Disclaimer: ESA’s statement and SKG’s response are part of the committee process and public record, or will be submitted as part of that process. This post is about the arguments being made against AB 1921, why we disagree with them, and why we believe the bill should move forward.
AB 1921, the POG Act, short for Protect Our Games Act, is coming up in another California Assembly committee this weeks Thursday (14th).
This is the bill backed by Stop Killing Games that says:
If a company sells you a paid digital game, then later shuts down the services needed for the game’s ordinary use, it needs to give notice and provide a remedy — a playable version, a patch, or a refund.
That’s it.
Not “run servers forever.”
Not “maintain every live-service feature until the heat death of the universe.”
Just don’t sell people a game and then make it unusable with no real remedy.
Now the Entertainment Software Association is lobbying against it.
For anyone unfamiliar: ESA is the big U.S. video game industry trade group. Think of it as the American counterpart to Video Games Europe, which recently pushed back against Stop Killing Games in the EU.
Their arguments are basically the usual ones:
games are licensed, not owned
online services are complicated
third-party licenses expire
security risks exist
this could be hard or expensive to enforce
Stop Killing Games has submitted a support letter that already takes these arguments apart. Why? Because none of this is new. We’ve heard the same talking points a thousand times. VGE, Commission, certain people on the Internet and so on.
The short version:
AB 1921 is about ordinary use, not giving players ownership of source code, music, trademarks, or game assets.
Expired third-party licenses may affect future sales or new versions, but they don’t justify disabling private use by people who already bought the game.
Security issues can be handled with normal warnings and unsupported-use terms. The bill does not require publishers to reveal exploits or sensitive technical details.
A refund is only the fallback. If a company won’t leave the game in a usable state, the buyer shouldn’t just be left with nothing.
This is the same fight as in Europe: a grassroots consumer movement asking for basic end-of-life protections, versus the industry lobby trying to preserve the right to sell games that can later be rendered useless while preserving control.
AB 1921 is narrow. It applies to paid games going forward and gives companies options: preserve ordinary use, patch the game, or refund the purchaser.
The industry wants people to think this is a demand for eternal server support, with endless costs and complications.
It isn’t.
It’s much simpler:
If you sell people a paid game, you should not be able to destroy its ordinary use later without notice or remedy.
For SKG,
Moritz Katzner
A video going through this in detail is coming soon. In the pictures, you’ll find both ESA’s short statement (there are multiple ones) and ours, which we will be submitting to the committee, just as we did for the previous hearings. All statements can be found in the public records of the respective committees.
