I hate how the article is written in a way that those are bad things.
No, you corporate swines, those are good things. Just because your ass has been blinded by money, growth, money and money, and now the EU does something against your greed and bad practices you throw a antrum.
That’s what governments are for. (BTW: thx Finland for you are the reason the chat-control-proposal got destroyed)
Oh, CC got killed? My day just got better then.
It’s not so much written as a bad thing, but written as something that can bite EA-esque developers (the target audience) on the ass if they’re not careful.
Lots of GDPR stuff is written about in the same way too. The focus is on the fines, not the net societal benefit of these laws because this is aimed at the operational folk in charge of making sure products comply
It’s a warning and guideline piece rolled into one.
The way the article talks about morally objectionable practices as good business (“With such large fines on the table, not fully complying with consumer laws is no longer a manageable option.”) makes me nauseated.
Could be wrong here but based on the URL of the website it’s an industry type site. They’re probably writing for people that make games, or are involved in their publishing more than they’re writing for the average person playing them.
I noticed, it doesn’t make it less sociopathic or less ethically reproachable. Honestly talking about the law as something that should be “managed” should be illegal on its own, as it’s basically leading people to break it.
I’ve tried to find it again and could not, but several years back there was a grade A asshole who published a “course” on how to exploit their monetization targets psychologically (you know the ones, those that are referred to as see mammals that can be hunted for their precious blubber).
The whole thing was ultra cynical, it was like watching a comic book villain’s PowerPoint presentation. But it was really supposed to be a design resource.
I hope that if regulations clamp down that the average consumer can understand the ramifications as well. It wouldn’t be as possible for AAA games to be as fancy and bleeding edge with the same degree of scope if they lose significant funding, most likely.
I fantasize about a renaissance of limitation where the game design gets stronger to compensate for the lack of sheer powering through by financially afforded scope and breadth, but I know that falls apart the second the consumer feels like they’re getting anything less than the best. You already see that now with people complaining about Starfield being ugly and things of that nature.
The perspective of what’s “good” graphically continues heightening, and I’d hope we can understand that we’re at a point where games look more than good enough and we should be worried about what is happening in them, or what those graphics are being used to show us, especially with the possibility that bleeding whales dry to keep the outsourced high fidelity graphics going might not always be the way.
Based on what?
They’re not spending most of their money on development. They’re spending it on ads to promote their addiction mechanics.
Based on my uninformed, unprofessional wild speculation
Ban all forms of taking money inside games.
Not: ban selling games.
Not: ban subscriptions.
Everything that’s like a lootbox is an abuse of predictable irrationality for limitless quantities of your money, and every complicated new “monetization technique” is exactly like a lootbox. There is no ethical form of this concept. We’ve seen where it always leads and it’s making the entire medium objectively worse for all of us. It’s engineered dissatisfaction.
Exploiting frustration is the dominant strategy. If we allow this to continue, there will be nothing else.
Only legislation will fix this.
fucking hope not
