I wasn’t referring to you but rather the heavy downvoting that my comments are receiving. I know when I’m muddying the hive mind’s cherished narrative with complications from reality, and that’s a stoning offense, no mistake.
I believe you’re trying to make it sound like “no it would be simple, just don’t go out of your way to do the bad thing.”
I know people just want to root out only the most obvious most insidious cases where online is totally unnecessary so it can seem like a simple matter of not doing it. But what about all the rest of gaming? How are we going to define these concepts? Write this law so that it will work for Fortnite, Among Us, MOBAs, and Hearthstone. Just try.
If someone wants to write ten paragraphs defining “single player games” with due precision and “unnecessary online components” and the required remedies for games that do have online components I’d love to hear it. No one here will take this time even though ten paragraphs is a laughably small length for such legislation to be written.
This bound/enforce bit is a distinction without a difference. In each case you need to understand the letter of the law and dance around it. SB2420 has plenty of things to “simply not do” and any “ensure offline play” law would absolutely have things you must do.
Yes it’s video games and people want what they want and always think it’s simpler to deliver than it is.
I would, but it’s video games and the mood in the room is not one of curiosity and discussion, but of pounding fists on the table. But suffice it to say that people think they can explain a law like this in two sentences while I despair that it can even be written at all, even with 100 pages, and function recognizably.
If you want an example, take Texas SB2420, the recent age verification law which said “the App Store has to ask your age and then tell developers so they can only show age appropriate content.” And now go read the full text, which I did at work. And look up Apple and Google’s implementation guidance and API specs. A “simple” thing people think can be explained in a few words is much, much more complex underneath. Like I said, I don’t even think this law can be written and come out the way we want it to.
I’d only be repeating myself.
Spoken like someone who’s never had to implement regulatory measures in software.
This is a masterclass in “pick your one thing in life and focus on that.”
I’m highly pessimistic that the spirit of this legislation, which I wholly support, can ever be enshrined in law with enough specificity that it works the way we want it to in the cases where we need it to, without becoming a truly undue burden on small developers or forcing all publishers to just work around it in some way: like taking everything to a subscription model going forward.
Both of them can grow profits, which is what’s demanded. Yes, investor demand for constant growth is the pressure that causes it, but the dichotomy is all too real.
A software giant like that can only go two directions:
They are still trying to be 2 when a lot of people would like them to be 1, and they have to show new feature adoption statistics to prove that all their expensive employees are still worth paying.
If it’s a very well defined task with repeatable steps, sure. Often it’s more like “why won’t my CarPlay open my garage door?” And in those cases I barely even know where to start and need to experiment and fiddle, and the last thing I want is them hanging on my arm asking questions and offering bad theories.
I used to work the IT help desk as well and I didn’t want to fix broken shit in my spare time either. Friends and family were constantly on me to fix their shit or worse, help them setup their new thing / upgrade or whatever. The thing that always irritated me about it was that no one ever considered this a favor, you know, actual labor. To them, I just knew the secrets, and should simply share those secrets with them like a good friend. Because whatever they wanted to do, in their minds, was very very bad easy, they were just missing some small secret answer that would make it all suddenly work. And of course they’d only consult me late in the game after they’d made the purchase or whatever and gotten stuck because it didn’t work. Eventually I had to formally declare that I wouldn’t be helping anyone anymore.
Absolutely. Age verification sucks. It’s just an example of the complexities between a two sentence concept and an actual software implementation. I lived through SOX, GDPR, and many others. They sound simple. “Right to be forgotten” but they are complex as hell and often have unforeseen side effects.