I know that. That still misses the point. The point of the law is to clarify that on digital storefronts that you make purchases for licensed digital goods, that you can’t imply to the consumer that they actually own those goods. It doesn’t matter if there is an offline installer. It doesn’t matter if you can ‘keep your installers forever’.
This exception clearly allows for user downloadable installer for a game with offline functionality. But consoles, steam, etc where you don’t get a standalone installer, they look like they will need the warning on all titles.
Technically that also applies to Steam, since you get a digital good available at the moment of purchase for permanent offline download to an external storage, just copy the game folder and you’re done. It would be the equivalent of a music store place downloading mp3s (and the equivalent to GoG would be selling an .iso to the music CD you can burn whenever you want or an installer that extracts the mp3 to a folder).
If the game itself has DRM then that would also apply to GoG (yes, there are games with DRM on GoG, there’s just proportionally less of them).
I know that. That still misses the point. The point of the law is to clarify that on digital storefronts that you make purchases for licensed digital goods, that you can’t imply to the consumer that they actually own those goods. It doesn’t matter if there is an offline installer. It doesn’t matter if you can ‘keep your installers forever’.
This article seems to say that it covers only digital items that have an always online requirement.
https://www.gamefile.news/p/california-ab2426-crew-call-of-duty
So i think offline games don’t need the warning, but online games, steaming movies, etc do need the warning.
Edit:
I looked a bit further and found the bill text:
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240AB2426#99INT
This exception clearly allows for user downloadable installer for a game with offline functionality. But consoles, steam, etc where you don’t get a standalone installer, they look like they will need the warning on all titles.
Technically that also applies to Steam, since you get a digital good available at the moment of purchase for permanent offline download to an external storage, just copy the game folder and you’re done. It would be the equivalent of a music store place downloading mp3s (and the equivalent to GoG would be selling an .iso to the music CD you can burn whenever you want or an installer that extracts the mp3 to a folder).
If the game itself has DRM then that would also apply to GoG (yes, there are games with DRM on GoG, there’s just proportionally less of them).