The California State Assembly Has Passed the 'Protect Our Games Act'

I’ve thought about how to introduce a bill and find sponsors for extending first sale and related rights to digital goods. I understand the current terms and licensing, but we’ve lost too much to non-transferable contracts and millennials and later will likely have no books, music, or games that can be inherited by their children. It’s crazy that after thousands of years of sharing copies of writings, hundreds of years of sharing recordings, and decades of sharing games, we’re going to give it all up because it’s a license now.

The problem is, where to even start? I would think EFF would be spearheading something like this, but I haven’t come across anything. There have been attempts in the past, but they don’t seem to have ongoing support.

They are going to do what movie industry is already doing: create shell company for release of each game.

Then they will shut down the company when they want, and there will be nobody to come for.

> The bill applies to digitally sold games. However, it excludes games provided via subscription services, free-to-play games, and games that are inherently playable offline indefinitely. It also prohibits the continued sale or distribution of games that have become unusable due to service termination.

I believe this is the key paragraph. I wonder if this will be an incentive towards making more games qualify for those exceptions. I think the previous cases where this act would apply are few but good thing they wouldn't increase under this act.

Releasing server-side code would be a non-starter for lots of companies. For one, many of them don't actually own all of the code they use to implement the game server. There's lots of proprietary middleware in use in online games.

Perhaps a workaround is to just have 1 server online indefinitely. Technically the online services are still functional - the match queue times would just be very, very large.

[delayed]

The reasonable compromise should be to force devs to release server binaries if they are not willing to run the servers themselves.

This what California's political machinery is focused on? Rather than the colossal waste that is the high speed rail project, or rampant corrupt use of State and local funds for social welfare projects that go nowhere?

I understand you can focus on two things at the same time, and moonshot projects are worth it. (More NASA funding please.) But as a California taxpayer I can't take our government seriously.

So just make every game free to play and then require a paying to unlock the actual game.