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Comment by davidwhitney | Hacker News Reader

The intent "don't turn off my games!" is generally good, but in practice the most likely thing that'll come from this is one of:

1. It passes, and subsequently a large amount of games just don't launch in the EU. GG. 2. Nobody can write enough caveats to make it workable, and it's abandoned. 3. People don't care because it's just videogames.

I'm broadly supportive of "can we make offline modes standard where the game in it's current design reasonably could be played offline", but that kind of language is too loose for legislation, and too prescriptive for technical innovation.

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> 1. It passes, and subsequently a large amount of games just don't launch in the EU

Unlikely, it's a huge and valuable market.

> 2. Nobody can write enough caveats to make it workable, and it's abandoned.

The EU has demonstrated they care about companies following the spirit of the law, not the letter. It'll be fine.

> 3. People don't care because it's just videogames.

Clearly they do. It's been making the rounds online for the past few days and now even made it to the top of HN.

>Unlikely, it's a huge and valuable market

They said the same thing about Facebook News and Canada.

Many tech companies already refuse to launch in overly-regulated markets, or launch years late with "government special" versions of the software that meet the extreme demands of the EU or China or whoever.

> Many tech companies already refuse to launch in overly-regulated markets

You say overly-regulated, I say sufficiently regulated. Maybe, just maybe, those companies should not launch here.

>You say overly-regulated, I say sufficiently regulated. Maybe, just maybe, those companies should not launch here

Sure! Sounds like we're in total agreement that the comment I replied to suggesting that the EU was "too big to ignore" is false, and that their regulations do in fact make it so that some products stay out.

Canada has a population of 41 million. The European Economic Area has a population of 453 million.

> They said the same thing about Facebook News and Canada.

Canada is not in the same league as the EU or the US. In terms of population, we are very roughly 10% the size of either. In terms political influence, we may like to toot our own horns but we are nowhere near as influential. Heck, we are nowhere near as influential as many individual EU member states.

As for products launching years late (if at all) in overly regulated markets, I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that is often intentional. I have little doubt that much of the reason behind China's regulations is good old-fashioned protectionism. Yes, there are other factors but they are by no means the only reasons. Protectionism is something that most nations participate in, including the US and EU member states.

Games also aren't in the same league as a social media attempting regulatory caputure. You'll find some surprisingly high production value games in asia that chooses to never release outside of Asia. Maybe not even outside of its domestic country of origin.

You definitely can skip some markets and manage a successful game. The other caveat is that gamers will still find the game if they hear about it enough. They get worse ping but very few barriers from buying a game not officially supported in your region.

>I have little doubt that much of the reason behind China's regulations is good old-fashioned protectionism

It mostly is, if we're being honest. It's still a big Asian factor, despite it being a dying western sentiment to simply focus on the domestic businesses over the foreign powers. Back to the above examples, there are some Japanese only games that in fact go out of their way to region lock out overseas audiences for various reasons.

Could someone elaborate on the reasons? Clearly translation is going to be one, since the market for any given game is going to be much smaller than the market for most social media sites. I would imagine that cultural norms, e.g. what is acceptable in one country is verboten in another, is a more significant barrier when it exists since it would alter the story or game mechanics. But is there anything else?

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