Re: Go EU!

On Thu, 10 Apr 2025 08:16:17 +0100, JAB <noway@nochance.com> wrote:

Well firstly, that saves me making a post about it.

Heh. I didn't think it was worth a separate thread either, hence my
hijacking an earlier one. I'm not so sure how much interest there is
about the business aspect of game development in csipga so I usually
try to limit the number of separate threads on the topic. Well, now we
have one more, I guess ;-)

So on to the meat,
the legal status seems slightly vague as I believe the CPC Network* have
picked a target (some horse game aimed squarely at kids)

If I recall, it was the Swedish consumer protection commission that
had an issue with the horse game, and they took it up with the EU,
where the EU CPC raised the stakes to make it apply for _all_ games.

and are using
the interpretation of existing EU consumer protect laws to say these
type of practices go against them. My assumption is that if you get a
case in one member state then you've basically given the green light to
all member states.

Quite. One of the problems with Belgium's anti lootbox law was it was
only effective in Belgium

       [for Americans: Belgium is a very small country, about
        the size of Vermont, with a population of only 11 million]

           and thus the law was generally ignored or -at best- the
game was marked as 'not for sale in Belgium' because the publishers
could ignore so small. But the EU is 445 million people

       [for Americans: that's 125% the size of the US population]

            so its unlikely that the publishers are going to pull out
of _that_ market. More likely, they'll create a "EU version" of the
game, which will lack these odious features, while America gets the
'regular' overly monetized crap. But Americans don't seem interested
in quality anyway, so I guess that's fine?

One of the funny parts was that organisation that represents the games
industry (which doesn't include consumers of course) have said that this
may disrupt games for users. Yes how awful having some of your games
disrupted by removing parts of MTX - won't anybody think of the grande
fromages yearly bonuses!

The thing is, right now MTX are a necessity for some games.
Development costs have skyrocketed, and volume sales are no longer
sufficient to cover those expenses anymore. It isn't _pure_ greed that
makes publishers turn to these 'alternative' methods of funding. It's
just that MTX and lootboxes and all the rest are so _effective_ that
they've gained a lot more importance, to the point that they are now
the focus of design (rather than, you know, making a good product).
But even the best products struggle to break even if they don't have
post-sale transactions.

Solutions to this problem include lowering development costs (which
could mean making smaller games, but mostly seems to be in the way of
replacing skilled artisans with AI slop, or firing everybody below
C-level ten seconds after the game ships), or by raising the retail
price of games. But publishers are still hooked on the drip of
constant money from MTX; even if they could get development costs
under control, they'd STILL monetize every aspect of their games to
suck out every dollar or euro out of their customers. That's where
laws like this come in.