Yes, exactly. Video game distributors should be forced to choose a pricing model: "Sell", or "Rent". No more "License, until we or the DRM service decides to revoke access for any reason/we go out of business/the DRM service goes out of business".

California AB 2426 is a very deliberate and well considered bill, because it does exactly what it was designed to do: feign consumer protections, while leaving easy loopholes for those companies the bill protects. Those legislators who signed it did not have consumer protections in mind. Gavin Newsom is not interested in rocking the boat of corporate power, and neither are the lobbyists who pushed for that bill.

Don't blame "regulations". Blame, and vote out, the authors and signers, because they clearly do not have your interests in mind.

On the other hand, "buying a game" is given the guise of ownership, despite true ownership still being retained by the seller, obscured by the fact you're making a one-time payment. It'd be reasonable if the terminology used was "rent" or "subscribe" to a game with a periodic payment, but that's not what's advertised.

It is deceiving, unnecessary, and anti-consumer.

There's no reason to move to an open source client, since Minecraft is already more open that the vast majority of games, and has shown no signs of closing that access in the future.

None of those things are required to be supported by this law. It's the minimum viable product to enable multiplayer play.

- Ditch the matchmaking, players can build their own communities and use server lists for discovery - Ditch the anti-cheat if you can't distribute it, it's not necessary for online play - Ditch the metrics, of course - Let the player download their inventory save file or something, idc

Like I said in my OP comment, the problem with saying "this regulation will push devs to subscription-based game models" is that it does not explain why that would happen. It just assumes it would.

This argument to me is like saying "forcing people to wear seatbelts will push them to take the bus instead". Why would this be such a problem that people ditch their whole mode of transit? I see it that way because I can't think of a single case where designing your game server architecture with decommissioning and redistributing to your users in mind would be difficult or costly at all, and I have seen no convincing explanations

Running a single dedicated server on a home computer to play with whatever community you've curated requires none of these. Any sane game server architecture would already be essentially a single executable since you want performance and synchronicity within a single "match" or "world".

You say most games won't be able to release server software. Can you provide an example of a game which could not possibly be disentangled from its cloud architecture? I'm having trouble thinking of any

A bill like this isn't asking for a 1-to-1 level of service once the company servers are turned off, it's a minimal product to make multiplayer play at all possible. The assumption is that, like with most fanbases for a product, you'll have to form a community of people to engage with it on your own.

The solution is to do what so many older games like Quake or Minecraft or TF2 have done since day 1: Release the server executable, and allow direct LAN connections (and disable login requirements).

Please reread my comment. You're doing the exact same thing. You're saying this like it's a given, but it is not. WHY would it be more attractive?

That seems a bit silly to my eyes, self-hosting a server seems sufficient. But not included in this bill, so not an issue here

> Think if fortnite died tomorrow how many different servers it would take to host. Could an argument be made that an end user couldn't be expected to launch a dozen aws services? More dev time, more costs.

In this specific case, it's not so hard to imagine a single home computer handling the traffic of 100 connected users for a game of battle royale, the server compute for those kinds (baked-in world, low physics) games can be cheaper than running an instance of the game. Just some physics calculations, networking, and game state.

The main point would be if you start development from the premise that your server executable will be released to the users, the architecture/performance considerations are not that different at all.

This is what I fail to see an explanation of anywhere in these comments. WHY would this law make a subscriber-based revenue model so much more enticing? WHY would this law make single-purchase games with multiplayer servers suddenly so non-viable from a business perspective?

The latent assumption I keep seeing is that the mere existence of a regulation in an area will drive people away from that model, but that's simply not how businesses operate. It's a cost/benefit analysis. So what is the cost?

Also, we should really drop this restaurant analogy, it's ill-fitting and clearly distracting from the main point.