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.

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.

Sometimes laws have unintended consequences.

https://apnews.com/article/sesame-allergies-label-b28f8eb3dc...

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.

Good luck with that.

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.

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.

Quake 3 can also be played fully offline, for various measures of "play" and "fully".

No worries, I disagree with your read on the text of the bill there, but I can appreciate there being reason for debate. ;)

This is absolutely not a gray area. MTX are monetary consideration. Free games in this case are more likely advergames.