Essentially, the new law will mean that storefronts like Steam will no longer be able to use terms such as “buy” or “purchase” when advertising a game that always requires an online connection. Since you won’t technically own the product and servers being taken offline would render the product useless, a different word will have to be used.
The official phrasing in the bill’s summary reads, it will “prohibit a seller of a digital good from advertising or offering for sale a digital good, as defined, to a purchaser with the terms buy, purchase, or any other term which a reasonable person would understand.”
That’s actually a very good reason IMO.
I’m waiting for something like this since forever. I hope other states and countries will follow. This is huge.
It’s not only steam, but also Amazon, Apple, you name it.
Buy means buy, not “rent until we decide to render your product useless”!
Can’t wait to see what marketing BS replaces it.
My money is on Experience!
Or Activate!
Or Join!
Or Unlock!
You know something with an exclamation mark.
Wait so if a game doesn’t not need online connection it can say buy?
That is such a huuuge advantage to indie devs that can let you own things.
I don’t see why there’s a distinction for always online games. You don’t “own” any game you buy off steam. All you get is a license to play the game off steam. You can’t sell or trade them.
Even if you buy a DVD, the only thing you are “buying” is the physical media and a license to operate the softwate. You don’t own the software stored on the media, you must use it in accordance with the license agreement or potentially face legal action. The main thing about digital storefronts is that it’s easier to revoke the license.
If you buy a movie, you are buying the rights to private use of the movie, you aren’t buying the copyright. You can sell a DVD movie to someone else and it’s not illegal and doesn’t subject you to copyright law.
If you buy a game that has a license key, then yeah, you are buying a license to the game even if it has physical media, but buying a physical copy of an Xbox game doesn’t have a license key (well, more recently they do, the box contains a store key instead of a disc, but before that was common practice)
Not exactly accurate. The button can still say Buy. The law says that they have to get extra acknowledgment from the buyer that they actually mean license. So it will say buy, and then it will pop up and say you aren’t buying the game, only a license, and then you have to click ok I understand. More nags. What we really need is another license agreement to pop up that nobody reads.
The EULA is a wall of text that means nothing to most people, just like the TOS. The CLA (California License Agreement) or whatever this will be called with be no different, unless they specifically demand a very short and to the point.
*"You are buying a game licence that can legally be revoked without providing a refund.
Ubisoft can revoke the game license at any time for any reason.
Ubisoft guarantees access to the license for 0 days."*
I have no expectation that it will be that clear and concise.
Edit: Looks like they have chosen not to discuss the language of the “clear expansion” at all. Likely because whoever wrote the law didn’t know the subject they’re regulating.
From the article:
The official phrasing in the bill’s summary reads, it will “prohibit a seller of a digital good from advertising or offering for sale a digital good, as defined, to a purchaser with the terms buy, purchase, or any other term which a reasonable person would understand.”
Alternatively, storefronts can clearly explain that you’re buying a license and that your purchase isn’t a permanent transaction, meaning the license can be revoked at any time by the issuer. The most important part of the bill states that passing it will be “ensuring that consumers have a full understanding of exactly what they have bought.”
It’ll probably be a wall of text like maybe a big fat paragraph and a little vague line at the bottom, or somehow manage to be short but still vague enough to not discourage sales while just barely straddling the line of being acceptable to the Californians who might one day end up bothering to look at how this ends up going, if they don’t forget to.
I was alarmed most by part B:
(B)The seller provides to the consumer before executing each transaction a clear and conspicuous statement that does both of the following:
(i)States in plain language that buying or purchasing the digital good is a license.
(ii)Includes a hyperlink, QR code, or similar method to access the terms and conditions that provide full details on the license.
The way I’m reading that it’s just going to say something like: “Attention, you access to this game which can be revoked or abandoned at any time. For more information follow this link and read the license. Press here to continue your purchase.” Nobody will read it.
A while back I was discussing Ross Scott’s ‘Stop Killing Games’ proposal in the EU, in some other lemmy thread.
If passed, that law would make it so you cannot make and sell a game that becomes unplayable after a person buys the game, or you have to refund the purchase of the game itself as well as all ingame purchases.
If gameplay itself is dependant on online servers, the game has to release a working version of the server code so it at least could be run by fans, or be refunded.
If it uses some kind of DRM that no longer works, it has to be stripped of this, or properly refunded.
Someone popped in and said ‘well I think they should just make it more obvious that you’re not buying a game, you’re buying a temporary license.’
To which I said something like ‘But all that does is highlight the problem without actually changing the situation.’
So, here we are with the American version of consumer protection: We’re not actually doing any kind of regulation that would actually prevent the problem, we’re just requiring some wordplay and allowing the problem to exist and proliferate.
All this does is make it so you can’t say ‘Buy’ or ‘Purchase’ and probably have a red box somewhere that says something like ‘You are acquiring a TEMPORARY license that may be revoked at any time for any reason.’
US gets a new content warning. EU is working toward actually stopping the bullshit.
EDIT: A few days after I posted this, Ross put out a video with more or less the same angle as I presented, that this solves nothing, changes nothing, and arguably actually makes it technically worse as this functionally acts as the government officially endorsing the status quo: You have no legal standing to contest your evaporating game, as it followed the rules and put a warning or changed some wording.
To which I said something like ‘But all that does is highlight the problem without actually changing the situation.’
I think the idea is, that the minimally invasive regulation only has to fix the information imbalance between producer and consumer. Then, once the consumer has all the information, they can make an informed racional market actor descision. That’s supposed to price shitty rip offs out of the market eventually.
… yeah I don’t believe it works either.
It doesn’t make any sense if the whole market is shitty rip offs.
In this case I’m not saying all games are bad, shitty games, but they are all shitty rip offs in the sense that they all legally can, and many do just suddenly deactivate, and you’re not even compensated for this.
The whole fundamental legal trick the software industry has pulled is making everything into a license for an ongoing service, as opposed to a consumer good.
And the problem is that this is now infecting everything, expanding as much as possible into anything with a chip in it.
Even if the consumer is perfectly informed, it doesn’t matter if the entire market is full of fundamentally unjust bullshit, as there aren’t any alternatives.
All you get is consumers who are now informed that their digital goods can poof out of existence with no recourse.
If gameplay itself is dependant on online servers, the game has to release a working version of the server code so it at least could be run by fans, or be refunded.
I replied to one of it a while ago and basically, this part is impossible since developer also “license” 3rd party backend/plugins/software solutions to make their server working. The developer do not have the right to release licensed code/api etc.
meaning, say if a backend have the free learning version of license, the developer are bound to the commercial license, which dictates if they can release code that involve 3rd party code/api.
You don’t need to be protected from video game sales, you need to be protected from fraudulent game sales, that’s it.
If you want to buy a game that runs on proprietary servers that will shutdown one day, you should be allowed to do that.
The Stop Killing Games concept is not stopping or protecting anyone from buying video games.
… Neither is slapping a warning label onto games that says ‘hey you don’t own this the way you own a blender.’
That’s very strange framing to use.
What SKG does is mandate that your purchased product be technically possible to be usable in perpetuity, or refund the cost of it.
Everyone knows servers cost money to run, so its not reasonable to mandate every game that is totally online only just have servers up forever, maintained by the publisher.
But what is also unreasonable is needless, always online DRM that shuts down one day (Games for Windows Live, anyone?) or having a massively online game that could still be enjoyed by dedicated fans, willing to front the cost for one or two servers… but cannot, because reverse engineering network code is orders of magnitude more difficult and costly than the publisher just releasing it to the public when they no longer want to officially maintain it.
SKG would completely allow you to purchase an online game whose official server support would end someday.
It… just augments consumer rights by mandating either a refund at that point, or a pretty effortless and costless release of the server files and configs.
I am really struggling to see how you are interpreting this concept as somehow preventing the purchase of games.
If games have to be playable in perpetuity, then you can’t buy a game that isn’t playable in perpetuity.
But what is also unreasonable is needless, always online DRM that shuts down one day.
There are lots of video games without forced online DRM, and video games aren’t a necessity. You can simply stop buying games from these services and let people who don’t care about such things continue to buy them.
People should be allowed to smoke and gamble, too.
I still don’t think it’s good that they do that, though.
One of the aims of Stop Killing Games, as far as I’m aware, is the preservation of history, which seems like a very odd thing to be indignant about.
It exists partially because many great games, for a long while, before widespread internet access, could not be played if they were no longer directly sold without either paying out the nose for a working, used cart or disc, and console… or via emulation, which is apparently basically illegal, in practice, technically, its complicated, etc.
Then the video game landscape changed with widespread internet access, much more oriented toward what used to be seen as buying a fancy pants board game into well now you’re just buying a ticket to a fancy pants board game that can be revoked at any time, and now you just have an expired ticket to a box that is magically superglued shut and will light on fire if you pry it open.
Some of us olds still view software as a product, a good, not a service.
So you want to legally require game companies to “preserve history” in perpetuity, unlike every other kind of company in existence?
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The rise of the “acquire” button.
“Subscribe”
