> 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.
California and meaningless feel good legislation with massive loopholes? A match made in heaven!
If this is how the bill ends up being enacted, it will only push more big game developers into making their titles subscription only. A win for gamers' rights, I suppose.
It's not meaningless feel-good legislation, it's actively harmful by disincentivizing a bad thing, in favor of an even worse thing. See also car fuel economy standards that push car makers into killing the wagon market segment in favor of SUVs.
The natural incentives had already pointed to subscription based games, these companies attempted it, and consumers mostly rejected it. I'm extremely dubious that this regulation would be enough to reverse that. It's a much easier decision for a company to put a small development team on readying the server tools for public release than brute forcing a new business model on a resistant consumer base and all the associated risks that come along with it.
If by subscription you mean World of Warcraft style continuous subscription then yes, it doesn't work for most games. But I'd argue the modern battle pass model is just another flavor of subscription. And according to the article, free to play games with battle passes and micro transactions also get an exemption from the proposed bill, so companies will just move to that instead.
Are we still talking about negative impacts of this regulation? Because I don't follow the argument that games going free-to-play is bad for the consumer. Consumer pressure has pushed most games with battle passes and microtransactions to limit those to optional expansions of the base game, often merely cosmetic. People can and do spend hundreds of hours playing Fortnite without paying a cent and I don't see how that type of outcome is bad for the consumer.
And if the consumer doesn't invest any money into the experience, I have a hard time justifying a requirement for the publisher to provide options to keep the game running in perpetuity, so I'm fine with that exception.
It’s basically going to incentivize gambling and skinners box type implementations to juice revenue.
Sure, people can opt out and some will. However the base human psychology is pretty well documented. If the ability to simply not engage in what amounts to addictive behavior was enough we wouldn’t have the crazy online gambling epidemic. That is at least to me obviously bad for the consumer even if you can simply choose not to engage.
Some ethical game companies will likely draw the line at what you say - but I predict far more will realize they can juice revenue quite easily by simply moving towards incentivizing more lootbox type things.
You are treating multiple related issues as one singular issue. Battle passes and microtransactions aren't inherently a form a gambling. They can be implemented with gambling, but plenty of games aren't setup that way. If we have a problem with a model that specifically relies on gambling, we can regulate it like other jurisdictions have done[1]. But this specific piece of regulation is addressing something else and doesn't do anything to point the market specifically towards gambling.
Battle passes/mtx would IMO definitely fall under monetary considerations, which would make the excemption not apply. But as is written now, there still needs to be a precedent set for that, to really cement that interpretation
Not exactly the same thing, but a few years ago the law changed to require a sesame-allergen notice on foods that had sesame. Some manufacturers starting adding sesame to foods that didn't need it, because they concluded that including the notice was easier than guaranteeing that their product was sesame-free. The intent of the law was to protect people with sesame allergies, but the result was fewer choices for them.
If a manufacturer is unwilling to guarantee/monitor the lack of sesame in their food, and you having a presumably severe sesame allergy… isn’t it correct not to be eating that food?
Like previously you trusted their lack of sesame based on vibes, which you probably shouldn’t have been doing, and now they’re explicitly telling you not to trust them on this; this seems to me strictly better. You’ve lost a choice that never really existed in the first place
An actually unintended consequence would be if they introduced sesame because they were going to have to put the label on it anyways
If people dislike subscription-based games, companies will adapt by making non-subscription games designed with end-of-service in mind. It only creates an incentive as much as people are willing to pay for the subscription.
The market for subscription games is vastly smaller than the market for offline games. The industry learned that when everyone tried to make a wow killer.
> However, it excludes games provided via subscription services, free-to-play games, and games that are inherently playable offline indefinitely.
Live service games overwhelmingly fall into exactly this category. If anything they're being incentivized over making a game that has an online multiplayer but focus being singleplayer or anything intended to be released and moved on from.
The industry already tried to make everything a live service game in the 2020-2022 period and it was financially disastrous because gamers rejected it.
Gamers have made it clear that they don't want a market full of live service games unless they are free to play (and even then, very few will survive).
They'll make rare exceptions for things like GTA6, but these will be unicorns.
That certainly won't stop out of touch CEOs from choosing to do just that anyways. CEOs and making the stupidest possible decisions are also a match made in heaven.
I think it's more likely that the big studios will start rolling out trivial offline modes (less risky) rather than overhaul their revenue models (more risky).
Subscription only games get way less revenue than pay once for the most part. So I don't think moving to subscriptions isn't gonna be as attractive to publishers as you think.
Also, with a subscription the customer has VERY different expectations, compared to a one time purchase. As in, they expect the access to go away once they no longer pay.
At least that somewhat aligns incentives between players and the game studio. If an old game has a long-lasting player base, then a modest subscription makes it more likely that the studio would keep the servers up and running, if not actively patching the game. With a game that you pay for up-front, a long-lived player base can be a liability for the company (ongoing costs without many new purchases.)
It seems similar to operating an arcade or a movie theater and saying that you can have thousands of people enter but then only having space for a couple while still taking everyone's money.
After about 2010 companies stopped providing the server binary. Games like Modern Warfare 2, Battlefield 2, etc could be played by communities in perpetuity on private servers. If the next game (MW3, BF3) were terrible, you didn't have to buy the sequel, what you had was "good enough" and you could wait for the next version to be released in 2-3 years.
With the current "closed server" model, you can't get a copy of the server code, can't host truly private servers, and when the sequel MW4, BF4 comes out, those private servers won't survive and it forces everyone to move to the sequel regardless of the quality of the game. You can technically still hire a private server for games like BF3 (circa 2012) but very few people are going to pay the $70/month to host an official one via whatever terms EA has come up with, and you absolutely can't run it with plugins, mods, and especially custom maps or game modes, you have to play it "vanilla".
Quake 3 the server is included with the game, anyone can run it, modify it and it's very plugin friendly, which is largely why it is still around today. Closed servers you can't directly access is a deliberate decision to kill the game when the sequel is released, by not allowing users to extend what they "bought". Otherwise we would still all be playing Battlefield 3 on custom maps with CTF and 128 v 128 player servers and everything else. You can modify a handful of things on the paid private servers but it's extremely limited and there's no community feedback on any of this.
> After about 2010 companies stopped providing the server binary. Games like Modern Warfare 2, Battlefield 2, etc could be played by communities in perpetuity on private servers. If the next game (MW3, BF3) were terrible, you didn't have to buy the sequel, what you had was "good enough" and you could wait for the next version to be released in 2-3 years.
That's not true about Modern Warfare 2. Modern Warfare 2 was the first Call of Duty game where you could no longer host your own servers. In its predecessor, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, however, that was still possible. For MW2, unofficial servers created by players only became available later on. However, Activision has taken legal action against many of these projects.
I don't think it's going to be a disaster, doing nothing is not quite a disaster when the AAA games sector has been ticking over like this for the past 10 years or so.
The law is worded so that this does extremely little even if fully passed by CA's legal system due to the very broad exceptions. Exactly as lobbyists want it.
Makes great headlines for SKG while doing pretty much nothing material for them though.
>> It also prohibits the continued sale or distribution of games that have become unusable due to service termination.
Does anyone know how this should be interpreted?
Maybe to have a concrete example, let's take Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 (RCT2), with OpenRCT2 as a sort-of mod for it, but imagine that RCT2 was originally a subscription game where you paid per month to play it and that it terminated before OpenRCT2 started. Existing copyright laws already prohibit continued distribution, which OpenRCT2 doesn't do, so does this change anything? Does this law move what used to be civil (copyright) cases into criminal law (so there needs not exist a rights-holder to file suit; the state can just push cases as they see fit)? Could the OpenRCT2 devs still (as I believe they hitherto can) release a 'donation version' with bonus gimmicks if they so wanted, or would that be classified as a sale of something that enables playing the original RCT2 and so illegal?
So this only really applies to games you have to purchase once but are online-only? That's... an incredibly narrow law, that only covers a class of games which are particularly stupid by design. (Continuous cost without continuous revenue.)
I assume you're actually a gamer, and not just an economist speculating on a market you're not exposed to? Because I don't know how to reconcile your comment with my reality. There are tons of live-service single-purchase games, I would even say they the overwhelmingly default model in 2026 compared to WoW-style subscription games.
If you want an answer to your "continuous cost without continuous revenue" riddle, the answer is in-game purchases, DLC, attracting new accounts over time, and the unspoken unadvertised promise "we can cut our losses at any time and shut down servers." This lattermost incentive is what is unhealthy for the market and what should be regulated to no longer be an incentive (short of having peer- or community-hosted servers, at least).
There are a bunch of these, and they are silly/unviable. I see a lot more free-to-play than single-purchase live service games, but the latter is a fun additional exploit in that they get you to pay up front for something that they never have any intention to survive long-term.
Currently I'm heavily playing both a free-to-play with microtransactions title (Heroes of the Storm) and a subscription title (EVE Online), both of which are live service games which would be exempt from this bill by definition, but are both games I would meaningfully like to play even if the companies decided they didn't want to run them anymore. (Yes, I'm aware both games I am playing regularly are old as time itself.)
Meanwhile, yes, there are single purchase games with an online model, and they fail and get shut down because they were never sustainable to begin with. The bill would arguably cover something like the FPS-of-the-years which are intended to grab everyone's attention for a few months and then die off when the company needs you to buy the next version of the title because they get no recurring revenue from you continuing to play the current one. (See Call of Duty, Battlefield, etc.)
Ah, I see your point better now. I agree that free-to-play and single-purchase live service games are essentially the same breed, that free-to-plays are similarly widespread, and would indeed like microtransaction-funded titles to be subjected to the same stipulations in the bill.
> there are single purchase games with an online model, and they fail and get shut down because they were never sustainable to begin with
I still don't think I agree with this (it's the exact same business model, just with an onboarding cost to e.g. be less dependent on MTX, or to cultivate a smaller but more dedicated fanbase, or to shut out bots), but that's beside the above points.
> Currently I'm heavily playing both a free-to-play with microtransactions title (Heroes of the Storm) and a subscription title (EVE Online), both of which are live service games which would be exempt from this bill by definition, but are both games I would meaningfully like to play even if the companies decided they didn't want to run them anymore. (Yes, I'm aware both games I am playing regularly are old as time itself.)
[emphasis mine]
AFAICT, the MTX would make HOTS not be eligible for the "no monetary considerations" carveout.
Edit, didn't realize you were the same person I replied to on another comment, sorry for repeating myself.
This is really about Ubisoft's The Crew, a one-time-paid mostly-singleplayer car race game about infights and revenges in an illegal street racing group, that required Internet connection, which server got shut down. So yeah.
The required connection and authentication was likely an anti-piracy measure, so kind of doubly yeah.
> That's... an incredibly narrow law, that only covers a class of games which are particularly stupid by design. (Continuous cost without continuous revenue.)
Eh, it sounds unintuitive, but in practice it's extremely common. Almost every first-person shooter (well, you could really expand that to "almost every competitive multiplayer game") made by major studios is either a one-time purchase or entirely free. The ongoing revenue comes from cosmetics and other in-game goodies.
This sort of economy makes sense when you consider consoles (especially back in the day), where it's easy to get people to buy a disc but hard to get people to sign up for a subscription.
> > (2) Any digital game that is advertised or offered to a person for no monetary consideration.
I'd argue buying any form of MTX creates a monetary consideration. Though, I guess it is kind of a gray area that's gonna have to be ruled on.
> This solely refers to the game being available for free, not for any additional powerups or cosmetics being available for free.
I didn't intend to mean additional stuff being free. I meant additional stuff you can buy, resulting in the no monetary considerations carveout not applying.
Another LLM tell is that they penalize repetition so they'll use as many synonyms as possible. You may end up recognizing the same concept being rehashed with synonyms constantly. You can look up examples of thie as "elegant variation"
In one of the languages I read, journalists do this when quoting someone and it pisses me off. Instead of "said", they'll cycle through the same 6-7 synonyms. Instead of just quoting everything together, they break it up.
So instead of:
> President Jackson said "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.".
They'll do something like:
> President Jackson noted that "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet". The head of state also remarked that "consectetur adipiscing elit" while emphasizing that "sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua".
> "Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation", categorically proclaimed the former business tycoon. He concluded that "ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat".
I've seen this way before LLMs and how much it's used varies a bit from language to language. But it's so formulaic, I can't help but imagine some brain-dead moron sitting in front of the keyboard, trying to make 5 paragraphs from 2 sentences someone said without adding anything else.
The page itself seems vibecoded and a bit of an advertisement, but it does look like the vulnerability is real and high risk. It does explain the big security update I just got, guess I'll prioritize updating today.
This is pretty obviously an advertisement but it's a pretty good advertisement imo, it pairs a meaningful contribution to the OSS ecosystem (discovering and patching a real bug) with selling your cybersecurity tool at the same time.
The incentive previously was having more secure software making a name for yourself. The incentive now is finding the most noisy vulnerability so you can push FUD to sell your AI software.
These guys don't need to advertise, they are already 100% busy with work. But who wastes their time manually creating web pages? Especially kernel devs.
Side comment: I have recently used Claude Code to make a few sites for testing purposes. In the prompt I added "don't make it look vibe coded," and it worked pretty well: No purple gradients, bento box layouts, etc. Nothing spectacularly original, either, but probably enough to avoid accusations of vibe coding.
People are confusing the presentation layer with the content, just a surface layer analysis. Basically people are feeling so burnt by reading AI fluff that they make a rushed judgement.
Writing something by hand requires effort and signals seriousness. It's not unreasonable to take things less seriously when they come wrapped in low-effort packaging.
It's not the effort or the lack thereof here that's the issue, but rather the message you're sending by using slop tools to create the design of the advertisement of your research. It looks cheap.
I'm sure that, at first glance, many more people would take this much more seriously had the authors gone with a style-less HTML page or something, and that'd require _less_ effort, not more.
I have heard this logic before, defending over-engineering the looks to hide a brittle backed. Both sides look very entrenched on their position, I lean more towards having a solid backend and see the polished frontend as a waste of effort, but I understand your logic of seeing it as professionalism. My point is that you are not sending only one message by using a cheap slop static html: some will see lazy and cheap people, some will see people focusing on the real thing with no time or willingness to make shiny sites.
Not much, as it only works on very few high end phones not sold in most countries. Hopefully their Motorola partnership will expand its availability but I'm not confident that'll happen anytime soon.
Sadly forget about it - GrapheneOS will only work on Motorola __flagship__ devices, and most of their budget phones are not even made by Motorola, but rather by the odm such as Tinno, where it's not even possible to unlock the bootloader without exploits.
This has been the worst upgrade so far. Claude Code had been doing great for months, then the past week took a nosedive. And today I find that _continuing_ a session from yesterday that had nothing to do with cybersecurity (literally pasted a stacktrace from a rare crash and told it to help me find a reproduction case to be able to fix it, as we very regularly did) suddenly ran afoul of usage policies and stopped the chat entirely. It's kind of a joke phrase by now, but in this case it's 100% serious, such behavior has made Claude Code literally unusable.
As a bonus, it somehow ate my entire daily allotment in a single prompt, something which had never happened before. I'll try again on Monday and if there's no change cancel my subscription outright and demand a refund.
That was my immediate impression too! It feels like it's all AI maximalists who seem to have a need to filter their every interaction through an LLM. And the result looks and reads just like Moltbook.
Yeah and the employee who generated an AI response to the AI-generated bug report, is Jared Sumner who is the founder of Bun which was acquired by Anthropic. Pretty sad state of affairs all around.
> “It is particularly painful that I made precisely the mistake I have repeatedly warned colleagues about: these language models are so good that they produce irresistible quotes you are tempted to use as an author. Of course, I should have verified them. The necessary ‘human oversight’, which I consistently advocate, fell short.”
What? Irresistible quotes? This betrays a terrible way of thinking as a journalist. Basically an admission of wanting to fake news that'd sound good. At that point just write fiction.
Cant you, like, ask or instruct it to create a bibliography with the citations or at least put the source of any quotes next to it for reviewing purposes?
If I end up using ChatGPT for any reason, I always preface with something like "2 sentences maximum. No emojis. Be professional." at the very least. It tends to improve things a bit.
I took something away from this article. While I enjoyed Blue Prince very much even though I played it alone, the surprisingly most enjoyable aspect of the game came externally - it was (and is) following my friends' journey through the game and being there to give them custom made consensual spoiler-free, hints when they needed. Some times simply being told you're barking up a very wrong tree or that you don't have enough information yet is exactly what you need to not get burnt out. I keep wondering if there's a way to have that baked into the game. Something to brainstorm.
Yeah, I was like your friend, fumbling through the game and texting him to receive some hints on how to proceed further, as I lost patience with the repetitive nature of the game. Still fun though.
>I keep wondering if there's a way to have that baked into the game.
Demon Souls' system of leaving little messages behind for other players is sort of similar.
Wait what? Really? All caps is a bannable offense? That should be in all caps, pardon me, in the terms of use if that's the case. Even more so since there's no support at the highest price point.
Its a combination. All caps is used in prompts for extra insistence, and has been common in cases of prompt hijacking. OP was doing it in combination with attempting to direct claude a certain way, multiple times, which might have looked similar to attempting to bypass teh system prompt.
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.
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