3 ms·

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

• eskori 4mo ago
  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 online game their company has them working on provides a self-hostable server or offline functionality once they finally stop working on it? I guess we could argue that game companies may get less revenue because users will keep playing older games that no longer produce money, and I am not keen on "perpetual games," which could impact the workers of that company... But this is a highly abusive practice. Sure, gambling makes salaries for workers around the world, but that is no excuse to keep perpetuating such an abusive industry. This is no attack; I am genuinely curious, and I might be wrong on everything :)
  • drorco 4mo ago
    If you're actually curious, to gate a taste of the cost of compliance, I recommend taking a look into the different standards for website accessibility, GDPR, etc. On paper it sounds great, who doesn't want a accessible websites or privacy? But in practice it's a total drain of resources, real legal risk even if you genuinely try and be compliant, and often you just pay a lot of $$$ for legal, compliance advisors etc. so you could tick off a box and have some sort of insurance in case you're being sued. Now you probably don't have a lot of empathy for big corps, but those laws often apply for small businesses as well (why wouldn't they?) and now imagine the struggling indie dev now also having to deal with another legal compliance so they won't lose their house to a legal troll, when they just struggle to get a game out there they have no idea if it's even going to ever be successful.
    • acron0 4mo ago
      I don't really buy this. From my personal experience, indie devs are more likely to use methods which make their server tech distributable (e.g. Minecraft). Large game publishers appear to go in the opposite direction for control and lineage reasons: "Crew 1 is dead so you need to buy Crew 2 now". Anyone who gamed before 2005 knows that games do not require magic, expensive, managed remote services. We all used to run our own servers! The GameSpy era!
      • drorco 4mo ago
        Well I'm talking from experience as a mobile indie game developer. Pretty much every year I'm getting warnings from Apple or Google, or 3rd party SDKs, that unless I make sure to update libraries, or comply with a new rule, they are going to take down the game. One of the latest rules was some sort of a digital services act (again another regulation) that made it very difficult for indie devs not to share their personal address and phone numbers.
        • drbscl 4mo ago
          That's not related to SKG though, that's storefront policy. In principle, as long as _you_ are not blocking using the binary on hardware that supports (i.e. a player already has it installed on an old phone), you're in the clear. SKG is explicitly _not_ advocating for lifetime support, compatibility with new devices, etc
          • drorco 4mo ago
            But there are 3rd party SDKs that rely on outside servers that will stop working and the app could have unexpected behavior. It doesn't have to be complete crash, but it might be enough to degrade functionality to a point where some players might say the game is unplayable etc. Being bootstrapped with no investors, there's no extra resources, and no financial benefit in making sure that the app can function well even with these 3rd party services, servers etc. not working.
  • pdpi 4mo ago
    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.
• woolion 4mo ago
  1. The standard of compromise makes no sense because there "the video-game industry" is not a company with a representative. Any compromise you could find would be dismissed on the basis that it's one lobby groups among others anyway. 2. The statements made by somewhat representative groups like the ESA showed any compromise was impossible since their whole premise is "if you don't let us kill games (which we aren't doing) then it's going to kill the industry"; the typical propaganda of "our enemies are insignificant and stupid yet the greatest threat to humanity" 3. The ESA statements were disavowed by some developers, and SKG made a point to have longer videos with developers agreeing and debunking the lies in the ESA statements already. If that's not enough, refer to point 1. >rights of its citizen workers/producers The whole point is that the basis of commerce is that you can't sell something and destroy it just afterwards. Sure you can have limited time subscriptions but that's not how video-games are sold. They are changing the definition based on context so they can do the most unethical things as they see fit, and as a result they are entirely destroying the industry by breaking consumer trust.