I'm not sure AAA studios are as large, or as profitable, as you think. The studio itself is often small, large publishers just own many of them.

Small like 30 people? I don't think so. Genuinely small studios are able to preserve their games for the long-term, so there is no excuse.

AAA gaming isn't something that needs to be protected. Anything of sufficient magnitude and budget should be made responsibly or not at all. If a game is unable to exist without screwing over the user in a very legal sense, it has no right to exist. The requests of SKG are not only sensible, they impose a serious legal ambiguity in the current system that needs to be corrected one way or the other.

AAA was always an untenable monster that brought obscene risk; this was clear even in the mid-2010s and the industry is rapidly moving away from that model for good reason. The user-base clearly does not look kindly on AAA anymore either. That's why they are not profitable anymore. The SKG requirements would make very little impact overall compared to this.

I got my start at a game studio in 2001, after they were bought by Microsoft (and their game went from Mac to Xbox, if you get my drift). They're "big" now, but they regularly lay off large portions of their staff, because game development is boom and bust.

I don't think what you say in your first paragraph follows. Are you really, really interested in learning more about why, with an open mind?

Absolutely! Happy to learn from an industry veteran; hard to argue with that pedigree (part of why I like HN). I figured you might have been, but wanted to push back a little because I think it is important.

Here is my impression. 2001 feels like it was still within a golden era of game development; "AAA" games of that time would have been made by smaller studios still, and budgets could be very large, but not catastrophically so. The industry was still expanding. Post-GFC, once graphics scaled, demands seemed to scale, and costs blew out. Games had to reduce risk as a consequence, become more consolidated, more live-service. But the model was never sustainable at that scale. The tech improved so that costs for basic games went down, but big-budget AAA live service costs went to the moon. Volatility skyrocketed, leading to rapid hiring-firing phases. Now it is at its most extreme and the AAA side of the industry is in crisis. Demands for long-term support could be the straw that breaks the camel's back, but it always seems like that back was going to break eventually anyway. What I hope is happening is that talent is falling into the hands of smaller publishers, but that might not be true. What I do think is that the nature of development may need to change so that studios are able to facilitate these requirements while remaining profitable. Some have shown it can be done, anyway.

That's my impression from a semi-outsider perspective. Happy to be corrected though.

First, thank you so much, I so appreciate when somebody cares what someone else has to say!

Second, I think you're right. The games industry is in really bad shape right now. That's part of why I'm so concerned about putting new requirements on studios. If they have to pay someone to package up software to preserve it like this, that's one less person to generate them revenue, and that means someone gets laid off.

Whether their back breaks or not is not binary. It's measured in careers, and time. Most studios aren't profitable at all, or they're very temporarily profitable after each release. That's why publishers buy them, to keep them afloat during the time when they are losing money, and that's an investment with an expected return from those good times.

If you tell a studio they suddenly have to keep something going when it was already a financial failure, there's no way they can plan for that. They did that planning years ago.

Thanks for continuing the discussion! It's not often an outsider would get to speak with someone with your experience.

I definitely agree that it is not tenable in any studio to have a full time staff member dedicated to packaging software to be in line with this legislation. The solution has to be similar to a toggle in the engine code itself at the very earliest design phases. That means there has to be sufficient advanced notice and can only apply to future titles. There is hope that an inexpensive industry of third parties may arise to easily handle this aspect upfront with new software, but it would be great if there was a tangible demo of this.

Good point about publishers providing the cash to get the studios through the bad times. I think where this falls apart now is in the modern big-budget live service model itself, since these projects are expected to be so long term, so expensive, and gain so much income, that their lack of success now seems to end up in a studio turning the lights out altogether. Concord comes to mind here. Bungie's reliance on the new Marathon is not something I would wish upon any studio either. These kinds of game development strategies do not seem to be healthy for the industry anymore, and some diversification is really needed. These comments here are not really an SKG thing, it just feels like a far bigger issue from the dev side right now. I hate that devs are constantly losing their jobs in the current market, and I think gamers do too. I just can't see the status quo as sustainable. I guess that's why I treated the "back breaking" as binary, but it is true that there is a whole range of suffering inbetween.

A studio should never be forced to keep something going when it is deemed a financial failure. Again, it has to be an upfront design decision during the early planning years so that the end of life version is mostly a compilation target. Latest version goes out, no more updates, no more servers to run. There were more specific solutions discussed by other devs in a video on Ross Scott's channel, but that's the general idea. Does this seem even remotely possible from your viewpoint? Maybe not on current projects, but for projects five to ten years in the future?

If it is too hard to implement in this way for the team, the legislation may force to accept that the nature of the project may be so inherently risky with the current staff resources that it should not come to fruition until new software developments have made it less risky. But you are right that it might just end up as one less person with an actual dev job at the studio, which isn't great in the current economy. Either way, I think many users feel their hands have been forced by the publishers as I understand.

I generally agree that you could require something like this for titles in the future. I think defining future is difficult, the engines everyone is using exist today, and often are just improving overtime, it's very rare for a studio to start from scratch.

But I'm still unsure that there's a good reason to require this. Basically we are saying that if a hobbyist really wants to operate and maintain something, they should be allowed to after some amount of time if the studio stops. It's a chink in the armor of copyright law, really - if a rights holder decides not to continue to license a film or TV show or book for publication, we let them.

I think it's a good idea to figure out who pays for this outside of the studio - I want studios to take risks, honestly the bigger the better, because that's how really interesting ideas get made. I recommended an auction in another thread about this, having a reserve and required auction at shutdown might be a good idea.

> Basically we are saying that if a hobbyist really wants to operate and maintain something, they should be allowed to after some amount of time if the studio stops.

I don't believe that is the problem as defined by SKG. I think the issue is less about empowering users to make use of the property afterwards (although that is nice), and more about the legal ambiguity in the process where products are removed from users without effective prior notice (from purchase date). Games without subscription fees are traded as effective goods by commerce law, but publishers operate as though they are services without a defined end-date through a EULA. IANAL, but my understanding is that whole concept is not legally tested. A one-time purchase should include a contract where the terms for revocation (ideally none, but we can't have nice things) are agreed upon and cannot change at the discretion of one party. You cannot have a license that essentially says "we can do whatever we want at any time". That has never been okay in the history of commerce. A subscription is different, since you know exactly how temporary it is at any particular time. Of course, both a defined lifetime or a subscription are tactics that have been tried and were not as popular with users, so companies resorted to effective trickery while users looked the other way for a time. The social contract is changing as users are watching games they loved die. So overall, the better solution for every party now is a minimal EOL. This isn't a precise threshold and it isn't an expectation that the game would continue to function as normal. It's a minimal effort taken to ensure that the customer still has something left to play around with which is in the spirit of the intended customer agreement; in the California bill, either patching for reasonable offline play (the command-line switch), providing server binaries (I can see this as more of a problem more often), or refunding (no-one wants this).

> if a rights holder decides not to continue to license a film or TV show or book for publication, we let them.

We let them, provided they don't rip the product we buy out of our hands. That's not new for games, but is only now happening for movies. It's unacceptable in every domain. It's like a user being told they can rent a movie, but it isn't clear how long for, so the movie can be requested back after only 5 minutes or could be after 5 years. It is fundamentally unfair. That comparison is quite real too, since some have bought a game, only to find it to be shutting down soon. That feels like theft. Sony removing movies from users libraries and from their computer feels like theft. I would argue it is theft, but that is part of the legal battle here.

> I want studios to take risks, honestly the bigger the better, because that's how really interesting ideas get made

I agree that creative risks should be taken, and also that bad economic strategies should not be rewarded. That's the natural course, and it seems that is happening right now just as one would expect. Many AAA studios are not taking many creative risks according to users (it's almost in the definition of AAA at this point), but are making poor economic decisions by not handling volatility with diversification. It's a recipe for disaster and the developers suffer most it seems.

> having a reserve and required auction at shutdown might be a good idea

I think that's fine, but I'm not sure whether it addresses the legal issues if the new rights holders do not uphold the original understanding of the purchase.