Mirage: Arcane Warfare Shutting Down Due to Looming GDPR - MMORPG.com News

SBFord

Mirage: Arcane Warfare Shutting Down Due to Looming GDPR - MMORPG.com News

Torn Banner Studios has announced that it is shutting down Mirage: Arcane Warfare and removing it from Steam due at least in part due to the EU privacy law, GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) that will go into effect on May 25th. While it is possible to upgrade servers to meet the new data protection standards, Gamasutra opines "that many developers are finding that they lack the resources or funds to make their games GDPR compliant & have instead opted to end service".

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Albatroes

Another one bites the dust

SBFord

Albatroes said:

Another one bites the dust

Given how many people around here champion indies and small-house development, this GDPR is going to be painful for them as many won't be able to release in the EU due to the laws. 

ohgodtherats707

SBFord said:

Albatroes said:

Another one bites the dust

Given how many people around here champion indies and small-house development, this GDPR is going to be painful for them as many won't be able to release in the EU due to the laws. 

No kidding I work in a kitchen you should see the laws the EU has in place just for Cheese!!!!

3dom

IP block against EU would be sufficient. Like Webzen blocked The Netherlands (or Belgium?) after anti-lockbox law.

Albatroes

SBFord said:

Albatroes said:

Another one bites the dust

Given how many people around here champion indies and small-house development, this GDPR is going to be painful for them as many won't be able to release in the EU due to the laws. 

I dont really have anything against indies that actually come out with something, but looking at steam (for example) makes my head hurt with how many asset flips and stuff flooding just that platform in a given week. There does need to be some kind of quality control so we can get more quality over quantity. This is just me speaking generally, nothing against these guys really.

Panther2103

Albatroes said:

SBFord said:

Albatroes said:

Another one bites the dust

Given how many people around here champion indies and small-house development, this GDPR is going to be painful for them as many won't be able to release in the EU due to the laws. 

I dont really have anything against indies that actually come out with something, but looking at steam (for example) makes my head hurt with how many asset flips and stuff flooding just that platform in a given week. There does need to be some kind of quality control so we can get more quality over quantity. This is just me speaking generally, nothing against these guys really.

This has been a problem with steam ever since greenlight was introduced. Then they got rid of greenlight due to this issue, and made it just as easy to put things up again. 

I think they were hoping that the steam curation lists would bring good games forward (in many cases they do!) but they need internal staff to fix what is being put on the store front. I could see the asset flips and really bad first games being put onto a platform like Itch.Io but on steam it just doesn't feel right.

If you follow youtubers who review those types of games, there have even been games released recently that had no exe files included, so they were banking on people buying the game and not refunding it. That's ridiculous. If they aren't even doing basic checks to make sure an actual game even exists, how are they preventing straight up viruses from being sold?



This game though, doesn't look like much of an asset flip. The fact that it was made by Torn Banner (Chivalry Medieval Warfare) shows it was at least a competent indie developer. 

SzczepanX

Nyctelios said:

Nah, bs, the game is just bad. They paid many twitch streamers to pump it up but out cameras they all agreed the game is just uninspired.

The game is bad but it's not the issue, small studios will not release any games in europe. Monopoly of large companies incoming.

Panther2103

SzczepanX said:

Nyctelios said:

Nah, bs, the game is just bad. They paid many twitch streamers to pump it up but out cameras they all agreed the game is just uninspired.

The game is bad but it's not the issue, small studios will not release any games in europe. Monopoly of large companies incoming.

Was it that bad? Reviews were generally decent by publications ~7 on metacritic. It seems like most of the negativity was towards it basically being a reskin of Chivalry. And I loved Chivalry. 

MadFrenchie

Panther2103 said:

Albatroes said:

SBFord said:

Albatroes said:

Another one bites the dust

Given how many people around here champion indies and small-house development, this GDPR is going to be painful for them as many won't be able to release in the EU due to the laws. 

I dont really have anything against indies that actually come out with something, but looking at steam (for example) makes my head hurt with how many asset flips and stuff flooding just that platform in a given week. There does need to be some kind of quality control so we can get more quality over quantity. This is just me speaking generally, nothing against these guys really.

This has been a problem with steam ever since greenlight was introduced. Then they got rid of greenlight due to this issue, and made it just as easy to put things up again. 

I think they were hoping that the steam curation lists would bring good games forward (in many cases they do!) but they need internal staff to fix what is being put on the store front. I could see the asset flips and really bad first games being put onto a platform like Itch.Io but on steam it just doesn't feel right.

If you follow youtubers who review those types of games, there have even been games released recently that had no exe files included, so they were banking on people buying the game and not refunding it. That's ridiculous. If they aren't even doing basic checks to make sure an actual game even exists, how are they preventing straight up viruses from being sold?



This game though, doesn't look like much of an asset flip. The fact that it was made by Torn Banner (Chivalry Medieval Warfare) shows it was at least a competent indie developer. 

Actually, their statement upon sunsetting Greenlight was that it was providing too large a barrier to indies to get their title on the store.  Translation: we were cutting out revenue we could've had because we were discerning with curating our game list to ensure the games there maintain at least a base standard of quality.  We'll no longer make that mistake.

MadFrenchie

SBFord said:

Albatroes said:

Another one bites the dust

Given how many people around here champion indies and small-house development, this GDPR is going to be painful for them as many won't be able to release in the EU due to the laws. 

A fraction of indie devs have given me anything I felt worth playing.  Culling the wannabes with zero acumen doesn't really give me any worries.

Creating video games from the ground up isn't an entry-level endeavor.  Folks with no prior industry experience trying to do the indie thing is a recipe for disaster.  Folks with prior industry experience trying to do the indie thing will succeed via crowdfunding (Obsidian, Larian, Stoic), which means they don't have to really worry about the GDPR until after release, because they only work as they ensure the crowd pays them to do so.  Should they see that there's a large interest in backers from Europe, they can then make an informed decision to approach compliance with the GDPR.  If they receive little interest from certain regions, they can merely release into the locations they feel are warranted.

Manestream

My thoughts are simply - Using this as an excuse to close down services when their game was probably more than likely failing anyways, but now they can blame it on something else

Heretique

Game was very lackluster and they didn't listen to us in the alpha it seemed. So not surprised the game failed.

Kyleran

As predicted, this will impact smaller titles and studios who will have to decide if its worth the effort to sell in the EU or not.   My guess is we'll see an increase in EU based publishers who will buy the rights to handle these smaller titles and manage the regulations.

Quizzical

GDPR isn't cause a game that was enormously profitable to abruptly shut down. Like most regulations, it's a marginal cost. It could be the difference between a game being profitable enough to keep running but not by much and them deciding that it's not quite profitable enough and shutting it down. Just deciding not to release in the EU doesn't fix that, as that loss of revenue could also push a game over the edge and mean they pull the plug.

One problem that existing games will face is that things that are easy to do if you have them in mind before you start writing any code can be a huge pain to tack on later. Hopefully you have some idea of where you want to go with features when you start (though you'll surely do some things that you later regret), but it's hard to plan for compliance with regulations that don't yet exist and weren't your idea anyway.

It gets much harder if you have to go back and modify some portion of code that no one has looked at in years, and the person who wrote it may already be gone, too. If it's poorly documented, changes that would take minutes once you know exactly what to do can take weeks of trying to decipher a mess and check that you're not breaking other things in the process. That doesn't mean that simple changes will always take weeks, but like other types of software, some games have a much cleaner code base than others.

That doesn't necessarily mean that the regulations are bad. But they don't come free; there's always some cost to them. Often, the problem is not that one particular regulation imposes an enormous cost but that many small regulations that each impose only small costs add up to something large.

necrolock

Nothing of value was lost.

Sandmanjw

Quizzical said:

GDPR isn't cause a game that was enormously profitable to abruptly shut down. Like most regulations, it's a marginal cost. It could be the difference between a game being profitable enough to keep running but not by much and them deciding that it's not quite profitable enough and shutting it down. Just deciding not to release in the EU doesn't fix that, as that loss of revenue could also push a game over the edge and mean they pull the plug.

One problem that existing games will face is that things that are easy to do if you have them in mind before you start writing any code can be a huge pain to tack on later. Hopefully you have some idea of where you want to go with features when you start (though you'll surely do some things that you later regret), but it's hard to plan for compliance with regulations that don't yet exist and weren't your idea anyway.

It gets much harder if you have to go back and modify some portion of code that no one has looked at in years, and the person who wrote it may already be gone, too. If it's poorly documented, changes that would take minutes once you know exactly what to do can take weeks of trying to decipher a mess and check that you're not breaking other things in the process. That doesn't mean that simple changes will always take weeks, but like other types of software, some games have a much cleaner code base than others.

That doesn't necessarily mean that the regulations are bad. But they don't come free; there's always some cost to them. Often, the problem is not that one particular regulation imposes an enormous cost but that many small regulations that each impose only small costs add up to something large.

More over head may hurt some games,  but i still like the direction this is going to take companies. Someone actually trying to do something about on-line privacy and other issues is a good thing. 

Same thing on the gambling/loot-box issues,  Some action being taken will at least generate some discussions and make people, and companies, think a bit further than the easiest and fastest way to make more cash from people.

Our personal and financial info security should be a top priority to companies that deal with them.  Full stop...the end. I guess it may take something like this to get the message across.  

Seelinnikoi

Me thinks they wanted to shut down and just needed a silly reason.

Win-Win

Quizzical

Sandmanjw said:

Quizzical said:

GDPR isn't cause a game that was enormously profitable to abruptly shut down. Like most regulations, it's a marginal cost. It could be the difference between a game being profitable enough to keep running but not by much and them deciding that it's not quite profitable enough and shutting it down. Just deciding not to release in the EU doesn't fix that, as that loss of revenue could also push a game over the edge and mean they pull the plug.

One problem that existing games will face is that things that are easy to do if you have them in mind before you start writing any code can be a huge pain to tack on later. Hopefully you have some idea of where you want to go with features when you start (though you'll surely do some things that you later regret), but it's hard to plan for compliance with regulations that don't yet exist and weren't your idea anyway.

It gets much harder if you have to go back and modify some portion of code that no one has looked at in years, and the person who wrote it may already be gone, too. If it's poorly documented, changes that would take minutes once you know exactly what to do can take weeks of trying to decipher a mess and check that you're not breaking other things in the process. That doesn't mean that simple changes will always take weeks, but like other types of software, some games have a much cleaner code base than others.

That doesn't necessarily mean that the regulations are bad. But they don't come free; there's always some cost to them. Often, the problem is not that one particular regulation imposes an enormous cost but that many small regulations that each impose only small costs add up to something large.

More over head may hurt some games,  but i still like the direction this is going to take companies. Someone actually trying to do something about on-line privacy and other issues is a good thing. 

Same thing on the gambling/loot-box issues,  Some action being taken will at least generate some discussions and make people, and companies, think a bit further than the easiest and fastest way to make more cash from people.

Our personal and financial info security should be a top priority to companies that deal with them.  Full stop...the end. I guess it may take something like this to get the message across.  

Beware of evaluating regulations on the basis of their goals, not their real-world effects.  You could theoretically have two different laws or regulations intended to accomplish the same thing.  One of them accomplishes its intended goal pretty well while generally imposing little in the way of compliance costs.  The other imposes enormous compliance costs and really doesn't meet its goals very well.  The former is better than the latter.

How do you tell the difference?  If you don't personally delve far into the details, you don't.  Most regulations try to achieve their intended goals with minimal costs, though there are some exceptions where the real goal is to hamstring an industry, such as some (but not all) proposed regulations on guns or abortion.

Sometimes problems with regulations become clear after they've been in effect for a while.  For example, in the US, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act tried to crack down on Internet piracy.  While some people liked pirating everything, protecting IP is important.  Whatever the intent of the law, one major real-world effect was the creation of copyright trolls whose business model was to buy the rights to obscure videos that someone was pirating, find people pirating it, subpoena the ISPs for the identity of the pirates, and then send them letters threatening lawsuits that could impose enormous damages but offering to settle out of court for a payment of mere hundreds or thousands of dollars.  And then sending that to some grandma who has no clue about the Internet and had a computer hosting pirated content because she was hacked or a grandkid did it or something.

It's also important to realize that even the bureaucrats who write the regulations don't naturally have all the expertise needed to write good regulations that achieve their stated goals without imposing excessive costs.  That's why they generally solicit input from the industries being regulated, as that's who understands the likely real-world effects.

The problem is that individual companies don't necessarily want highly efficient regulations.  They'd commonly prefer regulations that impose minimal costs on themselves but much greater costs on their competitors.  If they can get such regulations to be written and enforced, that gives them a huge competitive advantage.  Whether the regulations achieve their nominal aim is often irrelevant from the company's perspective.

Meanwhile, competitors may well be trying to do the reverse, and get regulations passed that will cripple your company while letting them go free and make enormous profits because they've crippled the competition.  Many companies have to spend a lot of money on lobbying just out of self-defense, even without intending to push for regulations that give them an unfair advantage.  The more intrusive regulations are, the larger this effect.

Meanwhile, large companies can much more easily afford a given amount of lobbying expenses than small companies.  Because they're bigger, larger businesses can expect much larger payoffs for a given amount of successful manipulation of the system that, say, improves your profit margin by 1%.  That's why regulations have a natural tendency to favor large businesses over small ones.

That's a well-known problem, and some regulations try to address it by exempting smaller businesses.  That can cause other problems, however, such as pushing an industry toward nominally splitting into a bunch of small businesses in order to evade the regulation.  If regulations impose enormous costs but exempt businesses with fewer than 50 employees, then a business with 49 is going to be very hesitant to hire #50.

Grunty

I see these shut downs as a positive.  It means those games that survived on delivering the quick, cheap, and rotten low hanging fruit will be disposed of.  But I also don't live in the EU.

Renoaku

So how does GDPR work, does this mean game companies (Can No Longer Hold Any Data) on a user including (IP Address) (Real Name) (Bank Account / Credit Card Information) if a user wants it deleted for any reason they have to comply if they are part of the European region, and also this applies to companies outside the EU region?

Could Face Book, and other companies outside just deny service to European members if they wanted to including Google, although (some of us believe Google works for NSA) and is the next Skynet waiting to happen... Edit: Doesn't this mean users can't run malicious scripts / web services from European region to collect IP addresses of other users I know some users in certain apps / services abuse this exploit.

timeraider

Suuuuureeeee because of gdpr... surely not anything else.. like.. not even making back a fraction of the development costs. NOTHING like that at all right.. yeah....

Kyleran

Renoaku said:

So how does GDPR work, does this mean game companies (Can No Longer Hold Any Data) on a user including (IP Address) (Real Name) (Bank Account / Credit Card Information) if a user wants it deleted for any reason they have to comply if they are part of the European region, and also this applies to companies outside the EU region?

Could Face Book, and other companies outside just deny service to European members if they wanted to including Google, although (some of us believe Google works for NSA) and is the next Skynet waiting to happen... Edit: Doesn't this mean users can't run malicious scripts / web services from European region to collect IP addresses of other users I know some users in certain apps / services abuse this exploit.

The right to erasure is considered to be one of the more onerous and complicated parts of the GDPR.

https://www.i-scoop.eu/gdpr/right-erasure-right-forgotten-gdpr/

Bananable

SBFord said:

Albatroes said:

Another one bites the dust

Given how many people around here champion indies and small-house development, this GDPR is going to be painful for them as many won't be able to release in the EU due to the laws. 

Lolz
This game closure has nothing to do with GDPR. Seriously. This game just wasn't popular. They did giveaway, thats how i get it, but haven't even launched it.
http://steamcharts.com/app/368420

Scot

I am starting to wonder if the privacy laws are not now being used as an excuse, you could block EU addresses.

Of course it is impossible to know the truth on this one, EU business regulation rarely actually does anything that helps the flow of business, but then that's the story of regulation world wide.

marganculos

stupid excuse lol

http://steamcharts.com/app/368420