It’s worth pointing out, this law doesn’t affect free games, or subscription only based games.

I still think we’ll need some sort of additional law that protects fans when they want to run the services themselves after a game has officially shut down. Too many times these groups end up receiving a cease and decist letter. Barely any group is going to be willing to take that on.

At the very least this should help tackle the annoying trend where even mostly single player games are at risk of being unplayable once servers are taken offline.

On the surface level it seems like a simple thing for developers to do, but the more you think about it the more it seems impractical with how much goes on behind the scenes, but then you remember they don’t have to maintain anything since it’s EoS and it really is as simple as dumping the backend online and saying figure it out.

Still, the current legislative progress in California has to be heartening for the Stop Killing Games movement, which has seen its momentum in the UK stall a bit after a UK Parliament debate on game preservation last November.

Having seen that debate, “stall a bit” is not the language I’d have used for what happened. Multiple impassioned politicians almost completely ignored by the Government spokesperson in an almost certainly pre-written speech asserting that the industry said this was too hard to implement, therefore we’re gonna do fuck all for game preservation.