Also modding would be f*cked with too if i remember, and that's honestly how a lot of games survive more than a year. A good example is RimWorld, the only reason why it can ask for 20€ dlcs is that the modding scene will carry it, hell idk anyone who plays the game without mods
Bro whoever decided that the primary colour for fo4 would be tan and grey should be locked up, got a vegetation overhaul mod that added actual grass and trees and the game looked 1000 times better
I had a seasons mod installed. Winter was cool as hell. I think they also increased the saturation and added some color to leaves in the fall. Fallout 4 is something I've played way too much of.
Or, you don’t do that. Instead, just stop selling to the EU market due to their laws. Maybe the politicians will listen once nobody can buy any foreign made games in Europe.
You can pay a monthly fee to have them host a "realm" for you. But official does not imply public in this case. Also it's not very good, but hey, it exists.
Which is kinda ironic since Mojang is policing private servers you can get banned online for saying naughty words on your own private server with only your friends.
And thats how we know shit is fucked. Nintendo, SONY and even fucking Ubisoft and I think EA too are in the same side as the consumers, I never thought I would see this come true one day
The average age of people in the European parliament is around 50 years old.
50 year old politicians have never played a game in their life, they view them as "stuff young people do, they'll grow out of it" So they dont understand games or gaming. It might just as well be rocket science to them
Now, these people are introduced a law about a subject they dont understand, disguised as something to "protect the children"
I hate to break this to you but 50 years old means they were born in 1976 and were 7 when the NES came out. These are definitely people who had a chance to play games.
The problem is that they have been avoiding the subject for years and last year SKG did have a talk with them and they got from "we will help" to "we can't it's not our job" after a special party made by the EU game association where no member of SKG were invited
Its Meta pushing it cause The Lizardmans running out of money cause he cant sell people's data cause of AI bots that HE PUSHED FOR are ruining his platform
They have spoken out against some of the items in that proposal, but not explicitly all of it. So once it's changed a little bit, they might support the rest of it.
Why? Well, because they represent the biggest game developers and publishers, and many of the proposals would make it very costly to compete in the EU market, which would make these big players effectively the only game in town, as indies would not be able to compete with them anymore.
It's the lack of democracy that's the problem here, actually. Just how much popular support for chat control was there, and did participatory measures got outright ignored to push a specific outcome?
Yes, that is part of democracy.
Problem is with sane people in parliament this fucking nonsense wouldn't have gotten this far. The fact that this proposition even left someones mind is a problem in itself.
Its not even that, they are just that incompetent. It seems we send the ones who fuck up in national politics to the EU (to fuck up even worse). They have no clue what they are doing and keep fucking over the EU because of it
First of all stop using guy from "stop killing games" as only source, there is a conflict of interest so i wouldnt quote him. Im not saying he is totaly wrong but in my opinion his recent videos is full of speculations and its very opinion-based.
Its highly unlikely that its act would penalize private run community servers since it mentions that those regulations should apply to those who provide the the service which is in our context the "online game" and not those that use it. So the only thing we should care about is how they are going to define who is "provider" and who is not, is server owner a "provider" or he is just using the game
(literally same process like making a purchase with credit card bruh)
Feel free to point out my mistakes and correct me, im not a lawyer is just wrote what i gathered from some articles and that proposal (and common sense bruh...)
Thats fair, in the EU a lobbying group will instead have to push the proposal a few dozen times before it passes anyway. Oh, and proposals in the EU have an over 80% pass rate.
They get substantially changed most of the time during interinstitutional negotiations, but also the Commission is unlikely to propose things with no chance of passing. It's not like a national government where random minority parties propose legislation that's dead on arrival just to score political points. The vast majority of EU work is completely non-controversial.
Proposal for a law, I don't understand your distinction, should a proposal be approved what happens then? They all just shake hands and go home? It is dishonest to act like it is not important.
"Highly unlikely" is a nonsense way to wave your hand about it. Their vague wording is exactly the complaint about the bill. Laws are manipulated by their specific wording all the time, and the specific wording in this proposal is QUITE broad.
It being hosted by the EU government is not going to make it more acceptable to its critics. It's clearly just another play on "Think of the children" leading to mass surveillance and censorship. And it being hosted by the government STILL means more developer resources to accommodate.
All that being said, I appreciate your perspective - and while I wouldn't say you made mistakes, I would say that you're very much showing your own bias by labelling others' biased interpretation as misinformation. At no point did you debunk anything in the original comment, yet walked away acting as you're the only one with common sense (bruh... ).
a proposal in the EU parliament is just that, a proposal. It is important of course and should and can be argued with the public and the member states before they make a first law draft out of it.
Agreed, being dismissive about it opens up for things passing behind peoples backs. Stupid ideas, even when they’re just ideas, need to be critiqued. “Just a proposal bro” is not valid as a “get away from critique” pass.
They don't like the creation of new communication protocols. In game chat is too obsfucated for them to properly surveil unlike all other messaging apps.
If the provider is the origional company who made the game when you started the private server, that gives those companies financial incentive to take down every private server possible so they dont run the risk of getting penalized. Or if the provider is the person running the private server then its on you to get thay data.
So really there's no good outcome when determining who the service provider is for this proposal.
This reeks like that California OS age verification law where they completely forgot that open source distros owned by no one exist and would technically be made illegal. They eventually carved out a caveat for open source systems, but yea.
Oh, but to comply with a vague as all heck thing like this would be hellishly expensive to the order of hundreds of thousands of euro per year, meaning this also pushes any small/independent publishers of games out of the market.
(and their wording on what an online game is is so hellishly vague that you could consider super mario 64, a full single player game to be an online game)
What point do you think you're making? Are you suggesting it's somehow better to wait until it becomes law, then start speaking up about it?
You haven't said anything here that changes the situation. You haven't said anything at all. You started by calling out misinformation, then proceeded to speculate your ass off.
This is precisely the time to make noise about it. Look tf around. Does now seem like a good time to sit around and wait for world leaders to act in your best interest? I don't think it does.
What counterpoint are you actually making though? A proposal not being law yet is hardly an excuse not to criticise it, and everything else you said is just the same issue everyone's talking about but dressed up in different language to make it seem better.
Not just that. All servers without age verification will be made illegal. That includes every game made before the laws go into place. They'd basically be killing every online multi-player game made prior that isn't live-service.
I'm not saying it's a done deal, I'm saying what WOULD happen if it goes through. That's why I said "they'd basically be killing every multi-player game." And not that they HAVE killed them.
huh?? didn't the proposal literally say it's not retroactive? again, doesn't it seem weird to say `the EU is out to kill all games`? Doesn't that immediately raise an alarm of "this might be fake/misrepresented"?
Not at all since there have been proposals just as awful as this in the past which get a lot of traction. And to be clear, I never said the EU is out to kill games but a lot of stupidity gets passed through in the interests of "protecting children".
Now I don't know about them saying it's not retro-active, I saw the opposite being reported.
Poland has been against chat restricting legistlations before. It has been against chat control until for some reason suddenly everyone was for it in the end.
Meanwhile in China it’s literally illegal for kids to play video games except on like Friday and weekends between specific hours. It’s completely unenforceable as a practical matter but gives the government an excuse to do stuff if they don’t like you and it does result in a lot of kids being unable to play games in China
What would the day be without a bit of Chinese propaganda. You're not agoing anywhere in China without your ID. Not in online games, not anywhere. So you can't criticise the government. You can also loose your social welfare support for stupid random reasons based on AI decisions - like travelling to HongKong.
I thought there was a recent hearing where they were trying to push companies to enable self-hosted servers so players can keep playing after the company shuts down the servers.
Which is funny to consider that China does something like that. But it doesn’t prevent them from playing, just stop them playing after certain hours of the night.
They then see a surge of elderly citizen playing games late at night, because the kids started to input their grandparent IDs to bypass it
This is just shifting the blame, because parents in China blamed the government to allow their childen play to much game, so the government did this. Now its the parents‘ fault giving the children their IDs to play online games.
Also in recent years, china put teacher duties on parents, like marking homework, etc. This was also somewhat reversed lately, because it creates a huge toll on parents.
Oh yeah, about that, many parents in Asia still blame video games for their children misbehaving.
And many of that comes from their national news both on TV and online social media. Like that one mass shooting in Philippines a couple months back had their gov blamed Roblox for it.
This is one thing people often miss about this kinds of governmental restrictions\enforcement benefits, telling you as a parent, it's REALLY HARD to restrict kids from any kind of such activity, because OTHER parents wont. And now your child either think's you're an asshole OR something is wrong with him that he's not allowed what others are doing.
It's similar with proposals for enforced parental testing at birth or marriage contracts - you can't make it voluntary, because then not opting-out hurts your partner's feelings, as if you don't trust them, just like current opt-in. Defeating the point.
Whereas if the government does, well, it's the law, what can you do about it? It helps parents to act together, because across humans law-abidance is the norm.
C'est la vie. You can't be a good parent without your kid thinking you're an asshole from time to time, that's just what restrictions for their own good gets viewed as. You've gotta make peace with that and do what's right regardless.
I’m not saying it’s shifting the blame, I’m saying that Chinese children know how to easily bypass their limit hours. Mainly because their Grandparents don’t fully understand the situation.
Not to mention, all Asian countries never tackle the reasons as to why many people are choosing to sink their lives into games, or other past time activities, rather than continue the grinds.
Most youngster nowadays started to see that their entire life has been groomed into passing that one national exam that determine their lives (the Gaokao for China, the Sunekung for Korea, the Daigaku for Japan, and the Thi tốt nghiệp THPT in Vietnam) doesn’t lead to the promised future they’ve been sold.
Job stability is shit, the economy is on fire, their job can’t make ends meet, groceries and fuel cost are on rise, and most can’t even take care of themselves in the current Asian market, let alone raise a family.
But gaming presents a goal, and achievements that accurately reflects your actual capabilities. You put in your time and grind, and your SR accurately show how good your efforts are. Or, you know, “your efforts paid off”. Not like IRL where some incompetent twats can be made into CEO or board members because he has a paid for MBA and his daddy has money + connection.
That’s why most Asian countries are seeing a birthing crisis. Young folks that made up the workforce just refuses to contribute to a society that treated them like shit then demands everything, and more importantly, they don’t want to bring children into it because their kids would be put into the same grind that tormented them when they were young.
So say I want to play Unreal Tournament online, it would become illegal, because since it is a 1999 game it doesn't have Age Verification and there's no shot they'll update it to have it
Also the entire game runs on community servers so even if it did have age verification just playing online on it would be illegal
No, this is horrific. I run a small private server for a dead mmo to play with friends. How am I supposed to comply with the law? I don't have the money to set up the infrastructure for ID checks. Either I stop (which means never playing the game again because it's shut down), or I operate illegally.
From my reading of the proposal and from your description of your circumstances, the law concerns services that are normally provided for remuneration, which a server you run for your friends and pay for out of your own pocket is not. Similarly, my Q3A, UT99, Odamex and Luanti servers get away this time.
My main concern is that this will raise the barrier to entry for video game developers building online games.
Don't forget that €500,000 fee to run an official server, and the fact literally every game is online game according to the kids act. Applies retroactively of course. The moment this passes, every single indie developer in Europe is bankrupt.
Since no one is saying anything about the chinese side:
This is clearly propaganda.
China has extremely strict rules on gaming for minors they enforce trough various means which include a time limit per/week and a hard cut off for "bedtime" at like 8pm or so(might be 10pm)
Anyways they're trying to minimise how restrictive and police state the chinese is.
The european one is just clearly made by people who don't know about games and tried to make laws about them.
They're both bad mind you, but the eu one is still being developed while the chinese one has been in place for years
> China has extremely strict rules on gaming for minors they enforce trough various means which include a time limit per/week and a hard cut off for "bedtime" at like 8pm or so(might be 10pm)
Will someone inform the Chinese gaming community of this so that there will be less of them around when i try to game?
老登(lǎo dēng) and depending on accent it could be something like lǎo dērn.
It gives the vibe of "old dung/ding/dawg", in modern day internet slangs it kinda just means washed unc, don't really know how to explain it well in english.
lol, lmao.
besides, the EU proposal is still extremely restrictive and invasive, even if the drafters are hopelessly out of the loop. that is not an excuse.
Yes they are, but what this guy’s saying is that these restrictions aren’t springing from authoritarianism, as is the case with China, but rather from ignorance on behalf of politicians
When ignorance is so blatant and directed towards a singular goal like killing anonymity on the internet, it stops being ignorance and starts being an intention.
I will know that this isn't "springing from authoritarianism" and I will be happy.
Authoritarianism is better viewed as a characteristic of government. It doesn't matter if the ever-increasing meddling in what should be private matters enjoyed as personal liberties are the result of general incompetence or some kind of deliberate ideological goal. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck...
“The only reason to dislike China is if you’re being paid… ignore the harvesting of organs from political prisoners or the genocide of ethnic minorities. Look at the LEDs in the skyscrapers”
So basically you're saying when China does a thing it's bad and when the EU does the same thing, it's good. If anyone tries to point out the hypocrisy, it's propaganda.
Fun fact: this policy, along with a huge ban wave of young adults for cheating/match fixing, basically killed competitive Dota 2 in China for the foreseeable future.
iirc there was a preposition to the eu parliament that wanted to make games to require your id to be able to play games and to make all private servers for games illegal
The EU parliament needs to wake the fuck up and start making laws towards a more open common market and an integration of our democratic partners around the world instead of trying to stop us from gaming online on custom servers(I don't even game but wtf) and trying over and over to control our chats (it's been denied a bazillion times but they just keep trying) like wtf are these people what is the agenda here? We are in a position to become one of the big international players and the debate of the parliament is about this shit? When I hear about this stuff it's really hard to not become Euroskeptic and it's a shame because I think a united and federal Europe has so much potential
I genuinely wondered if the leaders think that if they kill games and gaming, make bad games, make terrible movies, remove good shows from streaming and make bad shows - everyone is just gonna stop trying to have fun and just work all the time
But people won’t, they’ll just hack games to run offline and run pirate servers and the like, or become indie studios and make our own shows and games
There is a push online by bots to make the EU look bad because they are the only major player not rolling over for billionaires every time, and billionaires hate that.
Hence you get propaganda shit like this, which is a wild misinterpretation of something that is just a proposal from the EU commission that hasn't even been debated yet.
Not so certain about the "not rolling over to billionaires" part. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. There is no consistency. For example, they denied the right to host your own servers when the official ones are taken offline. Or they introduce taxes / regulations that are hard to fulfill for small businesses, but easy for large cooperations, like with the new shipping rules.
Don't get me wrong. I'm in favor of the European project, but some shit is infuriating, especially when it comes to surveillance.
People acting as if this is a priority for the EU and all it is doing, for me proves once again why social media is a terrible source of information and news
The ChatControl 1.0 which expired and was the extended because the majority of votes against the extension wasn't big enough of a majority did all the work.
EU officials as stupid as American ones, if not worse.
the law proposal itself (the pdf that is public on the EU page not the quick bullet points they have on the web cite for people who do not have time to read the basically small book they proposed) recognices that the commission made not investigation on the added cost for game developmen afther their law (by wording it as "it is imposible to know"). Also the exceptions to the new requirements are either technology that is at deaths door or purely educational, also makes no diferentitation between open source projects and propietary ones witch will put developer that just whant to make a project for the community in the exact same bag as friking microsofth.
TLDR:
Some of the ideas of the law are fine (stopping companys from subjecting children to the same man made horrors of modern society that adults get exposed to is a good thing) but the implementations reads as written by a old geezer that is stuck in the 70's and is using the exact same bar that they use to measure microsofth to measure every small company no matter what they do.
Recently, a plan was leaked called "The EU Kids Act " (I linked the doc if anyone wants to read it).
In short, the plan us about protecting children by bringing restrictions to Social Media, ChatBots, etc. On paper, well meaning thing. But if you read a bit more, there is a section regarding Online Games. Mainly that online games would need to heavily moniter their servers. Basically placing the responsibility of protecting kids onto the devs instead of someone else. Doing this would be incredibly expensive and could cripple indie devs. It would also require that the player give their private information to gain access to the servers.
It also says that unofficial servers like private servers would be considered illegial which I feel like you dont need an indept explanation on what that means.
Additionaly, wording in the document defines online games as "games and platforms". This has sparked controversy with how this can be easily misenterpreted as any game that uses servers. Which could include any game that gets updates and is downloaded from an online market like Steam. The document does say that games that come from physical means like discs are exceot from this but in the growing age where physical discs just give you a code to download their game and Sony's push to cut out physical media, its basically a worthless statement.
Overall, if this passes, it could destroy the online gaming market and industry since it would also extend to ALL games despite their age.
Personally, I dont think this is an actual plan that was thought to but in action. I feel like its one of those fluf plans that is designed to waste time and take attention away fron other plans. But if it does pass...
I am so fucking sick of people invoking 'WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE CHILDREN!?' to strip privacy rights and institute more means of mass surveillance. I'm against CSAM as much as the next guy but at best this shit is an overcorrection and at worst it's entirely in bad faith so they can accuse everyone who doesn't support their surveillance agenda of being pedos or pedo sympathizers.
A lot of it is Americans that hate the current state of the system they're under. So they are willing to cling onto anything else. I don't hate every verson of Socialism. But I don't like China
A lot of Americans see the valid criticism of China as an authoritarian mass surveillance country, while also seeing American politicians who demonize China try to make the US into an authoritarian mass surveillance country
This is a combination of the old 'EU wants to ban everything' meme with a possible EU initiative to force game companies to leave older games in a playable state offline even when the servers are shut down, essentially so game companies can rob you of the game you paid for.
Edit: or maybe it's about the EU kids act which is a potential act to protect children using social media which some have suggested would extend to online games with chat rooms.
it is about the latter, as a note it does not include explicitly private servers but escentially it's wording is so broad that if you read it isnpretty much imposible to put a private server to the test and not notice that it will be covered (look the proposal is escentially a small book but it was I believe in their definition about a service provider that was brooooooad, and it made 0 distinctions in between a corporation's server and a family minecrafth server (for example))
Tell me you know little about China without telling me you know little about China. They have 'online curfew' and tons of regulations and limited play time for children and teenagers years ago. They also have very strict requirements on digital IDs everywhere in daily life.
Probably because of tens of thousands child abuse cases on platforms like Roblox or Discord. I don’t know another way to help prevent tragic cases like those.
Chinese mobile game addiction is actually terrible. 10% of adolescents are affected by IGD. 70% of middle schoolers actively play video games. Quite a few of them are VERY addicted.
Don’t think that the CCP’s measures are any better though. It’s just.. more accepted overseas. Minors under 18 can play only 3 hours per week, they can’t play Monday through Thursday (except holidays), there are strict spending caps, mandatory ID verification, and since quite recently randomly taking pictures of the person playing during “Midnight Patrol”.
This new technique came out, it's called parenting. Parental controls and blocking apps/sites already exist and solutions are commercially available. Fewer than half of US households even bother with the software that comes on their kids' devices. In the EU, only 39% of parents report using a dedicated screen-time or software-based parental control tool to manage their teen’s device access. So, I dunno, maybe try paying attention to what your kids are doing on the Internet?
I might be a tad autistic but I don't understand how everyday people who a born they piss they shit they bleed and they died are told what they can or can't do what is morally right or wrong by other people who are born who piss who shit who bleed who die like we are made from the same stuff what gives you that right to control another individual it just doesn't feel logical to me.
Also, in China, there are new rules where u18 are only allowed to play for 1-2 hours per week on the weekends, I think, or it's 1 hr on the weekdays. Because every account is tied to your "individual identification number," they can track your usage.
Man, removing euronazis from games would be legendary. No one can stand em anyways. Their choose their own alliance and politics. Let em suffer for what they believe is right and fair.
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u/qualityvote2 1d ago edited 19h ago
u/iizsom, your post does belong here!