I'm generally in favor of the idea but I feel like it falls apart on the edges. imagine you're a small studio that made a passion project. you scrape together funds and you're able to keep it afloat for a year or two. you never really get the breakout success you were hoping for and eventually have to pull the plug because you're out of money. so what happens? all the devs have to work for free to offline the game, or they go to jail? or the company eats a massive fine when they're already going bankrupt?
it makes sense to keep sony/ea/microsoft more honest but it also might chill out smaller developers from being able to deliver products at all
If a company is truly that destitute, then surely they have nothing to lose by open sourcing the code used to host those servers so individual communities can do it themselves.
So now all games require online assets from a server. There's a few types that do need to work that way, and likely to be exceptions. I don't see Roblox or Fortnite having any real offline value and likely very difficult to make them work that way. But they could easily just start making it so the game retrieves Mario's sprite off a server and be like "It just doesn't work without internet" to use that exception.
It's a difficult subject. A lot of multiplayer games clearly would have no reason to exist as an offline mode, but there have been a few examples of games that could clearly have had one. The crew is the most famous one, and more personally to me, Star trek legends had no excuse for being online only, regardless of it's quality.
Also game ownership will become a far more important discussion if streaming ever does become mainstream.
I don't see Roblox or Fortnite having any real offline value
Blizzard said the same thing about vanilla WoW for over a decade while squishing private servers. Then made oodles of cash finally hosting their own.
People absolutely will be playing Fortnite in 2046. Either the servers will still be up, or folks will host it themselves. With or without Epic's cooperation.
Also... Fortnite Save The World was neat, and I freaking paid for it right before they cut access. It would be real nice if I could play the game I paid for.
Is a lot of work. I mean, for a company, it's not that much, but it's just enough of a hassle that they'd rather prevent people from doing it. As long as they don't legally force the game to be removed from stores and made available on PC, I'm fine with it.
I mean, how many online games are still alive today because some Belarusian guy is maintaining them for the community? Just give the community the tools to do it themselves. It's way cheaper than having to build everything from scratch.
It would be a first (but still a win!) that the us actually passes pro-consumer legislation not only before the EU does it, but that the EU declined to pass.
If they pass this every one of these console developers is going to be pushing out cloud service gaming and nothing else within a few years.
Not to say this law shouldn't happen, but it's barely scratching the surface of the consumer protection laws we are lacking. Also, why only video games? Why do I not own the movies, programs, and apps I pay for?
Well, it's generally because games are really difficult to get back once they're pulled. Online-Only games are a harder issue too, because that requires players to mod in an offline mode or mod in private servers somehow. A publisher that pulls a game from sale basically makes it legitimately impossible to find.
While the issue persists in things like movies and music and other audio and visual mediums, finding a pirate site usually provides what you're looking for IF you know how to look for what you want. Movies and such aren't as coveted and protected, not in the same manner that publishers hold video games legitimately hostage for a consumers cooperation.
Btw your questions ARE important, but I think the differences in mediums of entertainment are massive. There's a lot of lost movie, music, and book media, yes. But gaming media is a whole other level of intense when it comes to lost media and a lack of support from developers and publishers. If this gets passed, I'm hoping we extend it to all media eventually. :)
Would love for it to happen but it isnt going to happen. Theres simply too much tied up in the act of making these games. Not to mention how ironclad tight the legislation needs to be for publishers to not loophole it in combination with how heavy enforcement would have to be. Impact on indies and AA teams. Just not going to happen. Would be great.
Sounds like a good deal to me, I get games that are exclusively online yeah that might be a little hard to make the offline thing possible but single player games definitely need this
mgsv could have benefited from this. The inability to do multiple things like FoB base upgrades and higher grade upgrades for weapons and items, Online Dispatch Missions, the Challenge Tasks and other stuff because they all require you to be online, is annoying. That and there's a 10/90 split for resources, plants and gmp.
I'm getting so sick of the stupidity in this conversation. Owning your digital games is not the same thing as forcing games to remain online after shutting down servers. It's not even in allowing you to download them again and again forever by maintaining servers.
Owning your digital games means that they can't revoke your license ever for any reason. It means allowing you to make backup copies even if those copies can only be played on the same generation of hardware. It means allowing you to trade and sell those game licenses independently of them.
"make games playable offline before shutting down servers"
Is this talking about periodic license checks? If you buy games on PlayStation, Xbox, or switch you can continue to play it offline without ever needing a license check.
With Steam it's a bit different, some publishers don't work well with offline mode and if you forget to set it to offline mode you're SoL.
So Steam is the weakest with license check requirements, but it's not pictured here because...?
I mean you kill one of your game i bought like that and im not ever buying anything from you again. Its a good thing to do for the company, for their image, its not only a good thing for us buyers. If the buyers dont trust your game will be playable in the years to come why buy it ?
If this actually passes I’ll fuck a beehive, THAT’S how confident I am that there is a snowball’s chance in Texas in the middle of summer (or Hell I guess, I can’t really tell the difference between the two anymore) of it happening.
The courts have been packed to the gills with judges sympathetic to big business. Let's just say that while I want this to be real and have a real shot at becoming law, but I'm not holding my breath.
Well-meaning but it will either be ineffective in execution or outright make some genres impossible:
・What does "make games playable offline" mean?
Because publishers are gonna do the legal minimum; they'll put players in a blank room to walk around in if they can.
Where's the "line" of playability? This NEEDS to be defined in the bill.
・What does "buying" a game mean?
Is it only physical copies? (they'll just stop selling them sooner) Digital? Anything labeled as a "game"? Anything in a plastic case? (they'll just change the container).
If I spend money on Fortnite, do I have a right to access Fortnite offline?
・If so, again, what defines playability?
An offline mode of Fortnite can't handle 99 other bots, so does 50 count? 20? 10? 5?
What's the minimum allowed to have a game be considered "playable"?
This isn't gonna end the way people want it to like The Crew, because "make games playable offline" is so broad of a concept and it assumes publishers will just "get it" and act in good faith instead of finding every loophole they can.
This isn't hard. The game's functionality cannot materially change from the product that was sold. Features cannot go away. If they ran servers, they must provide the tools they use for servers so users can set up their own on their own hardware.
They don't get to take the ball and go home. They get to distribute the server software to license holders.
companies will not give away their IP or even source code that can be used in later games for "free", in particular server side code that can be used to easily reverse engineer the server side of their games.
You make good points but I recommend not being so negative. "Well-meaning but it will either be ineffective in execution or outright make some genres impossible" is the false dichotomy fallacy. 😉
I just don’t know how they would do that for digital games. You’d have to download the game and keep the files on your computer. And be able to start it without the provider. Is it really owning if the option to download the game goes away?
This makes sense for Singleplayer games with maybe a optional multiplayer/coop mode. But for online service games its not so easy. Because even optional items you can buy like skins must count tooe.
Anyway this sounds like a good idea but idk how it works in practice. Are companies obligated to keep digital games downloadable for all time? What about games like Fortnite which are free? Or WoW which are subscription based? Games like GTA sure, but there are probably other cases I can’t even think of off the top of my head where this doesn’t make much sense.
It's completely unworkable in practice and would destroy a lot of dev studios, and lead to many types of games not getting made because it would be too risky.
They shouldn't have to keep it download able for all time, but if they are going to take the servers offline, your copy needs to be made portable, so you can keep it on a flash drive etc.
It’s only an interesting thought if you’ve never thought about it as a software engineer. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of what the layperson calls “data.” It’s not as if there is some canonical version of what’s out there. Digital games are fundamentally a service.
I couldn't care less. We have a thousand heinous political problems and we aren't gonna fix any of them, and I just can't care about all the lesser bs issues. Just sail the seas and do what you want this country is a sinking ship
I was pretty upset when vanilla World of Warcraft ended in 2007 and EQOA ended in 2012. I don't know if offline-play would have solved it, but maybe making them open source & auto-granting approval for fan projects may have helped.
Power to the players, godspeed. We need some gd good news out of the states
Would love if it got passed. But they also tried to ban lootboxes and that failed. This’ll be no different. Enough people will get bribed so it won’t go into law
And without measures in place to prevent companies from raising prices “in response”, video games will become 300 or more a piece, since “any reasonable person” would expect to pay that much for something they own forever
It's an interesting and potentially good proposal of a bill but since it's pro consumers, it's nvr going to happen. Lobbyists are alrdy moving to make sure this bill nvr passes.
awesome idea that I hope happens, realistically I expect big companies will do everything they can to try stop it and kill it before it makes an any impact in the US or can spread and benifit the rest of us
I'll probably get down voted but, I doubt it. The billionaires would say but we'd lose a few cents and government would shoot it down. These conversations have been happening for years but until you vote people in who actually want to tax the rich, or help the consumers it's like throwing a rubber ball in an empty room. Just bouncing around word vomit.
Not every game does well offline. I'd rather they just make it available to private servers or an archive with HUGE notice in the TOS that states it's no longer maintained by the original publisher but they retain the rights to the characters and logos.
I feel like there should also be a law against games being online only when they have absolutely no reason to be online only. Like you shouldn't need internet to play a videogame completely alone.
Funny I'd actually buy the features the jailbreak ps5 now like backporting your games our giving you a chance to play your old game consoles there alot really cool features available now that I'd pay good money
This bill doesn't give us ownership rights. It doesn't give us the ability to resell our digital games, and we still can't make copies to preserve them. We're also trapped on platforms, and platforms monopolize their ecosystems. If a company becomes shitty, anti-consumer or immoral, I want to legal right to take my games elsewhere. Similarly, any game publisher should be able to create their own stores on any platform. That is what the EU DMA forced on Apple and Google app stores. That should also forced on PS, Xbox, and Nintendo.
I've seen posts about it on reddit all day, and now another one on video games. People really need to check /r/all throughout the day before reposting the same shit again on a new subreddit.
I’m hoping for games like Fortnite or Overwatch, they’ll be both Custom Servers, AND the ability to download Creative Maps to your console to play against Bots and Local Multiplayer!
And for Fortnite exclusively(since Overwatch already has Bot Matches), they can make Battle Royale/Zero Build, Reload, and Blitz Royale playable against Bots, as well as let you get all of the Battle Pass content free of charge after the servers go off someday(if they do LOL)!
"make playable offline" is an interestingly specific statement though. I feel like you could spin that into a loophole pretty easily.
It's playable. It's empty and dysfunctional, but it's technically playable offline. I feel like being playable offline is still pretty different from owning the game.
It could generate some unwanted behaviors such as some publishers just going to subscriptions or making consumers pay for patches if they want to own the game. Still, many would likely comply to the spirit of the law.
This will go nowhere, would be functionally impossible for some online games and is being brought up by a terrible congressman that I could never support. I was banned from the Xbox subreddit for calling him a pro war Zionist, which is what Torres actually calls himself. He knows it won’t go anywhere where is why there’s no teeth to it or many specifics. It’s a populist political move to try to stay relevant against challenges from his own party.
Not mention the dangers of Congress dabbling in things they don’t know like the gaming industry. US Congress attempts to fix something via legislation often breaks 3 other things.
Additionally a note to all mods, if you don’t want politics discussion on your sub then don’t allow posts that involve politics and politicians to begin with.
about fucking time. we can only " own" media so long and corporation is just going to go on or be merged. Humans should be able to have comfort in tangible memories. Maga wants us all to be angry chaotic animals.
There's no one that lobbies for gamers. There are plenty that lobby for the industry. And the industry would see opposition to this as existential for them.
Hate to be rhe pessimist. But without players having a singular foundation / entity backing rhem that could compete with the lobbying the console industries could shore up to put the bill to death - there's no way this would actually pass or become a thing I think I'll ever see in my lifetime.
Re: See congress' discussions they had about limits on politicians stock trading / term limits. They do enought to make people feel optimistic then leave it at that.
I remember buying Bravely Default for the Switch 2 from GameStop thinking I'd be able to download the game and store it on a physical game card. Unfortunately, it was just a license to access the digital version. I misunderstand this to mean I can buy a blank game card and use it to permanently download the game on to that card, essentially meaning I'd have a physical copy of the game. It's possible I can end up with a card with an invalid license to a game I could lose access to if the memory gets wiped or whatever agreement between Nintendo and the publisher ends.
Announced plans = thought about it and told people to get votes
Introduce a bill = has to get voted on and nobody will because GOP is super into trying to oppress people all day instead.
If you want Consumer protections then undo all the people who were let go when Musk had interns firing people.
CFPB - Consumer Financial Protection Bureau
You know what? All the people investigating all of Musk's companies got fired, let go or had their work shoved under a rug.
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u/ImportanceTurbulent8 6h ago
Which lawmaker? Announced plans to introduce a bill? It's like a trailer for a trailer