Comment by drorco | Hacker News Reader

Comment by drorco | Hacker News Reader

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If I have to watch ads, I personally prefer personalized ads as they waste less of my time if I happen to see an ad for something I would actually want. I think generally, scaring people with "oh noes they'll have your annonymuized data" is not that dissimilar from scaring about radiation radiation from their wifi router.

Anyway, the discussion was about the harms of regulations and why developers would resist these. I personally know several indie mobile developers that had games that their core business model was ad monetization, and the regulation made these businesses less viable, and it's likely that players who enjoyed these kind of games, will now see less of these indie games.

I personally think this regulation does more harm then good for small businesses and players alike. I think legeslation has to be super careful when it comes to regulating businesses, anytime I had to deal with compliance around accessibility, privacy, transparency etc. I saw how intentions were good, but execution was absolutely terrible, with so many holes that the ones who benefit the most are the big companies that can workaround these clauses, while good intentioned small businesses need to spend money on compliance before they even know if the business is going to be viable.

> I personally think this regulation does more harm then good for small businesses and players alike

Are we supposed to just accept that games will die because of the profits of some game dev studios?

> I saw how intentions were good, but execution was absolutely terrible, with so many holes that the ones who benefit the most are the big companies that can workaround these clauses

So we are supposed to not do anything...

I think regulation is a superweapon that should mostly be used in cases where there can be severe long-term damage (physical and health dangers, loans, etc.) or in cases where what it regulates is simple and easy to comply with.

For example, it makes a lot of sense to regulate gasoline so there won't be any lead in it. It also makes sense to standartize and simplify loans which can also have severe impact on people. I don't think it makes sense to regulate games to that degree, which are merely a form of entertainment and have no severe consequences on people, especially not SKG.

> If it would be so important for players to ensure their games stay alive, they'd just stop buying these games and they'd apply pressure on devs to do that

Unfortunately, it only works on paper. In reality publishers can add stuff after the release when people already paid money for it (classic bait and switch). So buying only "good" games does not guarantee that they will stay that way. Also, we did try "applying pressure", it didn't work, that's why we are here currently.

> I don't think it makes sense to regulate games to that degree

Nobody is asking to regulate the games themselves, only how they are distributed after their end of life.

> which are merely a form of entertainment and have no severe consequences on people

People make money using specific videogames. So there are consequences of shutting down games for good.

Most of the discussions I've seen about this disregard the fact that on paper it's all nice, but in practice it's a rabbit-hole of constraints. Developers often use 3rd party SDKs and services that can render the game useless if they are not included is just one concern, and many times they cannot be technically or legally included in client versions for players.

Personally, for all I care, even as a game-dev, I don't mind if there'd be a law that would allow players to modify and even reverse engineers previous versions of the game for the sole purpose of playing the game.

This kind of regulation demands nothing from the game developers, doesn't force them to comply with anything, and doesn't incur any additional costs. Maybe there'd be some tiny loss of revenue, but it's arguably miniscule if the games are already abandoned.

It pretty much already happening with games like the C&C Generals that have pirated abandonware versions.

Most of the demands I've seen from the SKG crowd demand actual laws that define what developers must provide players, instead they should just legalize reverse engineering.

> Developers often use 3rd party SDKs and services that can render the game useless if they are not included

That is indeed a case, and potential solutions has been discussed. The main idea is that games that have already been made do not need to comply with this, so they don't need to change anything. Moreover, some videogames have already been released with middleware stripped out of them. From the top of my head: Doom 3, Blietzkrieg. So you can work around that.

> I don't mind if there'd be a law that would allow players to modify and even reverse engineers previous versions of the game for the sole purpose of playing the game

To my knowledge, you can already do that in most jurisdictions. That's why there are a lot of decompilation projects that started in recent years.

> This kind of regulation demands nothing from the game developers

The problem is that for games with online components you also require server binaries, which you don't always have access to. So developers would need to provide at least those binaries. So unfortunately even in this case there will be something that developers must do.

> C&C Generals

That's a good example because EA made source code available last year for most C&C games. So people have been improving unofficial versions.

> Most of the demands I've seen from the SKG crowd demand actual laws that define what developers must provide players

SKG itself does not demand anything specific, that's the idea. People who support the initiative do provide some potential options, but I don't think they are forcing it on anyone.

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