Live data from Hacker News

Stop Killing Games fails to secure EU law despite 1.3M signatures

dexerto.com

61–70 of 346 posts

Re: Stop Killing Games fails to secure EU law despite 1.3M signatures

#61
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More direct democracy also makes it more attackable for misinformation campaigns (trying to offer a populist answer to complex problems).

That more democracy is more attackable is not a coherent position. More democracy means more people power. But people being powerless to resist misinformation campaigns means that they do not have power. Which means that it is not really democracy. This is the same as saying that democracy is being undermined by wealth inequality. If money can buy political power and money is unevenly distributed then it’s not a demo…

And that, I would argue, is rooted in wealth inequality.

Re: Stop Killing Games fails to secure EU law despite 1.3M signatures

#63

As is stated in the article, but is not clear just from the headline, this was not an unexpected outcome from the initiative. The Commission did not seek discussions with SKG, and spent virtually all of their time with the gaming industry lobby groups. SKG was prepared for this, and their intention has been to join up with the group putting together the new Digital Fairness Act, since the objective there is very simi…

wrong, the commission did discuss with SKG, but the entire group had their head in the sand when reasonable people asked SKG to respect technical reality and resubmit a better, reality-focused proposal as SKG 2.0. They ban anyone not in their echo chamber.

Re: Stop Killing Games fails to secure EU law despite 1.3M signatures

#65
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Democracy is mob rule when I don’t like it. Democratic activity is populism when I don’t like it.

More direct democracy also makes it more attackable for misinformation campaigns (trying to offer a populist answer to complex problems).

For this argument to work, you'd need to show that a generic politician is somehow immune to misinformation campaigns/lobbyism.

Re: Stop Killing Games fails to secure EU law despite 1.3M signatures

#66
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say this shows how corrupted elites are. If the "democratic" entity spends all the time with lobbyists, and not the initiative which started the discussion, this speaks volumes.

what can you do? they have billions and we have signatures.

I perceive democracy as a company, where people are bosses because they choose their workers. If you're the boss, and your employee uses your money to buy themselves a car instead of representing your interest, you make them pay for this and fire them

Re: Stop Killing Games fails to secure EU law despite 1.3M signatures

#68

As written, wouldn’t this result in fewer online games? Maybe dramatically fewer?

It would result in fewer online games that stop working altogether when the publisher wants to stop it. All the publisher would have to do is to create a "mini self-hosted server" application and provide it and they would follow the law on this. It's really not that complicated. Not "free", of course, but it's not exactly expensive either if you plan to do that from the moment you write your first line of code.

Game developer here. If it were “just” that easy I’d love to support this.

> All the publisher would have to do is to create a "mini self-hosted server" application and provide it and they would follow the law on this

You’re making a huge assumption here both about the scope of the law, and about how straightforward this is to do. I’ve worked in games where we could drop a server binary over the fence an that would be fine. I’ve also worked on games that have required a bunch of different standalone services just for core logic - running it requires a combination of dynamodb, Kafka, a few microservices on lambda, and massive third party dependencies. Getting a “mini self hosted server application” out of this is a rewrite.

> but it's not exactly expensive either if you plan to do that from the moment you write your first line of code.

The vast majority of games use existing technologies. First line of code was 30 years ago for any unreal game, for example. This effectively bans any third party non redistributable libraries (of which there are many), using many open source licensed projects for the backend.

What if I rely on steam, or epic for P2P and they shutter the service? What if playfab discontinue their offering, or AWS decide to remove a service that our “mini self hosted server” relies upon. Games aren’t some magical piece of technology, they’re just software like everything else.

Re: Stop Killing Games fails to secure EU law despite 1.3M signatures

#69
post #54
post #36

From the perspective of someone with some experience in consumer advocacy via the EU is that SKG did not do this the right way, or at least the right way right now. The EU expects radical compromise. The right starting point for SKG was to enter talks with games industry lobby groups to discuss possible solutions. If that fails - you will need to be able to prove that it isn't because you were unable to compromise. Y…

Completely agree with the first point; it would have been great showing a list of supporters from the game industry. Not that I am an expert in this matter, though. However: > The EU will view this from the perspective of balancing the rights of its citizen workers/producers (game developers) and its citizen consumers. How could SKG be an attack on gamedevs? What changes in the life of someone in gamedev if the onlin…

Consider for a moment that end-to-end encrypted messaging protects criminals of all sorts. Surely that’s a bad thing and requiring back doors for law enforcement shouldn’t be considered an attack on anybody?

I absolutely agree that the practices SKG are fighting against are pretty abusive and that it is right and proper to restrict those practices, but I also understand why people see the appeal in anti-e2ee laws.

The thing is, I have a good-enough understanding of cryptography to see why those laws are a terrible idea, and I’m infuriated by how clueless their supporters are. I’m self-aware enough to realise that I might the clueless one here and that me not seeing any legitimate issue with SKG doesn’t mean there isn’t one.

Post reply on HN