Do you think EU server will get shut down - like china/russian with upcoming EU lootbox law?
Lorddrew
Member Posts: 297 ★★
For me this is a legit concern, since 4th is on the way and I am a casual spender.
Some games are also not being released duo to the new lootboxes changes required by law in EU.
Any clarification would be nice and assuring.
I hope my question is correctly formulated, no finger pointing i want to be informed on the way the contest may move for us EU MCOC players
Some games are also not being released duo to the new lootboxes changes required by law in EU.
Any clarification would be nice and assuring.
I hope my question is correctly formulated, no finger pointing i want to be informed on the way the contest may move for us EU MCOC players
10
Comments
so I’m assuming this is what OP is referring to
Ohhh wait... I live in Japan where gambling is prohibited yet we have Pachinkos and all games are literally loot boxes. Heck, Japan invented Gacha.
Second, at the moment I'm unaware of any EU law prohibiting lootboxes. There were two separate local cases in Belgium and the Netherlands, and both cases are still somewhat vague in how the law applies to lootboxes in video games. For example, while I believe the legal precedent was set in Belgium to apply gambling laws to video game lootboxes, a similar decision in the Netherlands was eventually overturned on the technicality that Dutch law governs whole games, and not individual components of games. Lootboxes are a part of a larger video game that is not itself classified as a gambling game, and lootboxes cannot be regulated as a separate "game" because they aren't complete games of chance on their own.
The latest thing linked above in @TheBair123 's post above is a coordinated move by a set of consumer groups to pressure lawmakers to change the laws in individual EU countries to define lootboxes as (illegal) games of chance. Implicit in that act is the fact that at the moment, they are not considered so in most countries in the EU.
Second, one game i was intresting in was Diablo immortal, whom is not being released in the netherlands duo to lootboxes, any google search will give more information on this matter.
https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/1/23149771/diablo-immortal-loot-boxes-belgium-the-netherlands-gambling
The exception was when they launched the Chinese version of MCOC originally, which you could tell were hosted in completely separate servers because those players were invisible to the rest of us, lost access to the game completely when those servers were shut down, and had to be migrated to our servers by a manual migration process.
For us to play MCOC, we need to be able to reach the systems the game uses to function. But to even *possess* the game requires (at least officially) downloading the client from one of the two officially supported app stores (Apple and Google) and to maintain the clients requires downloading mandatory updates from those two app stores. If the game is blocked on an app store, the players can continue to play, until they need a mandatory update they can't fetch. At that point, they need to find an alternate way to update their game clients to continue to play.
Separately, you could have the ability to download the game clients but be unable to actually play, if you are in a place where the game systems themselves are somehow blocked or unreachable. Getting and maintaining the game clients and actually playing the game are two separate, and almost completely independent processes.