The Darktide store violates most of these principals. Will we finally see an end to the predatory FOMO tactics Fatshark refuses to correct?
Price indication should be clear and transparent.
Practice obscuring the cost of in-game digital content and services should be avoided.
Practices that force consumers to purchase unwanted in-game virtual currency should be avoided.
Consumers should be provided with clear and comprehensive pre-contractual information.
Consumers’ right of withdrawal should be respected.
Contractual terms should be fair and written in plain and clear language.
Game design and gameplay should be respectful of different consumer vulnerabilities.
Also relevant to the Fatshark FOMO store:
“Consumers that are willing to spend excessive amounts of money on and in a video game, so called ‘whales’, may be considered vulnerable since they are likely to struggle with impulse control or gambling disorders. Consequently, video games that base their business model on targeting ‘whales’ are likely to target avulnerable group of consumers. Therefore, the fairness of their commercial practices is to be assessed according to a stricter threshold.”
I want to go back to complete games that release regular scheduled DLCs where all fun cosmetics are hidden away behind ingame challenges and secrets, not MTX.
I’d rather buy a DLC every 3-6 months for 20-30 bucks than ‘support’ a dev via the MTX store, which gives devs zero incentive to actually produce playable content to make a massive profit.
But then again, that’d mean FS would have to actually put in effort, listen to feedback and produce -god forbid- content. It would also mean delivering content in a quality that would attract way more people than the few thousand or just hundred whales they currently require to make the same if not more.
Whoever keeps buying MTX is and and always has been the problem.
Ok shizzo theory now what if FS were expecting that to happen and so run mtx shop with overpriced cosmetics to milk as much money as they can befor mtxocalypse?
On a serious note, they’ll find a way how to sell you recolors still. Some flexible law interpretation and we are back.
It’s not written in law, so companies are still free to do as they please, but it is a big deterrent and the CPCN has threatened to “take further actions” if they’re ignored.
This is not even a directive that could be enforced by the time… so, nothing here is a rule that applies to Fatshark…
It is not a European regulation and not a directive… this is just blah blah from the Commission… as usual…
(Yes, I am European and I work in the legal field.)
I wouldn’t be surprised if they just added the equivalent price in dollars below the aquilas price.
I’m a pessimist here, I don’t really expect anything to change. And if they did, it’d be in very minor ways that don’t actually solve any of the bigger issues in the industry. But at least they’re talking about it. Hardly a whisper about companies being able to sell you a game and then render it unplayable at some arbitrary date, providing no expiration date at the point of sale and no means for a community to support it after the studio/publisher no longer can.
Last I heard people were talking about no longer letting them use “Buy” buttons since you’re effectively renting a game when you buy it these days. I don’t know if anything came of that but it shows that they’re really not keen on fixing the issue if they think that’ll solve anything.
Just sounds like they’ll need to sale for actual currency instead of in-game, makes sense they already do that in V2. The FOMO part seems bit more of a stretch but would be nice if going forward they stopped removing content from store.
As someone on another forum mentioned, the proposed law or regulation or whatever is specific to games intended for children. The simplest solution may be simply upgrading the ratings to avoid it altogether.
There is also the mention of “whales” in-particular, as a “vulnerable group”. I feel that changes the intent of the guidelines.
Clearly that is the main target for most of these ingame stores.
Most of us were completely happy with VT2’s store and cosmetic bundles, yeah? Its only been the disgusting practices they used in Darktide we were against, right?
It goes past that…
This is about vulnerable persons… don’t know if you live in Europe, but vulnerable person are NOT the children.
What is sure is… that they don’t want to create a rule and would prefer that gaming companies follow these guidances.
However, they claimed they could enforce rules if nothing is done…
Well, this means that nothing is currently enforced.
Fatshark is sweden… so maybe they will want to follow… but Tencent is chinese and doesn’t careof Europe (but its consumers, yes).
Anyways restricting that to only child is a non sense. A child cannot have his own bank account here in Europe before being 16 (age for the France, I have not verified all European countries). This would not make any sense to do all this for “children” that have 16 to 18.
