141–150 of 346 posts
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This is idiotic . "The industry" are also European citizens. It's about balancing the interests of people who pay their rent and feed their children by selling games, and the interests of people who merely enjoy games. Consulting only the group which enjoys games would be absurd to the point of being actively malicious.
It's a much smaller set of European citizens, and yet they have a much larger access to lawmakers. So no, it's not idiotic.
The disappointing part is the voluntary industry code. Publishers are not being asked to run servers forever, only to avoid making paid games completely unusable after shutdown.
At what point does buying a game become nothing more than renting access until the publisher changes its mind?
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The GDPR is almost trivial to comply with if you’re not harvesting data willy-nilly. Likewise, the legal risk for small indie games here rounds to zero. Most such games will, at worst, lose access to online leaderboards if their developers shut them down.
> The GDPR is almost trivial to comply with if you’re not harvesting data willy-nilly. I buy a VPS. I apt install nginx. Is it okay that by default, opening http://IP/index.html logs the IP address to /etc/log/nginx/access.log? Maybe yes, maybe no, maybe yes but I need a privacy policy (for an empty index.html). Maybe I need to ask a lawyer (who usually errs on side of caution) because people have been arguing about…
Yes. IP addresses by themselves are not PII and may be logged indefinitely. It's only after you start correlating them with other shit that you're collecting that they become subject to GDPR.
Same for cookies really. If you *only* operate a shopping cart, you don't have to display a cookie notice for "only technically required cookies". The point of the cookie notice is to dark pattern users into granting more access or just to annoy them enough that they continue not caring about privacy.
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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.
Seeing your comment, the base seems more corrupted than the elite. The corruption they suffer is to see everyone as being corrupted. Think about it: how you would implement such directive and make it implementable... Now you see the problem.
It's worth noting that they don't mandate a particular plan. A solution can take many forms - multiplayer games could have servers released, _or_ be given a "direct connection" method, or even have a local (no network) multiplayer option, and still be within what SKG was asking for. For singleplayer games, it's even easier, they can just have a killswitch for the "required server" components.
All of this is cheap to do, it just needs to be planned for so that when the time comes, all the tools are in place for the EOL plan to proceed.
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> spent virtually all of their time with the gaming industry lobby groups. The industry should only be allowed to comment after the laws have been written and fulfill the goals of European citizens. To ask the fox to guard the hen house is killing democracy.
This is idiotic . "The industry" are also European citizens. It's about balancing the interests of people who pay their rent and feed their children by selling games, and the interests of people who merely enjoy games. Consulting only the group which enjoys games would be absurd to the point of being actively malicious.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is idiotic . "The industry" are also European citizens. It's about balancing the interests of people who pay their rent and feed their children by selling games, and the interests of people who merely enjoy games. Consulting only the group which enjoys games would be absurd to the point of being actively malicious.
Hey! That's exactly what lobbyists against regulations would say!
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> [...] running it requires a combination of dynamodb, Kafka, a few microservices on lambda [...] The initiative has no problem with this as far as I know; the backend being an overengineered mess doesn't make it non-compliant with what SKG wants. I've worked on game backends that would've trivially complied with just a basic executable blob + MySQL, and ones that would've required someone to run 10+ services on AWS…
> The initiative has no problem with this as far as I know; the backend being an overengineered mess doesn't make it non-compliant with what SKG wants. SKG wants games to be "playable" and doesn't define what playable is. Is a multiplayer chess game with no AI "playable" if you can boot into the menu? Is TLOU remastered playable if the multiplayer is turned off but the SP is still playable? Is Trackmania playable wit…
Arguably a multiplayer game is playable when, given that you've convinced other people to join you, you can play against them on a self-hosted backend.
With that said, I don't really think the lack of a clear definition from the initiative as to what "playable" means is a problem; this is something that should be hashed out with the relevant parties. You seem to acknowledge that some level of discussion should be had with them, so it's unclear to me why you think somehow SKG should come with a fully formed basically-legislation to the table, when arguably that's not needed or useful for actual lawmakers.
> I don't think it's hyperfocusing to say "there's a massive hole in this idea"
The hyperfocusing I was referring to was making your backend as if you owe AWS/GCP/other-cloud-provider money, i.e. being stuck literally on exactly that platform and maximizing your usage of their services. It's not a great way of making things to begin with, and an even worse way when you actually have to be accountable for things being runnable over time.
One of the biggest issues the industry will face is that it puts pressure on its rapid decline in competency (the same one created and enabled by the things you allude to as being roadblocks for any initiatives around keeping games around after service ends).
They might solve those types of things with interesting accounting solutions like the ones you referred to, but those can be legislated against as well; liability circumvention is only a magic wand if you allow it to be.
> it appears this is one of the reasons the EU commission isn't proceeding here
I think nothing is being done in this particular case because there are groups that have talked quite a bit to the people deciding whether things should be done, not really because of any supposed lack of interaction from SKG. It seems naïve (or driven by other motives) to me to think otherwise.
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The GDPR is almost trivial to comply with if you’re not harvesting data willy-nilly. Likewise, the legal risk for small indie games here rounds to zero. Most such games will, at worst, lose access to online leaderboards if their developers shut them down.
I'm a developer of a mobile indie game and it's not true. Just to get started you need to implement tons of third part SDKs like Meta Ads, AdMob, Google Analytics, etc. These require actual handling of player choices, data sanitation etc. disregarding the loss of revenue with not being able to serve personalized ads, or even ads at all to large segments of players. And I'm talking about strictly optional rewarded ads…