I’m a game developer - this sums up my feelings perfectly.
A lot of this middleware isn’t necessarily even game middleware - think of a turn based game that might use a custom DB instead of mongo or SQL. You’re effectively banning any non game specific middleware from being used or requiring that every company provide a separate licensing path for game developers.
Why is this only targeted at games and not mobile apps, app subscriptions or websites.
This pretty much removes the ability to use _any_ commercial software without a custom license which is just insanity. No using any AWS services in case the pull the rug on you.
You might argue “but you can X and you can Y”, and that’s true, but again why is this only a problem for games?
The short answer is someone cared enough about the specific example in gaming to actually go through all the work to demand change.
The longer answer is that games are one of the only pieces of software your average consumer actually buys these days, and they have a few particularly egregious examples that make it much easier to argue in front of a bunch of politicians without a firm grasp on the digital world, like "Game is completely client side except it checks with a server every 5 minutes to make sure you have a valid license, so when the company goes belly up you're left with a brick"
SKG is basically "right-to-repair" but for games. I do contend that if your phone breaks and the company says "we won't fix it and you aren't allowed to" then the government isn't doing its job. On the same token, if a game that you purchased turns off their servers and says "we won't run it and you aren't allowed to" then the government isn't doing its job.
Now, how I would be able to run it is a very open question and I do agree there are some ways that are more reasonable asks than others. But the present-day status quo of "company says suck eggs and you just have to deal with it" is not an acceptable final state.
I live in the UK. By default your ISP will block "mature" content and you have to contact them to opt out. iOS, Android, Playstation, Xbox, Switch all have parental controls that are enforced at an account level.
A child with an iPhone, Xbox, and a Windows Laptop won't be able to install discord unless the parent explicitly lets them, or opts out of all the parental controls those platforms have to offer.
The tech is here already, this is not about keeping children safe.
Parts of discord are not safe at all for 13 year olds and currently there isn't a mechanism as far as I am aware to restrict a 13 year old from accessing them.
The solution to that is obviously some sort of Parental features, where a parent can create accounts for their kids with restricted access and/or monitoring capabilities. The solution isn't to require an ID from everyone just to "protect the kids"...
No, it's about corporate and government control. Thankfully, the UK government is clueless about tech, which means these controls can be bypassed relatively easily by using your own DNS or a public DNS server like Quad9.
The corporations in this case are fighting against this. This is about your government and its desire to squash opinions they don't like. They are already going so far as to jail people for posting opinions they don't like. This has absolutely nothing to do with children, children are just the excuse.
If you're going to be pedantic, you have to be correct.
> In Europe, ISPs and CDNs just block websites willy-nilly at the request of La Liga, for instance
There's so much wrong with this sentence. It's not Europe, it's Spain. La liga aren't just dropping emails to ISPs, they're gaining court orders (now, whether these court orders are warranted, or delivered correctly [0] or not is another question).
I'm in Scotland. Looking outside and seeing blue skies does not mean it's safe to leave without a rain jacket, or a thermal layer. Seeing fog in the morning doesn't mean you don't need shorts for the afternoon. It being 0 outside today doesn't mean it won't be 10 degrees tomorrow. Knowing it's going to rain between 10 and 2 is good motivation to take the dog out before 10. Knowing it's going to rain on Sunday but be clear on Saturday is a good reason to book outdoor activites (golf) on Saturday instead.
Yes, but it's the kind of information you need once a day on average and you are good to go.
Instead you find it placed on your smartphone homescreen, on the smartwatch, on the home dashboard, on a notification you receive every morning, on your car screen, on your computer, ... I don't need to see it constantly.
Personally I believe it is something that it is easy to integrate and that users don't perceive as useless, but 99% of the time doesn't add any value
I aim for the Boy Scout rule - always leave things better than you found it. It’s always a balance and you have to not lose the forest for the trees. Always ask what is the end goal, and am I still moving forward on that.
Really? My experience has been that it’s incredibly easy to get them stuck in a loop on a hallucinated API and burn through credits before I’ve even noticed what it’s done. I have a small rust project that stores stuff on disk that I wanted to add an s3 backend too - Claude code burned through my $20 in a loop in about 30 minutes without any awareness of what it was doing on a very simple syntax issue.
Might depend on used language. From my experience Claude Sonnet indeed never make any syntax mistakes in JS/TS/C#, but these are popular language with lots of training data.
I work in games, and we do commit directly to main. On a smaller team you can get away with pre submit review, post submit checks. On a bigger team you need pre submit checks but honestly the point where you need this is much much later than you think. One of my previous projects had 100+ people committing directly to main with no pre submit checks and jt broke once or twice a day. The builds took longer than that to go through so you just always sync to “last known good”
I got glasses 2 years ago for a very minor prescription. Your eyesight sucked before you’ve just forgotten how badly. I had an eye test very recently for
Contacts and my prescription is the same 2 years later
A lot of this middleware isn’t necessarily even game middleware - think of a turn based game that might use a custom DB instead of mongo or SQL. You’re effectively banning any non game specific middleware from being used or requiring that every company provide a separate licensing path for game developers.
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