As confirmed by the Stop Killing Games subreddit, AB 1921, the Protect Our Games Act failed to make it out of the Senate Business, Professions and Economic Development Committee.
Seven votes total were cast. Four Democrats voted yes, three Republicans voted no, and the remaining Democratic members abstained.
Despite this setback, group are not backing down and are extremely proud of even making it this far with with zero budget. Stating:
This was our first attempt, in our first year, in the United States, with a U.S. budget of zero dollars. No paid staff in California. No war chest. No in-person lobbying operation. The timeline was so compressed that we could not get funding in place fast enough to put people in the building.
We ran this on volunteers, emails, phone calls, and the truth.
And we still pushed a consumer-rights bill through the entire State Assembly, 43 to 16, and into a Senate committee vote. We were only three votes away from this becoming law.
A volunteer movement with nothing took on one of the most powerful trade groups in entertainment and forced them to spend real money and real effort to stop us.
They had to work for this.
They are going to have to work a lot harder next time, because next time we will be ready.
Had the bill passed it would have made it a mandate game developers to provide exact dates of server shutdowns as well as be legally required to either provide an alternate version of the game that no longer needs to connect to a server, an offline mode patch, or full refund.
