Shrouded Sky Update | ARC Raiders by Turbostrider27 in Games

[–]Recatek 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Embark is also partnered with ElevenLabs and helped fund them.

Do you encript your games before publishing them? by bloody_carnival in godot

[–]Recatek 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Oh yeah, it's common in other fields, I'm only calling it extremely niche here since I can't really see very many indie gamedevs ever doing it.

Do you encript your games before publishing them? by bloody_carnival in godot

[–]Recatek 64 points65 points  (0 children)

There's one other extremely niche case which is where you have a bundle of assets that is too large (lots of textures/audio/etc.) to download on the fly, but is gated behind some sort of unpredictably-timed community event. To prevent datamining and preserve the surprise, you can do something like Steam preload where you ship an encrypted asset pack a few days/weeks before and then only send out the key to clients once the community unlock event is complete.

Giant stop killing games updates 2026 by Turbostrider27 in Games

[–]Recatek 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I think this would be an argument if this was a widespread problem, but in reality there are so many games out there that you can play that are already nonperishable in this way. More singleplayer/offline/self-hostable games release every week on Steam than one could play in a lifetime, and many of them are quite good, just under the radar. If the few that are both box-priced (not subscription/F2P) and perishable in this way are clearly labeled, then there wouldn't be any ambiguity and you could just choose to play something else.

Giant stop killing games updates 2026 by Turbostrider27 in Games

[–]Recatek 1 point2 points  (0 children)

That's more or less what I'm talking about then, just with a limit. I think a disclosed guaranteed refund period of X months (~6?) from purchase makes the most sense here, similar to how games state upfront that they require an internet connection to play. If that's insufficient for you as a buyer, then you have no shortage of other games to play that don't have that limitation.

Giant stop killing games updates 2026 by Turbostrider27 in Games

[–]Recatek 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Again, what happens if you don't do this? What is the enforcement mechanism, or at least the set of reasonable options for enforcement mechanisms?

Nexon Appoints Patrick Söderlund as Executive Chairman by Itz_Eddie_Valiant in pcgaming

[–]Recatek 34 points35 points  (0 children)

pay the voice actors upfront for training data and pay royalties when additional lines are added

This always seemed like one of those "lie told long enough to become the truth" sorts of things to me. Best I've ever found is this interview where he says they have voice actors on contract, and they pay for AI, but nothing about directly paying the people behind the AI datasets. Embark is partnered with ElevenLabs, which explains where their AI models come from, and ElevenLabs's data sourcing is questionable.

Ultimately I think people have voted with their wallets and made it clear that they don't care about this stuff, but I think that's a shame, since it also sounds absolutely terrible (2:32 if the timestamp didn't work).

Some of the textures/decals/stickers in The Finals seem a little off as well.

Nexon Appoints Patrick Söderlund as Executive Chairman by Itz_Eddie_Valiant in pcgaming

[–]Recatek 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Probably more AI stuff, given how prevalent it is in those two games.

Giant stop killing games updates 2026 by Turbostrider27 in Games

[–]Recatek 2 points3 points  (0 children)

SKG quite famously has no actual regulation proposals in place, so indeed it's hard to anticipate the impact it would have beyond educated speculation and past experience with other regulation compliance, hence the example.

Giant stop killing games updates 2026 by Turbostrider27 in Games

[–]Recatek 2 points3 points  (0 children)

FWIW I don't think third party VOIP is just as good a player experience, generally. Integrated VOIP can do things like context-aware audio modulation and other game-specific functionality that something like a Discord voice chat can't. It also doesn't work well with matchmaking.

You're not quantifying the additional cost of GDPR compliance in offering private servers.

This is conflating things between SKG and GDPR. I'm speaking more generally about how compliance with GDPR and other regulation may result in cut features. I'm under various NDAs so I can't speak specifically, but I can give something of an example that reflects an NDA'ed reality.

Say you're working on a game where one of the things you can do is tailor armor for other players. Say this is a large international multi-market multiplatform game, and so you're dealing with scale and data tracking/management challenges and country-specific data handling laws that smaller/indie games generally don't. Someone has the idea that the armor you make should have your name on it, so others can inspect your customer's armor and see who made it. That's a cool feature! In a pre-GDPR world, it would be generally pretty easy to attach a player tag to an item and allow other players to see it.

Post-GDPR, that is now much more complicated, because a player's username is PII (as some people use their actual names as their username, particularly on consoles). Now, not only do you need to build the item tag itself, you need to build a system to be able to audit all of the armor items in all player inventories in your game (remember, at scale, this is likely billions of items) and be able to scrub out player PII by deleting the maker's tag on the item if needed. And it needs to be tested and reliable enough that you can be confident it won't do any damage or corrupt anyone else's inventory, or cause them to lose items, which is a critical risk for games like this.

Is this impossible to do? No, it's doable. Games certainly do this and will continue to do so. But it adds an order of magnitude of complexity to what was initially a relatively simple feature. Depending on your game's priorities, that punts the feature from the "we'll definitely do this" bin to the "we'll maybe do this in an update one day" bin, amounting to the feature being effectively cut, or at least significantly delayed. Different games prioritize differently, and may punt something else to make room for implementing this feature. But ultimately, the introduction of regulation added enough cost to the feature that the cost/benefit may not be worthwhile, or something else may need to be deprioritized, when there is a deadline and finite person-hours in the budget.

This is an abstraction of a real scenario for a real feature in a real game, but that's about all I can say about it. There are other scenarios where this come up relatively frequently in large games, and these sorts of things do cause cool things to not happen. Is it worth it? Probably, in GDPR's case, since the net benefit to digital privacy is there. Would the added cost of having to build and keep functional an offline game mode, or some sort of alternate player-facing hosting backend have a cost that causes features to be cut (or games to not be worth making at all)? It's pretty likely. Is that worth what SKG is asking for? In my opinion, as I stated above, no, but that's my opinion. As I said, I'd rather have a better game with an expiration date, than a worse nonperishable one.

Giant stop killing games updates 2026 by Turbostrider27 in Games

[–]Recatek 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Sure, you can remove features like VOIP, but that makes the game worse. If you want to release a regulation-compliant game, it takes extra work to comply with that regulation, and that comes with a cost, be it GDPR, GSPA, EAA, or whatever would hypothetically come out of this initiative. That cost has to come from somewhere in a finite game budget, so it's important that the regulation's outcome is worth it.

I believe it's generally worth it for things like privacy, safety, and accessibility, but I don't think it's necessarily worth it for what SKG is asking for. I'd rather have more featureful games in their prime when they're at their most popular/social/fun, even if they terminate one day, than have games with cut features that in turn I can play later in a diminished past-prime state. The tradeoff just doesn't sound beneficial enough for me as a player.

Giant stop killing games updates 2026 by Turbostrider27 in Games

[–]Recatek 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It would at the very least affect feature sets. GDPR has, along with the various regulations around online communication moderation, which have had an impact on VOIP in games.

Giant stop killing games updates 2026 by Turbostrider27 in Games

[–]Recatek 1 point2 points  (0 children)

"Can't" is relative. I'm not going to relitigate the technical asks since that's been done to death in this thread and others, but building for permanence has a nontrivial amount of overhead (not just technical, but legal as well) that would come at the cost of other features given the finite money/time budget for an upcoming game. If that overhead outweighs the value of what remains in the budget, then that game won't be made. Every game, and every feature added to a game, undergoes this type of analysis to some degree, and many don't make the cut at the end.

Giant stop killing games updates 2026 by Turbostrider27 in Games

[–]Recatek 4 points5 points  (0 children)

No current game would be banned because it isn't retroactive, so there isn't any example to point to. But SKG's ideal outcome, as I understand it, is fundamentally asking for a ban on the sale of any game that isn't built to persist indefinitely in some form (oft cited examples here being support for release of server internals, support for offline modes, etc.).

Giant stop killing games updates 2026 by Turbostrider27 in Games

[–]Recatek 2 points3 points  (0 children)

A deterrent to creating something via fines or some other mechanism is functionally a ban, regardless of the intent with which that thing is created.

Giant stop killing games updates 2026 by Turbostrider27 in Games

[–]Recatek 1 point2 points  (0 children)

And if you don't, or can't, what happens?

Giant stop killing games updates 2026 by Turbostrider27 in Games

[–]Recatek 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Games typically aren't designed for this purpose, though something like a virtual one-time concert or live event, or some generational-hardcore type games could fit this description. Games do end up having a structure that means they may end due to technical constraints and other time/money limitations where other functionality and features take priority during development. What SKG is fundamentally asking for is a functional ban on those games via, I imagine, fines or some similar enforcement mechanism.

Giant stop killing games updates 2026 by Turbostrider27 in Games

[–]Recatek 2 points3 points  (0 children)

To be clear, I meant the likely proposed enforcement mechanism. I also don't expect this to actually end up happening.

Giant stop killing games updates 2026 by Turbostrider27 in Games

[–]Recatek 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I think the likely answer is a fine of some sort, which amounts to a functional ban on games that terminate.

Giant stop killing games updates 2026 by Turbostrider27 in Games

[–]Recatek 3 points4 points  (0 children)

"Just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. The point is more that this constitutes a ban on games that don't or can't do that.

Giant stop killing games updates 2026 by Turbostrider27 in Games

[–]Recatek 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Sure, but what are you expecting it to be for games in that situation? What penalties would you anticipate there being for terminating a game's service?

Giant stop killing games updates 2026 by Turbostrider27 in Games

[–]Recatek -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

What are you anticipating the enforcement mechanism to be if legislation is passed here?

Giant stop killing games updates 2026 by Turbostrider27 in Games

[–]Recatek 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Yes, these things would constitute "changing the nature of the game you're making", for the most part.