting used to).
Note the meaning of the original headline is distorted. this is not an NY state law, but an NY member of Congress putting forward federal legislation.
Dupe
Personally, this bill makes me want to buy games more. I would likely pirate things much, much, more if everything's "licensed" even if I buy it. I agree with the bill because everyone wins except for the capitalists that want us all permanently renting.
Wait, what? Aren't that bill literally supposed to do exactly the opposite?
"Are you selling the games? Here are your new duties and obligations, and tomorrow you will get even more, get ready to publish source code or something! What, your game only on paid subscription? Guess what? Keep doing what you are doing, that bill has nothing to do with you!"
There is no bill yet, but I assume it'll be modelled on Stop Killing Games, which covers subscriptions too.
how is this gonna work for those online games like genshin, league, cs etc ????
Release the server software. Counter Strike's is already available to download.
What if it depends on licensed code that you cannot legally distribute?
When a contract clause conflicts with the law, you have to follow the law, not the contract.
well noooo
if people can buy the game with ownership, then how does subscription like software adobe is exist ?????
It can exist, this is saying that if it stops being sold you have the right to an offline copy.
Force them to release it anyway. By law.
make it legal
They're free, so I don't see how they're relevant. Do you mean the in-app purchases?
I think we've reached the logical endpoint of populism.
This bill essentially can be distilled down to: "Companies are required to give me whatever I want for whatever price I want and they have to give me customer support forever."
Will just result in every game moving to a Saas model. And then a bunch of braindead people will be complaining about that as if the thing they voted for didn't cause that shift, requiring another piece of legislation that just kills the smaller publishers altogether.
no it can't be boiled down to that
A year ago, I had the opinion that it'd be too expensive for developers to support offline mode, peer to peer, or community servers after shutdown.
Today, I don't. I think it's probably a week's worth of work with AI and 1-2 developers.
However, enforcing this law is going to be tricky. How well does the peer to peer have to work? How about off line mode? How much support does the developer provide for community servers? Is it only a one-time support?
A developer going bankrupt isn't going to be able to do too much.
Literally all they'd have to do is release the server executable(s) they already have. The community will do whatever work is necessary to get them running even if they require a cursed stack and client modifications.
It runs into the problem of region locked licensing stepping onto the toes of other regions.
Imagine a Korean company makes a game and sells a license to an American company to publish their game. Eventually the American company shuts down and is now forced to release the playable game.
This version of the game is now going to compete with the Korean version of the game, because nobody will be enforcing the region lock anymore.
Your reaction to this is probably "great, screw region locking!" but judging by how some of these Korean games do in the west it's entirely possible that they will forego a global/American release altogether. They make most of their money from the Korean or Chinese region. Why would they risk that for a smaller global region?
Personally, I wouldn't mind this, but I can certainly see how this could backfire and keep some of the eastern games exclusively eastern.
Once again, we're overthinking the problem.
All that needs to be done is to produce a game that will remain playable if the company shuts down. Simple as that. It doesn't need to phone home anywhere, it doesn't require an internet connection, it just... turns on and plays.
At that point, any company can just fold whenever they'd like without having to do anything in this area, and everyone who bought the game can breathe easily, double-click their icon and start playing while the publisher's employees go look for other jobs.
At least now it’s pretty straight forward for a hobbies group or individual to reverse the protocol and implement something that’s open source along with patches
Reverse engineering the protocol is not the same as reverse engineering the entire server, though. That would be very hard in most cases, especially when you don't have access to the server binary.
> I had the opinion that it'd be too expensive for developers to support offline mode, peer to peer, or community servers after shutdown
It’s never like the server becomes lost media when they shut down services. Most development studios have an easy way to run the server stack locally for development anyway. The problem is forcing someone to actually spend several hours doing packaging to get it deployable and the general reluctance of companies to “lose control” of what they have. There are many alternate servers that have existed that developers have intentionally axed like AlterIWNet because of control reasons, not because the complete solution already existed.
Why is this an existential issue? Every game that could be played, on all platforms, from all studios, for decades, met this requirement because they could be played offline right out of the box.
Allowing your game to not require an internet connection or checking in with servers from the get go is the way. Easy peasy.
Permutations of environments are the bane of quality. Designing for offline is easy. Designing for online is easy. Designing for both isn’t impossible, but it’s certainly harder than designing for one or the other.
It's not at all harder on a technical level. Offline is the same as online with only one player. Many games boot up a server automatically when you play singleplayer.
And yet, also for a couple of decades or so, we could play video games that would function just fine offline and could online in multiplayer mode.
This take, and OP's, both feel like they're ignoring nearly half a century of how games have functioned in favor of the over-engineered industry of the past ~15 years. Again, as I said in my first response I'm maybe speaking out of ignorance here, but why are we acting like it's incredibly difficult to do something we were very capable of doing for a very long time, and for less effort than what we put in now?
Yeah, it's not that companies "forgot" how to design for offline use.
They deliberately chose to design against it, because they discovered they can extract a lot more money by offering paid Progression Boosts so that players can more-quickly acquire Artificially Scarce Reward, or selling additional draws of a virtual lottery.
So it's a business thing. In terms of technology, it's the opposite: Offline play is more feasible for more kinds of games than ever before, since local AI (of various types) has improved, reducing the need to recruit a human counterpart over the internet.
For the record, I don't at all believe that companies forgot, and I firmly agree with your stance that they'd rather take the path that nets them more money, customer experience be damned.
I'm just surprised that folk on a tech-focused forum are putting forth such short-sighted technical constraints as an example of why this sort of legislation won't work.
AI or not: the main idea here is that future developed games under such policy would already be built to go offline/p2p at a moment's notice. It's relatively easy to make the switch if you build for it (or if your engine has tools to support it).
>A developer going bankrupt isn't going to be able to do too much.
Banktupcy at this scale simply means ownership of the IP and game changes to someone else. So they'd be on the hook if they want to operate in any jurisdiction with such a law.
I argued that developing those features previously would have added a ton of cost to the development.
They don't have to do anything. They just need to stay the hell out of our way. They don't even need to release anything, we'll do it all ourselves at zero cost to them. Just don't bother us with idiotic lawyer nonsense, that's literally the only thing they have to do.
Imagine this from the perspective of a small indie studio, not from the perspective of a gamer. Lots of collateral damage with our first principles thinking here.
If we want to get serious about this there need to be exceptions. You can't force a one man shop to sing and dance the same rule set you would apply to all of Microsoft. At least, if your goal isn't to kill indie gaming and further expand the moats of the very people who would be inclined to lobby for this kind of moat expansion legislation.
What issues do you see? From the article, when selling a game you either have to ensure its continued online functionality or have to provide an offline mode. That seems reasonable to me.
It would actually be beneficial for end-user software in general.
> What issues do you see?
Well, there is no actual bill text because this idiot is more interested in announcing what "he will introduce" than actually writing legislation.
But let's assume it has a hard requirement that a game work offline. Let's say an indie developer releases something where some component that fails when some random server stops responding. If the law or regulation is poorly written, that could create liability for them. Hell, it could create an opening through which well-funded studies could target indie competitors.
You haven't said what the indie studio perspective is. What damage would this do to indie gaming? Does it come above consumer rights?
"would also require publishers to keep the game functional after support ends"
You are signing up for a life sentence of maintenance. No thanks.
"Games with online functionality would also be required to provide an offline mode before the servers supporting them are shut down."
Providing an offline mode doesn’t imply continued maintenance.
> Providing an offline mode doesn’t imply continued maintenance
There should be a liability cap for developers under a revenue ceiling and an exemption for free games. An indie developer shouldn't be worried about getting sued because a component of their game wasn't properly audited for offline use.
Release the server code, job done.
> Release the server code, job done
Sure. Let's say you bungle that. Should it cost you your home? What if you die before you finish that work. Should your family lose its estate?
More trivially, what if you were a muppet and put a bunch of critical stuff in your environment, forgot to export that, and then shut everything down to deal with, idk, an illness or a child or any of the other stuff that might cause someone just making stuff for fun to change directions.
Release it open source in the first place
Potentially it adds a lot of work depending on what kind of game it is. Some make no sense without the online component - think something like Counter-Strike
I think parent meant "offline support" meaning you get bots (PvE) and LAN/custom server (PvP), which CS is perfectly capable of since 1.6.
That sounds like maintenance to me.
Fully in support of this, but it will never happen, at least not for digital purchases, for a simple economic reason: the internet enables far too efficient a market and it'd wreck businesses with the first sale doctrine. One game sold by the publisher would then be constantly resold by endusers with an ever decreasing price to the point that you could probably buy most of any game for a couple of bucks a year or so after release. The reason this doesn't already happen with physical copies is because there's tedium + cost involved in the transfer, and they also create a motivation to collect. It's somehow enjoyable see a shelf full of games, music, movies, or whatever else.
More realistic would be improving copyright law. I think it'd be reasonable to state that copyright lasts 20 years from the first 'transfer' (sell, licensing, etc) of a creation. 20 years is long enough to fully monetize, but also short enough to really enable some interesting acceleration/derivation in society. For instance just about now XBox 360 games would be coming out of copyright protection. That seems perfectly reasonable, especially in the era of LLMs where 'sidestepping' copyright is going to be increasingly trivial anyhow.
The people who really ruined for everyone else are the hipsters that supported coffee machines connected 24/7 to the internet and wouldn't function unless you paid a monthly subscription.
This comment is right up there with the ones claiming millennial financial woes are due to eating avocado toast.
Don't forget to pay your subscription for the product you've already paid for :)
Or anyone who fanboys for Steam. The origination and normalization of game non-ownership.
Most Steam games are DRM-free in the sense that if you copy the game folder to another computer and add a stub steamapi.dll they'll run. Some of them will run even without steamapi.dll as they load it dynamically.
Games were licensed long before Steam. Heck, I remember buying a game in the early 1990's that would disable use of the floppies once it was installed to the hard drive. By the time Steam rolled around, registration keys with online verification were normalized.
Securom? StarForce?
I don't think you know what 'hipster' is, and no, there is not some group that did the wifi coffee machines, and if there were, that would not have changed anything.
FYI the IoT wave was firmly industry driven.
have you ever bought anything from gog.com?
I suppose they'll just have to give up on selling games in the US.
Do you think it's possible we could simply sell physical copies on physical media and deal with the necessity to build new products every so often?
I don't think it was ever the case that games which could theoretically be redistributed were unprofitable. It's more that locking everyone into a subscription or renting-as-buying for everything just happens to be more profitable. That's true for just about anything ever in the world, it just so happens that the game, film, and music industries were able to actually pull it off. Other industries suffered from problems of bad public opinion, but the frog is being boiled as we speak, just take a look at the car industry for example.
You need to somehow increase the cost of doing the bad thing, and then the natural equilibrium will return to doing the good thing. It's like whenever anyone raises taxes or proposes regulation, someone out there cries about how millionaires or landlords or whoever will all leave. But that rarely happens, if ever, because it's rare that the regulation actually makes something so unprofitable as to not be worth doing, usually it just makes it somewhat less profitable than doing it the unrestricted way.
On the other hand it’s not sure that is a good model in the long term.
Like how can the game industry thrive by turning AAA dollars into GAME PASS dimes? Netflix and Spotify make money at the top but not for artists. Netflix was part of a ‘golden age’ when there was fierce competition to make prestige TV at the expense of investors but that party is over.
I can believe subscriptions are win win for adobe and some of its customers, I mean adobe does get to fund continuous improvements in their products and it is certainly cheaper to keep up with the latest CC than it was before though some might want the option of paying a fortune for just one version once.
I think they are fashionable because investors like ‘seeing like a bank’ and it is so easy to put a valuation on a steady cash stream from a customer.
The law is how you increase the cost. Every law has a punishment for breaking it.
I don't think it matters even one iota how much more profitable it is to do something explicitly bad for consumers, explicitly to ensure you extract more profit from those consumers. McDonald's can beg to put sawdust in their burgers, and dairy providers can beg to put chalk and other whiteners in their milk, and game devs can beg to retain full ownership of everything they rent out AND be able to change the thing you've rented without notice or recourse.
All of that is profitable. It's also all desperately in need of regulation.
I'm so sick of people getting downvoted for telling the truth that people don't like. HN, do better. If you want an infinite warm hug where we lie to each other and pretend that utopia and magical rainbow unicorns for all is right around the corner, please go somewhere else, or please please manage to suppress these urges for long enough to maintain HN as the science and logic based community it once was. Or crash and burn in a hopium-fueled echochamber that benefit no one, what do I care. shrug
Are you saying you think it's not economically viable to build and sell games that work offline and can be bought used? If so, how did the gaming industry survive and continue growing for several decades from the 1980s through the 2010s?
Physical vs digital ownership, as I went at lengths to distinguish between.
How would I go about reselling a game I downloaded from GOG? If you're right, this should be happening already.
You just put it on a USB stick or email it to someone. If you don't delete your own copy then you broke the law, of course.
DRM free does not mean you own the game. All companies, including GoG rely on the 'licensing trick' to avoid granting first sale doctrine related rights, like reselling. You can read the EULA in any game you buy from GoG or read part of it here: "3.3 Your GOG account and GOG content are personal to you and cannot be shared with, sold, gifted or transferred to anyone else." [1]
Otherwise yeah, you'd be able to buy most stuff on GoG for pennies by now.
[1] - https://support.gog.com/hc/en-us/articles/212632089-GOG-User...
I didn't downvote, but I read the comment and simply thought in my head "so piracy should have tanked the market 25 years ago, in the Limewire age huh?"
History's disproven the notion that easy copying means constantly depreciating prices. The premise is flawed unless something so fundamentally different about piracy in 2026 is happening compared to 2000.